▶︎ 0:00 A major issue in ethics is the topic of moral psychology, where one focuses on the relationship between things like incentives and motives and desires and feelings to our various moral duties or obligations or other aspects of our moral lives. And moral psychology plays a really important role in Kant's own moral philosophy.
▶︎ 0:22 What I'm going to do in this particular lecture is I'm going to talk about some important aspects of Kant's moral psychology, in particular focusing on the important role that he gives to the notion of the feeling of respect. And in doing this, I'm going to say a lot about the relationship between various feelings, including feelings of pleasure, and the way that Kant himself thinks of our ethical obligations and the ways in which we need to act in order to count as acting morally.
▶︎ 0:55 One of the most famous aspects of Kant's moral philosophy is found in his book, The Groundwork, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, where Kant claims that the only thing of unconditional value is a goodwill. He suggests that the only thing the value of which doesn't seem limited or conditioned by something else is the value of a goodwill.
▶︎ 1:24 In saying this, he's obviously putting a large emphasis on particular intentions for acting, acting in a way where one counts as having a goodwill, where the focus is more on the inner intentions than on the particular external consequences of the action or particular results of the action. For example, Kant says that the value of a goodwill doesn't necessarily depend on achieving the goal that you set out to achieve. As long as you were intending to bring about that goal, even if things got in the way or frustrated your achievement of the goal, nevertheless, the value of your will still shines brightly on his view, still counts as having a goodwill.
▶︎ 2:12 Well, so what is it then that makes a particular action for Kant moral? What's the type of motive
▶︎ 2:19 Or intention that needs to lie behind the act in order for it to count as moral? And Kant very famously claims that in order for our actions to be moral, they need to be performed out of respect for the moral law. And he connects this notion of acting out of respect for the moral law with a notion of obeying morality, the moral law for its own sake, or as it's sometimes put, performing our duty for duty's sake.
▶︎ 2:48 In order to articulate this view, Kant draws this distinction between acting merely in accordance with the moral law versus acting out of respect for the moral law. Imagine that I have a moral duty to be benevolent to my brother, and I go ahead and act kindly towards my brother. In doing so, I'm acting according to the moral law. But what's my motive for acting this way? If my motive is that, "Oh, well, I just don't want to get on my brother's bad side because then I'm worried that it'll be tense or we'll end up struggling or we'll get in a fight," or if I'm a kid, I'm maybe worried that my parents are going to get upset with me, then my action is certainly in accordance with the moral law because I'm being benevolent the way the moral law demands.
▶︎ 3:49 But my intention is not, for Kant, one that expresses a goodwill. It's not me performing that action really out of respect for the moral law or because for the moral law or because it's the right thing to do. It's rather me acting that way for these other types of motives, like just not wanting to get in a kind of tense situation or conflict or get in trouble with my parents.
▶︎ 4:12 In order for us to count as acting morally for Kant, it needs to be the case that we don't merely act in accordance with the moral law, but we also act out of respect for the moral law, that the main motive for our action at the end of the day is simply the fact this is something morally required of us, that we're performing duty for duty's sake. This aspect of Kant's philosophy has generated a lot of attention, both positive and negative.
▶︎ 4:44 And one major worry for this aspect of Kant's philosophy is that it ends up overly degrading the values of different types of desires or pleasures in human life, including in the ethical life. In Kant's own lifetime, one of the clearest statements of this worry came from his contemporary, German playwright, poet, historian, philosopher Friedrich Schiller. In one text, Schiller joked that it seems like for Kant, in order to be moral towards your friends, you have to find a way to secretly hate them so that you're not being kind to them for the enjoyment of their friendship or avoiding conflict with them, but rather so that your inner motive is this proper moral motive of just being benevolent for the sake of the duty of benevolence.
▶︎ 5:52 Elsewhere, Schiller said that Kant seems to present the moral law in a draconian form, that the moral law seems to make these really strong demands on us in ways that we might feel it's imposing itself on us, a worry that it might be requiring us to give up too much of our interest in other aspects of life or isn't paying proper accord to other things that we find valuable in human life.
▶︎ 6:24 So what I'm going to do then is I'm going to talk in more detail about what Kant has in mind when he's talking about this proper motivation for acting morally, which he connects to the notion of respect. And in doing so, I'm going to try to articulate some of the resources that Kant himself has and that he presents for trying to push back a bit against somebody who has these Schillerian style worries about Kant's moral philosophy.
▶︎ 6:58 Like I said before, Kant says that the only thing of unconditioned value is a goodwill. The notion of unconditioned here is potentially ambiguous, and we should be careful in what exactly we take it to entail or to amount to. So there's various ways that one might understand the notion of something being unconditioned or an unconditioned value. One way that one might read it is one might think that unconditioned here means something like absolutely best. Like there's no better scenario than one where this obtains, that there's just no better scenario than a scenario where I have a goodwill. If I'm leading the best kind of human life, then at the end of the day, the only thing to assess if I am or am not leading the best kind of human life is just to look and see if I have a goodwill or not.
▶︎ 7:57 That doesn't seem to be what Kant has in mind when he's talking about the unconditioned value of a goodwill, because Kant does have a picture of a better kind of human life than simply one where one possesses a goodwill. In his ethical writings, Kant oftentimes talks about a notion that he refers to as the highest good. And Kant articulates the highest good as a combination of two different things. On the one hand, the highest good requires virtue. In other words, in order to be experiencing the highest good or participating in the highest good fully, it needs to be the case that we act morally, and part of being virtuous and moral is, of course, having the right intention, acting on the basis of a goodwill. So it's certainly part of the highest good, but it's not the only part of the highest good.
▶︎ 9:12 The other part of the highest good is happiness. And the basic intuition behind this suggestion is fairly straightforward. It seems like if we wanted to say, "What's the best kind of human life I could be living?" that a human life where I was virtuous and miserable would not be the best kind of human life compared to a human life where I was both virtuous and also happy. And so for Kant, the highest good is going to be one where we have both virtue and happiness. And so when Kant says that the value of a goodwill is unconditioned, he doesn't seem there to be wanting to claim that the value of a goodwill is literally the utmost highest possible thing, because there's this other scenario that he recognizes is, all things considered, a better position to be in than merely having a goodwill.
▶︎ 10:23 Well, then what are some other possibilities for what Kant might have in mind when he's talking about how the only thing of unconditioned value is a goodwill? Another way of reading it would be to read the notion of conditioned or unconditioned in terms of whether the value of something depends or doesn't depend on something else. So Kant says that happiness taken on its own is something good, something that human beings value, but he doesn't think that the value of happiness is independent of any further conditions. So in particular, Kant is of the view that if we see somebody who's just morally atrocious, they're just constantly going around and doing horrible acts, and yet they seem to be experiencing a lot of happiness in their life, that we feel like something's awry. We feel like that's happiness that they maybe on Kant's view shouldn't be experiencing. It seems like the value of that happiness is degraded. It's like the happiness shouldn't be there. There's something wrong about that happiness.
▶︎ 11:43 And so Kant suggests that the value of happiness seems to be dependent on whether one does or does not have a moral will or a goodwill, that having a goodwill is a kind of necessary condition on one's happiness having value. This is further elucidated when he talks about the notion of the highest good, because one way that he articulates the highest good quite a bit is in terms of people receiving happiness in proportion to their virtue. And so the suggestion that people in the highest good receiving happiness in proportion to their virtue further indicates that in order for the happiness to have proper value or to be something properly merited by somebody, then it needs to be the case that they have the relevant virtue, moral character, goodwill.
▶︎ 12:45 So Kant certainly doesn't dismiss happiness or the value of happiness. Rather, he takes it very seriously and includes it in this general notion of the highest good. I'll talk about the highest good more fully in another lecture and the way it connects up with some other aspects of Kant's philosophy, and including some aspects of his philosophy of religion. But for now, I'm going to go ahead and move on to talking about how Kant thinks of the notion of respect more specifically.
▶︎ 13:24 As I said earlier, Kant claims that we need to act out of respect for the moral law. And you might wonder, well, what exactly does Kant mean when he's talking about respect? One way of interpreting it would be in very abstract or intellectualist terms, that I just reflect on the moral law, recognize what it requires of me, and then just bring myself to do that in a way that bears no relationship to different feelings or has no bearing on my feelings.
▶︎ 14:04 Although Kant's comments about respect in the groundwork are brief, he says a lot more about how he's thinking about this notion of respect in other texts in ways that push back against a merely intellectualist or abstract, so to say, conception of respect. Because what he goes on to do in works like the Critique of Practical Reason is specifically to talk about respect as a feeling, to talk about the feeling of respect and to discuss the feeling of respect in relation to the different incentives that are at play in moral action. So then let's take a further look at how Kant's thinking about this notion of the feeling of respect.
▶︎ 14:53 For Kant, the feeling of respect is a mixed feeling. It's a feeling that, in other words, has both some negative and painful aspects, but also some pleasant and uplifting aspects. And he thinks that we should recognize that in the moral life, performing our duty and being committed to the moral law is going to have a bit of a mixture of both pain and pleasure, bitter and sweet.
▶︎ 15:37 In Kant's philosophy, he maintains that human beings count as autonomous. Part of what he has in mind here is that it's the case for human beings that their own faculty of practical reason counts as legislating the moral law and determining our wills.
▶︎ 16:38 Kant doesn't think, though, that we're merely rational creatures, that the only aspect of our minds related to action is practical reason. Rather, he notes that we're in between God and animals in the sense that we're not merely intellectual and independent of sensibility, but we're also not mere brutes who simply have a faculty of sensibility. Rather, we have these two sides of our human nature, both the rational side and then also the sensible side. And as part of our sensibility, we have a lot of different desires and inclinations and passions.
▶︎ 17:24 Kant isolates two different features of human psychology related to sensibility. One is the notion of self-love. A desire for self-love would be a desire to provide oneself with pleasure, a desire to provide oneself with happiness, a desire to care for oneself. And then the other aspect of sensibility, relevant aspect of sensibility here is something that Kant calls self-conceit.
▶︎ 18:10 The notion of self-love can have, I think in many people's minds, an ambiguous connotation, if it's something good or something bad. And in Kant that's the case as well. Kant thinks that in certain contexts self-love is something good. He thinks that we should be benevolent to ourselves. Indeed, he emphasizes that if we overly deny ourselves pleasure and happiness, then we'll end up actually being more tempted to break the moral law because we'll end up so desperate for a brief respite and spike of pleasure or something like that, that we'll go ahead and cave to temptation.
▶︎ 19:05 So rather than trying to suggest that we deprive ourselves of all pleasure and happiness and self-care, he indicates that this is something we actually are wise to provide ourselves with. At the same time, most people don't need too much external motivation to provide themselves with this. So he thinks people naturally are going to pursue self-love. But he certainly doesn't think that self-love is something good in all contexts. If it's the case that somebody is pursuing pleasure for themselves or pursuing their own welfare in a way that harms others, such that it's violating the moral law, then Kant thinks that that's not good self-love. The moral law is going to place a restriction on self-love.
▶︎ 19:59 So, what Kant says is he says that the moral law that our own practical reason legislates and gives to us infringes on self-love. It doesn't eliminate self-love entirely, but it infringes on self-love. There will be occasions in human life where we have to give up a bit of our own welfare or our own pleasure for the sake of doing what's morally obligatory, morally right.
▶︎ 20:36 Self-conceit is something different than mere self-love. Self-conceit is where one takes one's own sensible desires and inclinations to be the end-all be-all of things. Where one says that because I want something, because I desire something, that's a trumping reason in favor, that I prioritize my own desires and inclinations entirely above the moral law.
▶︎ 21:12 And Kant thinks that the moral law doesn't simply infringe on this hubristic, prideful self-conceit that takes me to be above, better than everything else, the center of the universe. Rather it strikes down self-conceit in a way that Kant sometimes describes using terms that'd be translated as a humiliation of self-conceit.
▶︎ 21:53 Kant thinks that both the infringement on self-love and the striking down of self-conceit provide us with a certain element of pain. It's painful to give up on pleasures that we otherwise would have liked to pursue. So it's painful for the moral law to infringe on self-love. We have to give something up sometimes in order to obey the moral law.
▶︎ 22:23 It's painful to be told that my desires are not the most important thing in the world, that they're subordinate, ethically speaking, to the moral law, to have my hubris or pride struck down, or to feel humiliated in the face of the moral law's command. So Kant recognizes that in the moral life, there's going to be aspects of pain connected to these moments of the infringing on self-love and the striking down of self-conceit.
▶︎ 23:08 If we ended the story there, it would be pretty doom and gloom. One would think that someone who expressed this kind of Schillerian worry that Kant's presentation of the moral law is overly draconian would definitely have a point. But Kant himself is aware of this worry. And what he tends to do in trying to answer this worry is to emphasize that the story doesn't end here, rather respect is a mixed feeling, and there's also a pleasant aspect of respect.
▶︎ 23:49 Kant's view is that when we act morally, we're acting on the basis of a law that we have given to ourselves. This key aspect of Kant's notion of autonomy is that the moral law is a law that we legislate to ourselves, a law that our practical reason gives to us. And so when I act morally on Kant's view I experience the action not merely as painful or negative, but also as in a way positive and uplifting. Because I recognize that I here am a self-determining being who's acting according to this law that they have given to themselves, and that there's a way in which I'm elevated above being merely pushed around by my various inclinations and passions.
▶︎ 24:50 It would be nice if Kant said a little bit more in detail about why exactly the self-determining gives rise to the uplifting feeling. What he does say is that in the case of acting out of respect, the moral law has determined my will. That's a law I've given to myself. I'm self-determining. And so in that sense, there's a kind of furtherance of my own activity. It's a furtherance of my practical reason. And a furthering of our own activity is something that we experience as pleasant and uplifting.
▶︎ 25:36 When I say it would be nice if he said more, it would be nice for him to say a bit more about why exactly we experience a furthering of our activity as pleasant and uplifting. But it's not an unusual view for the time period. A lot of other philosophers who Kant was in correspondence with and fully aware of, people like Moses Mendelssohn, for example, also put a stress on a connection between activity and a kind of pleasure. So it's possible that Kant is moving in those waters and adopting this view. For Kant, the feeling of respect then is this mixed feeling that has both this negative aspect and this positive aspect, this painful aspect and then this pleasant aspect.
▶︎ 26:25 How exactly should we characterize the pleasant aspect of the feeling of respect? Kant draws a contrast between different types of pleasure. And he defines, for example, happiness as when things go according to our wish and will. And the suggestion there seems to be that we have all sorts of sensible desires and inclinations. And when those desires and inclinations are satisfied, we experience pleasure. And happiness would be the sum of all these different pleasures. And true happiness would be where we have this maximal satisfaction of our different desires and inclinations. And it's where the world is going according to our wish and will. So a notion of pleasure related to desire satisfaction and a notion of happiness in terms of maximal desire satisfaction.
▶︎ 27:58 But another notion that Kant points to is a notion of what he calls contentment. And he refers to this as a negative satisfaction. And what he means by that is this is not a pleasure that we experience because one of our desires has been satisfied. Rather, this is a pleasure we experience in recognizing that we stand above all needs. In recognizing an elevation above being dependent on things or an elevation above being tied to various needs, Kant thinks that we experience this contentment, this what he oftentimes characterizes as this uplifting feeling of pleasure.
▶︎ 29:02 And so this seems to be the pleasure that we experience when we act morally. When we act morally, we have the painful aspect, of course, from the infringement and the striking down of self-love and self-conceit. But then we also recognize that in being self-determining, we're acting in a way where we're elevated above our merely sensible desires. We're elevated above our various sensible needs. And we experience that elevation, that furthering of our activity in that moment of elevation as uplifting and as a pleasure that Kant refers to as contentment.
▶︎ 29:49 Now, this whole complex of respect and contentment and this term I've used a number of times, this upliftingness, we can see all of this as very closely tied to an important issue in the aesthetics of the eighteenth century, namely the notion of the sublime. There's all different kinds of aesthetic categories. We can refer to something as beautiful. We can refer to something as graceful. We can refer to something as novel, interesting. One aesthetic categorization that we can make is to call something sublime. And this was an aesthetic categorization that had become increasingly popular, and of interest, during the course of the eighteenth century.
▶︎ 31:06 Standard objects for what people in the eighteenth century had in mind when they were talking about the notion of something being sublime were things like the Alps, large craggy mountains, the ocean, the night sky with all the stars, also strong storms or winds, ice. And for people in the eighteenth century, the sublime was a somewhat emerging aesthetic category. In earlier centuries, there had been a tendency for people to just, for example, see mountains as just ugly and terrifying. So there's these stories about people crossing the Alps, and they would ask to be blindfolded so they didn't have to see the terrifying mountains and ravines around them. Some of those views of the mountains being terrifying might even have had a lingering theological dimension, that many people saw the mountains as having been formed by the flood, the deluge with Noah, and as testaments to human sinfulness.
▶︎ 32:23 But in the eighteenth century, the general attitude towards things like mountains or stormy oceans or the frigid ice of the Arctic was undergoing a shift. And it was a shift where people still recognized some moments of frightfulness or terror or a negative moment in viewing these kinds of objects, but also experienced the viewing of these objects as, in a way, giving a sense of a wonder or awesomeness in a way that people also experienced as pleasant and uplifting. And so this is a general discourse in the eighteenth century, with which Kant himself is very familiar, and he oftentimes is seeming to want to tie his notion of respect for the moral law to aspects of this discourse. So in talking about the sublime, people would
▶︎ 33:28 Oftentimes talk about things as being elevated. They would talk about things as having a nobility or a grandeur. And Kant himself will talk about things like sublime duty or about the nobility of the moral law, or he'll stress notions of human dignity as a noble status that human beings as human beings possess. All of this seems to be tying his notion of respect, respect for the moral law, to this general discourse of the sublime.
▶︎ 34:07 In the third critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant has an extended discussion of the sublime, and his discussion has been very influential for subsequent discussions in aesthetics and some other areas of philosophy. The discussion of the sublime in the third critique, though, we'll just note, it's by no means Kant's first discussion of the sublime. We find discussions of the sublime all the way back in Kant's earliest writings from the 1750s, when he's talking about the natural world. And in those early scientific writings from the 1750s and early 1760s, what Kant tends to emphasize in classifying certain things as sublime is the notion of independence.
▶︎ 34:59 So he'll say that we view the infinity of nature, and that leads us to a thought of God and of God as the all-sufficient being. God is independent from anything else, not depending on anything else, elevated above everything, and that provides us with an experience of sublimity. Or in those early writings, he'll talk about the notion of the human soul. In these early writings, he thinks that we know the human soul is immortal. And so the human soul has a kind of elevation above the mere natural course of things. It stands above the kind of this world of vanities where things come and go. It has this independence, and Kant associates that independence with a sublimity.
▶︎ 35:48 In the third critique, Kant continues to place an emphasis on the notion of a kind of independence, but it's no longer the independence of God or the notion of immortality that's key to him. Rather, he's revised or modified or altered his view, where what he now comes to emphasize is the independence of human reason. There's two types of the sublime that Kant refers to corresponding to the two aspects of reason that he stresses throughout his writings, namely theoretical reason and practical reason.
▶︎ 36:44 The notion of theoretical reason is tied to what he calls the mathematical sublime. So think about looking at the starry heavens, the great expanse of the cosmos, all the different points of light that one sees. Kant thinks that in looking at the cosmos, we experience a feeling of sublimity, this upliftingness. More specifically, what he suggests is that our imaginations attempt to present the entire cosmos to us. And they recognize that my imagination presents this particular region of the cosmos to us, but clearly that's not the whole cosmos.
▶︎ 37:50 And so the imagination represents a larger region of the cosmos to us, a larger region of the cosmos, a larger region. But Kant thinks that there reaches a certain limit that he refers to as an aesthetic magnitude beyond which the imagination can't present images to us simultaneously or at once together. And so when we reach this aesthetic magnitude, this limit of the imagination, we recognize that we still haven't presented ourselves with the entire cosmos, and we feel a little bit of frustration. We feel a bit of a negative feeling that our imagination has not been up to this task. We could even, using the language that Kant used in talking about the feeling of respect, suggest that the imagination feels a little humiliated or sheepish, in that we haven't been able to broaden beyond it. Or not the imagination itself feels that way, but we feel that way because of our imagination's limits.
▶︎ 39:05 But Kant says we also recognize in this moment that we have this other faculty, this faculty of reason, which is able to present us with rational ideas like the rational idea of the infinite, the rational idea of the cosmos as a whole, that goes beyond what our imagination is able to present us with. And Kant thinks that the recognition of this aspect of our theoretical reason and its independence from the limits of the imagination is something that provides us, once again, with a positive, uplifting sort of feeling.
▶︎ 39:51 In the case of practical reason, rather, we get the other type of the sublime, which Kant calls the dynamical sublime. In this case, think about things like powerful waterfalls, thunderstorms, hurricanes. Kant recognizes that there's something about the experience of these kinds of natural objects that on the one hand can seem a bit off-putting or have a kind of negative feeling. When you watch on the news the hurricane coming in, there's certainly a negative sense of a trepidation or anticipation of destruction that's going to come. But once again, Kant thinks that we don't merely experience that negative feeling, as long as we're not ourselves so in danger from the hurricane that all we're thinking about is our own survival in the moment.
▶︎ 41:08 But if we're watching it a bit from afar, then we also are awestruck by it. There's this, once again, a sublime feeling, that Kant associates with this feeling of upliftedness. Well, what gives rise to that feeling in this case? Kant thinks that we recognize that we as moral beings are free beings and that we have the ability to do whatever it is that morality requires us to do. And as such, we stand above being pushed around by our desires for pleasure and our desire to avoid pain.
▶︎ 41:56 Whatever nature threatens us with, whatever harms to sensibility nature might seem to present, whatever dangers to the satisfactions of our desires nature might put before us, we recognize that no matter what, we always have the ability to do that which the moral law requires of us. Nature can never coerce us by threatening us so much with different pains that we suddenly wouldn't be able to do that which we recognize as morally obligatory. We always, Kant thinks, have the ability to do that which we ought to do.
▶︎ 42:41 And Kant's suggestion is that in the experience of things like large storms or raging waterfalls, there's an implicit recognition of our status as free beings, of the fact that there's this element of us, our freedom, that's such that nature doesn't have, at the end of the day, control over it. No matter what threats nature presents, we can always, through our own choice, do that which we recognize morality requires. And so Kant thinks that this manifests, once again, a kind of elevation above nature, a kind of freedom from being really dependent on nature, and that we experience this uplifted status as something pleasant.
▶︎ 43:41 What I've aimed to do then is I've aimed to talk a bit about some of the relationships in Kant's moral psychology between the moral life and notions like pleasure and pain and desire. And in doing so, I've tried to articulate some of the ways in which pleasure continues to play a really significant role in Kant's conception of the moral life. But I've also noted that there's various types of pleasure for Kant, and that we should be careful to distinguish between something like happiness and the pleasures associated with happiness, and then other types of moral pleasures, like the one that Kant calls contentment.
▶︎ 44:32 And I've also aimed to stress the ways in which Kant's discussions of contentment and of the feeling of respect in relation to contentment seem to be very closely tied to eighteenth-century discourse of the sublime, and the ways in which his own theory of the sublime further reflects this aspect of a mixed feeling that has both a negative and pleasant moment, where there's this kind of uplift from the recognition that our reason has certain types of independence from sensibility. Thanks.