Tom Sorell and Kant on the Good Will

It's a little while since I last blogged about the role of the "good will" in the first part of Kant's Groundwork, the subject of which has provoked quite different responses from Richard Henson and Barbara Herman. However, Tom Sorell in a piece published in this collection, has offered a reply to both their pieces that articulates an interestingly different view of the good will and in this posting I'm going to summarise and partially amplify his general argument.


As with the other pieces reflecting on the use Kant makes of the notion of the "good will", so also in Sorell's case the principal question concerning it is to do with the view of "moral worth" Kant is canvassing in Groundwork I. Is it Kant's claim that moral worth owes nothing to benevolent feelings or, as we more colloquially might put it, to our "good nature"? This appears to be Kant's claim and it is, I venture to suggest, a quite radical view in some respects though, and this is the interest of Sorell's piece, it might nonetheless be a view that is founded on moral intuition (or "common sense" claims about morality). If the latter can be justified then it might turn out that the implications of ordinary morality are not entirely equivalent to how we often represent them to ourselves.


The first reason that Kant (and Sorell) provide for the claim that there is a lack of equivalence between the notion of the "good will" and the general idea of "good dispositions" is to the effect that there is only an "accidental" correlation between these notions. This claim appears to run up against the intuitive suggestion that someone who acts, for example, in a spontaneously kindly way, is more morally attractive than someone who rather has to deliberate to arrive at the right act to perform. It was due to the apparent conflict between the Kantian view and the alleged intuitive appeal of the spontaneous character that Henson and Herman presented rival accounts of the "good will". Henson distinguished the account given in the Groundwork (which he termed a "battle citation" model) from that given in the Metaphysics of Morals (which was a "fitness model") suggesting that whilst the former presents rightness in terms of conflicts of motives that the latter, rather, instead simply takes duty to be one motive amongst others so long as it could have brought about the right action on its own. Herman, by contrast, doubted that there really were two models of right action in Kant.


Whilst Sorell intends to reply to the dispute between Henson and Herman he also indicates his view of what is going on with the "good will" in Kant will turn out to provide us with a "simpler" view of how "good will" is to be understood. Henson raised the question of whether a right act can be backed by both moral and non-moral motives, a question that can also be framed as one concerned with the "overdetermination" of right action. However, neither Henson nor Herman take Kant to have himself offered a view on overdetermination and Sorell disagrees with them both on this point. It is clearly stated in the general introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals that juridical legislation "admits another motive than the idea of duty itself" and, indeed, the motive that therefore leads me not to commit an act that is contrary to duty may itself have no moral worth (in Kant's claimed equivalence of moral worth with actions that follow from possession of a "good will"). Kant also has a very complicated picture of promising which is presented as implying a juridical duty even though often it is not susceptible to external coercive enforcement. The latter point is used by Sorell to show that Kant does consider the case of overdetermination.


The reason to take promise keeping as so overdetermined is that the thought of duty alone is sufficient, on Kant's account, to lead one to act so as to fulfil this command even though it is also often a command that can be enforced coercively (which latter gives us an incentive to act rightly). When something is represented as a duty subjectively then it is also taken to be something we should, of necessity, do. As Kant puts this point, there are different "modes" of obligation involved here. However, inasmuch as what we are interested in is merely ethics alone, there is no ground for even considering any mode of obligation other than that commanded by duty so, whilst Kant appears to indicate that overdetermination is capable of being at work, he also suggests that such overdetermination is of no interest to someone with a "good will" since this person will simply act in accord with the thought of duty alone.


This argument - drawn from the introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals - is supplemented by Sorell by considerations drawn from the Groundwork. These latter involve the claim, made at Ak. 4: 400, that action done from duty excludes the influence of inclination. Henson raised the question of whether the presence of a co-operating inclination is something that is thereby ethically excluded on the grounds that it would appear that intuition permits this. Now, addressing this exact point, Herman argued that this would open up dutiful actions to the problem of including something that would only align in a fortuitous way with the demand of duty. This point does appear to be emphasised by Kant both at Ak. 4: 390 and at Ak. 4: 398. How Herman sees this point is, however, different from the argument Sorell wishes to present as Kant's. Herman takes it that a disposition to help, for example, might lead to helping someone who is in the process of performing an act that is not morally commendable. So the difficultly with reliance on inclination on Herman's view appears to be that inclinations are "indiscriminate" in their orientation. But this is not the way Sorell suggests we should view Kant's argument. Rather, on Sorell's interpretation, the point is instead that inclinations violate what he terms Kant's "no accident" principle.


To see the difference between Sorell and Herman here it is useful to understand what follows from the claim that it should be "no accident" that the right act is performed. Well, for Herman, it is sufficient that a right act not only meet the requirement that it not depend on "accidental circumstances" but also that "failure in different circumstances does not require denial of moral worth". So there are two different senses of "accidental circumstance" for Herman. Sorell, by contrast, denies that Kant could have accepted the second of Herman's senses of "accidental circumstance". A will viewed in this way is one that is open to conditional rightness and this appears to contravene Kant's requirement that the good will be a will that is good in an unconditional sense. However, when this difference between Herman's and Sorell's reading comes out this way it appears that Sorell's reading reinforces the suggestion, to which Henson's original argument was meant to reply, that there is something about Kant's requirements that is seriously in conflict with moral intuition. Now it appears that the conflict concerns the point that Kant appears to want it not to be accidental ever that the right act is performed whereas "common sense" would appear to be satisfied, like Herman, with the lesser requirement that what is actually willed is right even though, given appropriate variational difference, it could have turned out to be wrong.


Now that we have arrived at this difference between Herman's and Sorell's accounts it becomes clearer that the "no accident" principle in the latter's sense would appear to be the source of the alleged conflict between the unconditionality of duty and the presumed attractiveness of spontaneous good character. In order to see the connection between the "no accident" principle and this claimed conflict it is useful to follow Sorell in looking again at the "natural dialectic" with which Kant concludes Groundwork I. In this "natural dialectic" Kant discusses the contrary pulls of duty and inclination summarising the latter as providing a basis for scepticism concerning the purity and strictness of morals (what Henson termed Kant's "battle citation" model). The point Kant has in view in evoking this "natural dialectic" is to present the commands of moral requirements as inescapable or unconditional. Now the point about responding to the view that alleges spontaneous good character is more attractive in the manner of Henson's alleged later "fitness" model is that it is meant to show that inclination need not be seen as a barrier to this unconditional nature of duty. However the "no accident" principle shows that this unconditional character of duty is not restricted and this appears to cut against any argument that allows "moral worth" to even partially reside in the presence of good inclinations.


Now it is obviously part of Kant's general case that we can detach ourselves from that which we are inclined towards. This is part of the way Kant resists "naturalism" in the sense of arguing that there is nothing about our sensuousness as such that can be morally determinative when it comes to the pure command of duty. This is underscored by Kant's claim at Ak. 4: 410-11 that reason influence us more powerfully than the inclinations. However, as Sorell points out, this brings Kant into apparent conflict with a picture like the one many derive from Aristotle in which the cultivation of the virtues through habitual learning will co-ordinate perception and appetite in such a way as to make right action the general outcome. The "Aristotelian" picture is not without problems of its own though since, as follows from recognition of even Herman's restricted notion of the "no accident" principle, some tend to have less spontaneous direction towards the right than others and would, on this account, therefore tend less towards the right outcome. This would open morality up to the accusation that it sets forth requirements that are in fact ones that some are, due to various types of good fortune, better able to meet than others. Thus circumstantial bad luck would put the good life beyond reach which would seem a poor ground for being responded to with moral opprobrium.


Now, in response to this worry, a worry that Kant can use against the "attractiveness" of the "spontaneous" good character, Kant can and does adopt the view that the type of commendation the "good character" deserves is less moral than aesthetic. The person of "good character" on Kant's view is one who acts in a way that we can term "beautiful" whereas the person who possesses a good will is, rather, one we view as "sublime" in their character. The person with the "good character" of spontaneous type is one who charms us but does not, merely due to this, present us with a check on our view of ourselves. Rather the person of this sort can reinforce a "naturalistic" view of ourselves that leads us to think that if we just leave things alone we will, over time, get the "good character" in question just from habitual observances. By contrast, the "discipline" of reason is based on the sublime authority of the law, an authority that we find we only reluctantly give way to (which is why the person with the "good will" inspires us with respect).


Another way of putting the general point that Sorell has derived from the aesthetic contrast that Kant makes is that the "spontaneous" good character, to be really attractive, is one that we have to think of as one that the one who exhibits it, is responsible for. If the person of "spontaneous" good character really is "naturalistically" good it would follow they were not really a character worthy of commendation for their goodness as this goodness would be purely a lucky possession. Hence, moral intuition agrees with Kant that there have to be internal constraints on good character for it really to be good. Should the character be just an outflow of a "good nature" it would not be one that was really worth commending for its morality since it would not be expressive of a moral character. So we need a "good will behind a good nature" in order to show moral respect. So if there are good inclinations in the person of good will they cannot be what is generically causally the basis of their good acts as otherwise there is nothing there that is worthy of our moral commendation. From which it follows that Kant's thesis is perhaps not, after all, out of accord with common sense morality and thus that the latter might not, despite appearances to the contrary, favour "spontaneous" good character.

Barbara Herman and Kant on Moral Worth

In my previous posting I looked at Richard Henson's article on Kant and moral worth and reported the basis of his conclusion that we may not have a duty to perform actions that have moral worth. The point of Henson's argument was to take the sting out of the view, as reported in part of the Groundwork, that there is a sense in which the presence of inclination is apparently sufficient to undermine the moral worth of an action. Henson's argument, whilst ingenious in its way, and certainly influential, has not gone without opposition. In this posting I am going to look at the reply to Henson made by Barbara Herman. 


Herman opens her piece by indicating that her sense of Henson's achievement consists in the notion that he has managed to salvage Kant's view by indicating two distinct views of moral worth in Kant's texts and that only one of these requires the view that the presence of inclinations undermines the moral worth of an action. The view that cuts against this conception, on Herman's account, is the fitness-report model of moral worth but this view is not, on Henson's report, the model of moral worth that Kant adopts in the Groundwork.  Henson appears to view the Groundwork account as requiring that respect for duty be present if an act is to have moral worth (and this is what he terms a "battle-citation" view). In responding to Henson, Herman's first move is to return to the text of the Groundwork to see if it supports the account that Henson has given.


Henson's interpretation of the Groundwork is based largely on the account of the sympathetic man (or "friend of mankind") mentioned in the first part of the work. This person normally does what is right due to finding an inner satisfaction in doing so. However, in extremis, when overcome by sorrow, he finds a ground for doing the right thing despite no longer having any inclination to do so and now for the first time, as Kant puts it, "his action has its genuine moral worth" (Ak. 4: 398). Henson generalises from this case to the position that there is a basic problem with inclination in the Groundwork which produces his "battle-citation" conception of moral worth. 


Herman, however, in returning to the text of the Groundwork, goes back prior to the invocation of this example by Kant in order to look at the wider context of the discussion in the first section of the work within which this example occurs. The first part of the Groundwork is evidently concerned with the conception of the good will and after the concept of duty has  introduced "certain subjective limitations" on the good will we arrive at the discussion of moral worth and the examples of acting for the sake of duty. This suggests, says Herman, that moral worth is part of an account of what it is that is involved in the good will. Now, the key to the good will, as appears from its connection to duty, concerns the motive involved in performing a dutiful act. The important thing, however, is that the motivation here considered is one in which acting dutifully means acting for the sake of duty rather than for the sake of something else.


This limitation on dutiful acts is undertaken in order to contrast such a form of motivation from ones in which dutiful acts are undertaken for some other end with the example of a dutiful act undertaken for self-seeking ends (as in the case of the shopkeeper) and due to immediate inclination (in the case of the "friend of man") brought in as contrastive to the action undertaken for the sake of duty alone. In the shopkeeper example it is evident that acting honestly is undertaken instrumentally and hence need not apply in all circumstances. Now this problem with the maxim of the shopkeeper does not obviously apply to the philanthropist who is generally disposed to act in ways that do accord with duty. Whilst the philanthropist has not adopted the right maxim instrumentally, however, it is still true, Kant suggests, that there is only a contingent connection between the ground of their maxims and right action and it lacks, he says, "moral content". In other words, the philanthropist is essentially indifferent to morality. 


Looked at in general terms, Herman argues, Kant's discussion of the examples is not intended to give an overall account of moral worth. But what it does do is show us a problem with dutiful actions being performed for motives that are not themselves dutiful. The key point then would not concern inclination ultimately (as it does for Henson) but, instead, an understanding of what is involved in moral motivation which is, for Herman, the claim that a moral motive, to be truly said to exist, has to give the agent adopting it an interest in the rightness of their actions. So the problem with Henson's account of "overdetermination" of motives really concerns whether such motives involve attention being directed to such rightness as, if they do not, their connection to the rightness of actions remains only contingent. To be sure that an action has moral worth we thus need a non-contingent (or necessary) relation between the motive of the agent and the duty that the action would manifest.


Once things are put in this way Herman can move to complicate the details of Henson's original picture which she does by considering two models of her own of moral worth. On the first account the fitness-report model of moral worth that Henson argues is articulated in the Groundwork requires to be understood through a notion of "greater strength". What this involves is that an action would be judged only to have moral worth if the moral motive was sufficiently strong to prevail over other inclinations regardless of whether they cooperation or conflicted with the moral motive. The battle-citation model is only different in the sense that it has here been specified that the moral motive has won out. In other words, on Herman's account, it becomes implausible to view Kant as having adopted different models of moral worth in the Groundwork and the Doctrine of Virtue as Henson argued. However the problem with this first account is that since it really collapses the two views of moral worth into one by upholding the battle-citation model that it seems to require that moral worth be understood as the same as moral virtue. 


On the alternative reading Herman requires that the moral motive be the one on which the agent acted and that the configuration of motives be one that is reliable in its outcome. The reliability of outcome seems to be guaranteed not by an appeal to "strength" (which perhaps was still a contingent measure) but by the direct invocation of the moral motive as the ground of the action so that an action with moral worth was produced. The stress here seems to fall on the action rather than the agent as the general structure of the agent's character is what is meant by virtue. The disambiguation that Herman has carried out in distinguishing this second alternative from the first thus consisted in seeing the appeal to the ground of the maxim as crucial to the given action rather than taking it to represent a permanent alteration in the structure of the agent's willing.


Herman's account of dutiful actions thus indicates the nature of the appeal to the moral motive as the assessment of the moral worth of the action undertaken. The motives provide what she calls "limiting conditions" on what we can do for other motives than the moral one. The key is that the moral motive be the effective ground of the action undertaken regardless of the presence or otherwise of other elements. It limits the effective presence of other motivations but is also a ground of appeal when we do act in its own right. 


However Herman's picture becomes more complicated when we note that she speaks of duty being a motive in a primary sense in dutiful actions whilst it is only limitative of the presence of other motives in, for example, merely permissible (but not mandatory) actions. So the role of duty is not always expressive in the primary sense as it can simply act as a means of filtering out immoral temptations. 


Going back to the "friend of humanity" who was important for Henson's original argument, Herman now presents this person in terms of a change of temperament and the point concerns not the kind of view that Schiller endorsed (and towards which Henson's interpretation inevitably drifts) but rather that this case has broken the person in question from having only a contingent connection between their willing and an action that can be said to be right. In support of this Herman also cites Kant's discussion of suicide in Groundwork I in which it becomes clear that it is not normally morally worthy that we avoid it but it becomes so when we are robbed of the normal reasons inclination provides us with not to wish for it. Inclination alone provides us with nothing that has moral worth as it gives no reason to act morally. So the appeal to being free of inclination in order for an act to have moral worth concerns, as Herman concludes by arguing, a situation of independence from circumstances and it is that which we have when inclination ceases to be the ground on which we act.

Richard Henson and Kant on Moral Worth

I have posted a number of pieces recently concerned with how different commentators have responded to the argument of the first part of the Groundwork, including, most recently, Christine Korsgaard's account of its argument. However, what I have not addressed thus far in the postings given over to this topic, have been the contributions in the secondary literature that have focused specific attention to the topic of "moral worth", something that is worth some detailed attention as the literature on this topic has, in recent years, rather grown. As one of the first pieces devoted specifically to discussing moral worth was by Richard Henson I will, in this piece, seek to retrace the main points of Henson's argument in order that the subsequent responses to it can be given separate consideration in later postings.


Henson's article is meant to focus on the question of what is involved in attribution of "moral worth" to an action given Kant's statements and the statement analysed in particular in Henson's article is in the first section of the Groundwork. It is worth adding, however, that Henson also emphasises the notion that moral motivation can be "overdetermined" as it may involve a mixture of inclinations and determining reasons. In relation to the maxim being taken to be a moral one Henson also points out that it is not sufficient that it pass the universalisation test (although it is necessary that it does so) but failure to carry out the action should also be wrong. However, the key point for Henson doesn't concern duty itself but rather "moral worth" and the suggestion that an act "only" has such worth if it is done from duty. Finally, for the purposes of introduction of Henson's argument, the suggestion that moral worth attaches only to actions done from duty, is taken by him only to feature as an argument in the Groundwork and not to be part of the argument of the Doctrine of Virtue, not least because, in the latter work, we have a distinct class of "duties of virtue" which are simply not performed at all unless done from duty.


The key passage from the Groundwork on which Henson builds so much is the one concerning the "friend to mankind" who has been overcome by some sorrow such that they are no longer capable of possessing an inclination to do a good act but manage to tear themselves "out of this dead insensibility" and perform the required act "without any inclination" and then have performed an act which has "genuine moral worth" (Ak. 4: 398). Having cited this passage Henson questions its import on two levels, asking both (A) what it means to ascribe moral worth to an act and (B) under what circumstances we are to say that someone has acted from duty. The first question concerning the ascription of moral worth is one that is presented as having two possible answers, either (a) that the person at the time of performing the action was in a "fit moral condition" or (b) that the person at the time acted in such a way that we feel they won a significant battle against evil.


The second question (B), by contrast, concerns overdetermination of acts given that it is often the case that one may well have many distinct motives for performing a given act. Henson argues that Kant gives no direct answer to this second question but that he could have given one of three possible answers to it: 1) reverence for duty was present and would be enough without anything further; 2) other inclinations were present and show the act was not  done from duty; 3) both could be present but this does not show, in any given case, on which motive the agent was acting. Henson effectively rules out 3) (despite giving it some supporting grounds) in order to argue between 1) and 2) and argues that the example given at Ak 4: 398 tells in favour of 2) and thus to support the view that it is only when one acts without any supporting inclination that one is acting from duty.


Henson does concede, however, that many would be tempted to deny that Kant adopts 2) as the right answer to B) simply because it seems to leave him open to the view of Schiller to the effect that he is endorsing the suggestion that having pleasure in doing duty is itself "wrong", an odd and counter-intuitive result and one that most Kantians have always been concerned to reject. 


In order to respond to this putative objection to his account Henson rolls together his responses to A) and B) now in order to articulate what he takes the full Kantian reply to be to the question of what it means to say that a dutiful act has moral worth and he states that the choice is between one of two answers: i) provided respect for duty was present then it doesn't matter whether or not there were other motives; ii) only if respect for duty was the sole motive was there moral worth in the act performed. Now this full response also relates back to the alternative answers given to question A) since the  fitness report model (a) would coincide with i) whereas the battle model would require ii). 


Now, having stated these points Henson returns to the putative objection from Schiller and points out that it counts as such only if Kant agrees c) that the presence of inclinations defeats the attribution of moral worth and d) it is a moral defect not to perform actions which require moral worth. Both conditions are required for Schiller's response to the Kantian account to be the right one since the failure of c) would ensure that the presence of inclinations had no effect on the award of moral worth to an action whereas the failure of d) would show that it was not necessary to put oneself in positions where it is was required to act from duty. (So there would not be a duty to act from duty.)


Assuming that Henson's earlier argument was accepted it would follow that part of Schiller's condition was fulfilled since c) would hold and the presence of inclinations would have an effect on the award of moral worth to an action but this does not, by itself, entail that d) also has to hold. This means that the battle that could be won in overcoming evil is not one that we would necessarily encourage people to undertake. A reason for adopting this view, according to Henson, is that the argument of the Groundwork does not lead to the conclusion that we have to perform acts that have moral worth (or even, he says, that we "ought" to). The reason for this is that the situation that requires moral worth is not one that we should wish to be placed in and nor is it one that we have a duty to find ourselves in. A supporting argument for this view is the suggestion made at Ak. 4: 428 concerning the wish to be free from inclinations which Henson takes merely to require that we be free of inclinations which would hinder us from performing our duties not of inclinations per se (which takes part of the sting out of Schiller's attack).


The final part of Henson's argument turns on his view of the case in the Doctrine of Virtue since the duties of virtue require, he states, that we adopt the end in question and if we lacked it we would not have performed the said duties at all. On this model it does become the case that it is a moral defect to fail to perform acts having moral worth (d) on Schiller's account but not evidently a problem that there be cooperating inclinations. So neither the Doctrine of Virtue account nor that of the Groundwork satisfies both conditions of Schiller's gibe though each work possesses one of the conditions of meeting it. This does suggest that the works are inconsistent with each other on Henson's view but he argues the reason for this inconsistency is that Kant failed to pay sufficient attention to the question of overdetermination of actions. 


Having set Henson's argument out in detail I will, in future postings on moral worth, review some of the responses to it that have appeared in the secondary literature but will link back to this posting when I do so in order that the replies can be evaluated in terms of how well they have depicted Henson's original argument.