Herman on Mutual Aid (II)

In the previous posting I began to look at Barbara Herman's reconstruction of Kant's argument for beneficence in the Groundwork. In this posting I want to look at the second part of Herman's argument and respond to some elements of it. If the first part of her reconstruction concentrated primarily on providing a response to prudential readings of Kant's argument, the second part, by contrast, attends to some questions that emerge from her alternative reconstruction.

Herman mentions, for example, Kant's rationale for including some sense of "true needs" in his view of beneficence given that he has apparently "excluded" empirical considerations from his argument. The basis for Kant being able to do both these things is, claims Herman, due to the way he understands the "exclusion" of empirical considerations. On the one hand, empirical considerations are not meant to account for the "foundations" of morality. This is based on Kant's view that reason itself is not to be understood on empiricist lines. Connected to this point is the distinct claim that moral requirements are separate from any contingent and empirical ends we may possess. These claims about the "exclusion" of empirical considerations need not entail (and does not for Herman) that the "content" of morality has no relation to the empirical nature of things.

Despite having made this clarificatory comment about Kant's "exclusion" of empirical data from his view of morality Herman admits that the presence of claims about agential dependence in her reconstruction of the argument for beneficence might still trouble us. After all, what is to prevent there being rational agents who are not dependent in the way we humans appear to be. Given this possibility it would appear that factors trading on contingent characteristics have been given undue weight in her reconstructed argument and this is important given that the categorical imperative is meant to apply to all rational beings. However, in reply, Herman argues that whilst the fundamental categorical imperative would apply to all rational beings this does not entail that the same duties would emerge from the application of it for all rational beings. So there would be rational beings that would not have the duty of beneficence despite being subject to the categorical imperative.

This implication of Herman's account is somewhat surprising and reveals that her claim about indispensable ends is anthropologically inflected. The duty of mutual aid emerges for her as one that attaches to beings that are dependent on each other in the way that humans are. Another surprising element of her view is that the claim of mutual aid can be said to be met if it is recognised as valid even should it be the case that no aid is able to be given. This latter claim involves saying that the claim is "met" in a sense if it is recognised that someone is of the class of persons and hence we can see that their claim is one we should meet if we can. Even though it may be we cannot meet their claim the act of recognition of its validity is a kind of way in which it is acknowledged and this itself appears to Herman to matter.

This second surprising element of Herman's argument is one to which she pays more attention than the first surprising element. Seeing a claim as "valid" is seeing that it is right that the need it expresses be considered she states and this does not entail that the claim even should be met. 

The next element of Herman's account worth remark is that she takes the duty of mutual aid to be one that is indeterminate with regard to action. It expresses what she calls a "general policy maxim" which expresses a form of intent with regard to the formation of specific maxims of action. The intent is that the specific maxims of action should take the general policy to guide their formulation. This view of the way the duty works is now used to begin to formulate what Herman takes to be the casuistry of mutual aid.

In outlining this casuistry Herman argues that the way a maxim is to be understood is in terms of what is "behind" a maxim. So, using the example of refusing to give to charity, she articulates the very different reasons that might lead someone to adopt such a policy and argues that the general policy behind the specific adoption of this view is what matters. The lesson of this example is then applied to other examples including the reason why someone who has ability and opportunity to help another does not do so on a specific occasion. Acknowledging another's need as a claim on one is taking it to provide a reason why one should help them. Relevant reasons for failing to act on the claim are introduced in the context of competing claims. 

The basis of mutual aid is revealed for Herman to be the preservation and support of persons in their activity as rational agents. The basis of refraining from helping others in general is the threat this may pose to our own agency. The same action may therefore be mandated for one and yet not for another so the universality of the duty is not a basis for claiming uniformity of what is required to be done.

A further surprising implication of Herman's account is that if mutual aid really relates to "true needs" then many acts of helping others that we perform are not really acts that are morally mandated and therefore not duties at all. This view is distinct from the claim in the Doctrine of Virtue (Ak. 6: 387-8) that the happiness of others is an obligatory end for us, which implies a more stringent requirement of beneficence than Herman allows. Herman is unhappy with this suggestion since she thinks if interpreted strictly it fails to distinguish between different kinds of need of others. The passage cited from the Doctrine of Virtue is very thin and principally aimed at arguing against the view that I have a duty to promote my own happiness. Herman also has a more moderate view of the passage taking it to mandate no more than possessing a duty of contributing to the meeting of the true needs of others. 

The focus on "true needs" as the basis of the requirement of beneficence is a way of distinguishing between the help that morality mandates and that which may be naturally given by a kindly soul but Herman does not wish to present the difference this way since she argues that a full Kantian account of helping would attempt to integrate both types of help. The problem with this is that the view of kindness offered still stands as one on Herman's account that tends to be viewed in terms of inclination as when she refers to it as "good-heartedness". This construal of it assimilates it to the position of the kindly person described as lacking in moral worth in the first part of the Groundwork. 

Herman's account of beneficence has, in sum, three difficulties: 1) it surprisingly limits the scope of beneficence to only certain kinds of rational beings; 2) it brings in a view of a relationship between beneficence and kindness that appears to point to a fuller Kantian theory of helping but also undercuts this suggestion; 3) in ruling out more stringent accounts of beneficence it appears to leave a large amount of the filling in of the determinancy of the judgment about this duty to latitude.

Herman and Mutual Aid (I)

Apologies to readers of this blog for my extended absence from writing. Various things came up and for a while they created problems with finding time and space for blogging. In returning to the practice I want to look at an essay from the collection on Kant's Groundwork that was edited by Paul Guyer. The piece I'm going to address here and in the next posting is the one by Barbara Herman on mutual aid (which originally appeared in 1984 in an issue of Ethics).

Herman's piece opens with a long epigraph from the Groundwork (Ak. 4: 423) where Kant relates the question of beneficence to the formula of the law of nature. After citing this Herman claims that it is not a "crude misunderstanding" of the passage to see it as making a "prudential claim" for the duty of beneficence. The example as given relates the duty to the conception of a contradiction in the will and does so by pointing out that the adoption of a maxim of non-beneficence would lead an agent to deprive themselves of the help they will in future need for themselves. The "prudential" understanding of this argument has a substantial history going back to Schopenhauer and being repeated in one way by Sidgwick. It is, despite the evident reasons for championing it, a reading that runs full tilt against the overwhelming general case made in the Groundwork for distinguishing morality from prudential foundations. This general heuristic point gives one a clear reason for rejecting the prudential reading of the beneficence example.

In addition to referring to this heuristic point Herman points out a "double function" of the categorical imperative. One part of this is to "establish" moral requirements, the other is to assess actions and policies whose "permissibility" is uncertain. This "double function" should lead to seeing the use of examples as part of the general case for the duty in question and not as severed from it.

Herman's argument subsequently develops a view of the way the test that is given in the example is meant to work. Her overall claim is that the point of it should be to establish that the categorical imperative "correlates well with our considered judgments" (134). This notion of "considered judgments" is unclear since it could involve a notion of "common sense" or it may refer to a "reflective" kind of work that is undertaken on the typical judgments of "common sense". Further Herman refers to the point that Kant takes it that the categorical imperative is, in some way, "embedded" in ordinary judgments as would seem to follow from the argument of the first part of the Groundwork. "Correlation" is not a strong enough link to establish this claim but this claim could itself be interpreted in a similarly dual fashion as requiring either that common sense exhibits the categorical imperative or that a reflective analysis of its operation would demonstrate the categorical imperative whose result therefore would not be equivalent to a descriptive analysis of the operation of common sense.

This first issue is thus far unresolved. The next point that arises concerns the way that Herman views the operation of the procedure of moral judgment. This is done by means of iteration of the method of the "typic" outlined in the Critique of Practical Reason where Kant speaks of construction of a "world" in which the maxim in question has got the status of being a law of nature. If something can't be adopted as such a law without a contradiction of one of two kinds (in either conception or in willing) resulting then the maxim must be rejected. (Herman neglects to engage here in any discussion of the theory of maxims.) The example from the Groundwork involves no contradiction in conception and instead Kant there insists on the notion that there is a contradiction in the will.

The prudential reading of the example produces no specifically moral reason for acting on a maxim of beneficence. It typically instead trades on considerations of the vulnerability to misfortune of the agent with the putatively non-beneficent maxim. But if the argument is a prudential one it follows that there are many situations in which helping others is very inconvenient and that a generalized maxim of non-beneficence might, on the whole, be preferable. It would also produce a non-universalizable conception of beneficence since, as Herman puts it, some might be more whilst others are less willing to "risk it" that they will need and want help in the future. The whole problem seems then to turn into one about insurance and assurance and then the degree of beneficence one is willing to practice becomes dependent upon the way one calculates one's real risks of being in need.

The result of the prudential conception of the beneficence example is that the consideration of it becomes one in which moral actions are viewed in terms of "pay-off" and resultant expectations of well-being and this seems not to capture correctly the intuition we have of the importance of morality in our life. Herman mentions a possible alternative view to the prudential reading of the example as used by Rawls in his lectures on Kant's moral philosophy. Here Rawls invokes his conception of the veil of ignorance but Herman interprets it in   terms of the prudential argument for beneficence since it merely makes everyone conservative about risk taking. There are passages where Rawls suggests this in Theory but I don't take this to be his point here. In Theory, as Herman rightly states, the veil of ignorance is used against the backdrop of the "original position" but Rawls makes no reference to the latter when he interprets Kant's moral philosophy in his lectures. So I don't think the "prudential" reading that makes some sense of Rawls' overall political argument is one that is evidently right with regard to his reconstruction of Kant's moral philosophy.

Herman's interpretation of Rawls' view of the beneficence argument leads to seeing it as based on a view of the "representative person" rather than on an assessment of the position individuals are placed in. The point of emphasizing the latter is that Kant's examples generally function to counter the typical strategy revealed in many maxims of "exempting" oneself, just for this once, from a rule accepted to hold generally. Seeing the example this way makes the question of testing the maxim of non-beneficence one that is merely a special case of a general problem of egoistic self-preference. This way of seeing the example has the virtue of being close to the prudential reading in one central respect whilst also presenting a case for the prudential reading being wrong overall.

A second element of Herman's resistance to the Rawlsian reading concerns the fact that maxims appear to be tested by Kant as they are willed by the agent and hence the test of them has to include information of a sort ruled out by the veil of ignorance. I am unconvinced by this second "problem" with Rawls' reconstruction since the information that is relevant is only the generic information concerning the rationale for adopting the maxim. It doesn't incorporate specifically individual features into its consideration, the Herman reading, and nor could it or should it. In not doing so however it is no better placed than the Rawlsian reading.

Herman's interpretation turns, not like the Rawlsian one, on a view of information but instead on a view of rationality. Herman wishes to show that the adoption of the maxim of non-beneficence is irrational but not because of its implications of being non-prudential. In presenting an alternative view of the irrationality of the maxim of non-beneficence Herman looks in particular at the qualities of "ends" agents adopt. She wishes to show two qualities of ends that will be sufficient to show the irrationality of the maxim of non-beneficence. These are, firstly, that there are ends that are more important to agents than any alleged benefit derived from the aim of non-beneficence and, secondly, that there are ends that it is not possible for agents to forego. These two claims could be termed the importance claim (as in "importance of what we care about") and indispensable ends claim (ends we cannot fail to have).

So the categorical imperative procedure is viewed by Herman as showing that these two claims hold with regard to our ends. Central to her reconstruction will be showing that the aid of others is something we cannot do without and thus that aiming to maintain relations with others that will ensure that such aid is forthcoming should it be required is an indispensable aim for us. This point requires looking again at the theory of action that Kant outlines in his account of hypothetical imperatives. The conception of these was that means are not contingently connected to ends in the sense that certain kinds of means are essential to the accomplishment of certain kinds of ends. To this Herman adds that we essentially have recourse to three kinds of means: the utilisation of our own powers (as is discussed in the duty of self-improvement), the use of "things" or "objects" and the use of the services of others. Put like this the argument concerning beneficence aims to show that one of the basic conditions of our action incorporates a relation to the services of others.

In response to this Herman conjures up the figure of a "negative Stoic" who is prepared to give up any end that will require the help of others to be realised. Such an agent has taken the Stoical end to be a limit on all other ends. This does require taking this end to have a supreme kind of value and if there are other ends that are also taken to be important the problem with maintaining such a view will be manifested in demonstrating to oneself why this end should always have over-riding value. Not only is this so but whether the conditions faced by this agent are ones that present serious problems for them are not themselves under the agent's control. It may be that one will need help to resist temptations that are very strong and if this is resisted then the maxim of independence may become self-defeating. Whilst this argument doesn't strike me as having conclusive force what it does show is that any given end has to be related to the conditions that enable it to be realized and that one of the elements that have to be considered there is the potential help of others. Cutting oneself off from this seems unreasonable whatever one's ends otherwise are.

Herman's central claim is that there are ends that a rational being cannot give up and this is her gloss on Kant's notion of "true needs". Included amongst these are the need for the help of others given the natural limits on our powers as agents. As Herman puts this: "Because we are dependent rational beings with true needs, we are constrained to act in certain ways" (143). It is not obvious how this argument fails to be a variant on the conception that the duty of beneficence turns out to be something that it is prudent to accept. Herman's view that conditions of agency include the ability to call on the help of others seems right but this ability to call on the help of others is neither always requiring of beneficent acts nor does it mandate the scope of these acts. Further whilst a relation to others does seem to manifest a "true need" there are reasons to think separation from others is also so required (as in Kant's discussion of friendship).

Herman herself, however, appears more concerned with the suggestion that an implausibly stringent requirement of beneficence might be thought to follow from her argument. So she considers a maxim of non-sacrificial beneficence as a means to counter such a result and suggests that it would fail the categorical imperative test. However, in countering the suggestion that such a result points to an implausibly strong duty she argues that what is required when sacrificial help is needed is not "sacrifice" itself but something specific and availability of this latter depends on contingent circumstances.  Hence a maxim of non-sacrificial beneficence does not involve a contradiction in the will in the way that a maxim of non-beneficence generically does.

However it might seem that such an argument can be used against the duty of beneficence in general. Whenever help is needed it is something specific that is required not the help as such. Whilst this is true it is only the agency of another that can provide the help in question whatever that is.

What Herman's argument as shown does do not do is demonstrate that there may not be imprudent consequences from acting in a way that serves our own "true needs". Further she cannot demonstrate that our "true needs" may fail to be met in future because we acted beneficently. So, in an example she considers, it may be that a rich person will give away resources beneficently that will later make it impossible for this person to get an expensive medical treatment that would have had major effects on their life. This fact shows that the argument for beneficence is far from an easy one to sell. Herman herself deals with this in terms of how there is no requirement to meet all contingent circumstances in such cases but only to show what is required for agency to be truly realised. But given that the circumstances of scarcity seem far from "contingent" if they are likely to always hold in an agent's life this argument is not clearly conclusive.

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.

Parfit and Kant on Universal Law (II)

In my last posting on Parfit I looked at the way in which Parfit addressed the topic of universal laws in the second of his 2002 Tanner Lectures. In this posting, by contrast, I'm going to look at the way in which Parfit addresses the topic in Climbing the Mountain, the first draft of Parfit's book, On What Matters.


Chapter 8 of Climbing the Mountain is concentrated on the question of "universal laws" and opens, as did the second of Parfit's Tanner Lectures of 2002, with a description of the variety of statements that appear to be classified by Kant as "maxims". Having listed these Parfit goes on to discuss the question of what underlies the Formula of Universal Law. Essentially Parfit is here attempting to assess what could underpin it for a successful version of Kantian ethics to be mounted and he is not interested, strictly speaking, in whatever it might have been that Kant himself was up to.


So the first candidate for the essential thrust of the Formula of Universal Law that Parfit considers is the one he terms "the Impossibility Formula" that alleges that there is something wrong in acting on a maxim that could not be a universal law. However, Parfit is not content to rest the understanding of the Formula of Universal Law on the Impossibility Formula alone since he wishes to offer further interpretation of what it is claiming to be impossible. Is it, as Parfit considers first, acting on maxims that we could not all accept? Well, if this refers to questions about psychological plausibility then it is not a formula that would work so Parfit shifts from this account to a different one where it would mean that acting on a maxim that it would be impossible for everyone to act upon would be wrong.


Here, however, the reference to "everyone" requires careful attention since many maxims can only be acted on by some. Children whose parents are mentally ill or imprisoned have no basis to expect that these parents are able to act on the general maxim of caring for their children and nor can the childless act upon such a maxim. These points are pretty obvious and show that the formula cannot be interpreted in ways that lead to such objections. Parfit reformulates Kant's notion as based upon an idea like the following: "It is wrong to act on any maxim of which it is true that, if everyone accepted and acted upon this maxim, or everyone believed that it was permissible to act upon it, that would make it impossible for anyone successfully to act upon it". (151)


The question that Parfit then raises concerning this more extended view of the Formula of Universal Law is whether he has reached an understanding of what the wrong-making characteristics of something are. However, Parfit still understands the question in a way that seems to me eccentric although the eccentricity of understanding here is not his alone. Barbara Herman, like Parfit, seems to think that it would be possible, in accordance with this criteria, to adopt the maxim of killing or injuring others wherever that would benefit me. The suggestion that this could be adopted as a maxim under the rules of the above citation strikes me as bizarre. Once this maxim has been generally adopted it would follow that all were constantly vigilant against being attacked by each other and that the general result would have to be to establish conditions that prevented such mutual harm. A structural argument of this sort is precisely at work in Kant's philosophy of right and it is very odd of Parfit and Herman to ignore it.


A similar point applies to Parfit's attempt to evade the logic of the universalisation of the practice of lying undermining the practice of lies. Parfit here indicates that some lies wouldn't then be told due to no longer being believed but that some lies would be told still since not every lie could be detected. In this case Parfit abstracts from the example Kant explicitly considers in the Groundwork which does not concern lying per se but lying promises and that what Kant was considering was the undermining of the practice of promising. Since generalised lying would ensure that no promise could be accepted as it stood it is promises that would be undermined, exactly as Kant argues. Parfit does later arrive at the point about promising only to channel it into an account of generalised permissibility without stopping to examine the basis of the claim about promising. Similarly, Parfit generally neglects the distinction between examples of contradiction in conception and contradiction in the will and looks at all of Kant's cases as if they were examples of the former.


Parfit does later arrive at questions about practices but, in invoking practices that he has reasons to think are bad ones, neglects to ask why Kant focused on the cases that he did.
The discussion of examples that Parfit gives is consistently in terms of checking different versions of what he thinks lies behind the Formula of Universal Law. Included here are questions about what it is to "successfully" act on certain maxims but Parfit basically rejects the notion that the Formula of Universal Law itself can help us with maxims that guide actions without revealing that Kant does not specifically apply it in this way in the Groundwork. Kant instead moves to the Formula of the Law of Nature before he turns to examples and Parfit follows Kant in this without indicating that he has done so. When he moves to the law of nature formula, however, Parfit for the first time considers "rational willing" though only to conflate this with formulas of his own devising concerning permissibility and "moral belief". The latter notion is used to ask whether acting on certain types of belief would produce wrong results. 


Once Parfit has arrived at this view he considers what he terms "policy-and-motive maxims" though this still leads him into muddles when he considers cases of egoistic action, actions that are not consistently treated by Parfit in terms of moral worth. The basic problem seems to be that Parfit takes a maxim to formulate an intention rather than an underlying policy that may not feature in conscious acts at all. Due to this Parfit consistently sets his examples in a peculiar light. Further, due to failing to get this right, Parfit gets confused about the point of understanding something having "moral worth". The formulations in Chapter 8 of Climbing the Mountain are thus little better than they were in the 2002 lectures.

Allison and Kant on Universal Law

Due to being away traveling in the earlier part of this month it is a little while since I last blogged. My last posting on Allison's book on the Groundwork was about a month previous to this one and concerned chapter 6 where Allison discussed rational agency and the general notion of imperatives. In this posting I will comment on the seventh chapter where Allison gives his account of the two formulas of universal law as they appear in the second part of the Groundwork, and which includes an account of the examples Kant gives there.


The first issue Allison raises in this chapter concerns the claim Kant makes at Ak. 4: 421 that all "imperatives of his duty" can be "derived" from the "single imperative" of universal law that Kant unequivocally identifies with the categorical imperative formula of universal law. The word translated as "derived" is abgeleitet and Allison asks whether Kant here means that the test of the categorical imperative concerns whether all generally recognised duties can be derived from it or whether he has something weaker in mind. Allison also raises a second immediate question concerning Kant's use of the notion of "nature" in the formula of the law of nature and asks what function this reference serves for Kant. 


In addressing this second question Allison turns, unsurprisingly, to the account in the Critique of Practical Reason, of the "typic" of pure practical judgment where Kant gives a general discussion of the notion of practical schematism. Here the notion of natural law is described as serving as a "type" or schema of the general notion of law in the process of formulating imperatives. In the second Critique this leads to the formulation: "Ask yourself whether, if the action you propose were to take place by a law of nature of which you were yourself a part, you could indeed regard it as possible through your will" (Ak. 5: 69). This is indicated to be substantially the same as the formula of the law of nature in the Groundwork by Allison though he does little to use the "typic" to make clear the means by which the formula of the law of nature is justified.


The point that comes out by use of the typic is that actions that cannot meet it are, by virtue of this, morally impossible. However, rather than focus on this point, Allison chooses instead to return to the question of what is meant by the claim that imperatives of duty are "derived" from the reference to the law of nature. This question leads Allison to think of the reference to the law of nature as one that is intended to be "fertile" in the sense that it enables a discussion of how lists of duty are supposedly meant to arise. Despite formulating the alleged task of the reference to the law of nature in this way, however, Allison reaches the conclusion that the most that it can do is indicate the impermissibility of a course of action under a given maxim. In other words, it provides a test of moral permissibility rather than providing for specific determination of duties. 


Allison also defends this reading of what can be accomplished by the reference to the law of nature against other views, principally against the claim of Stephen Engstrom that fundamental duties of justice and beneficence can be directly derived from this reference. Essentially the reason why Allison disagrees with Engstrom appears to be that Allison does not think that the reference to universal laws of nature is sufficient to arrive at a generally acceptable conception of what is rationally universally required. 


In turning to Kant's use of examples, which appear after the formulation of the reference to universal laws of nature, Allison notes some points about Kant's procedure. Amongst other things, it is important on Allison's view to see that the examples include courses of action that run against generally accepted duties. Also the examples are meant to bring out a form of contradiction that will arise in willing the course of action in question. 


The first example is that of suicide but important in considering it is the understanding that the maxim here is one of taking shortening one's life to be acceptable if its longer duration promises more ill than agreeableness. So the maxim is one that rests upon an appeal to inclinations. However Allison takes it that the contradiction that arises from this maxim is a teleological one but also views Kant's argument here as unsuccessful. One of the points that Allison makes here is that there is no way of formulating the argument concerning suicide in terms of a simple reference to universal law simplicter. This seems to entail that Allison views the incorporation of reference to universal laws of nature as requiring some sense of teleology though it is far from clear why this should be so. Indeed, Allison himself accepts that taking a strongly teleological view of nature seems a rather large step in order to show a problem with reference to inclinations in a maxim concerning suicide and yet still thinks that Kant requires this. It appears to me that Allison's treatment of this example is marred in failing to justify the necessity of seeing Kant's treatment of it as having to involve assumptions that are far from evidently required.


Moving on to the example of false promises Kant invokes specific circumstances to make this example a strong one. In the case in question there is a reason why the false promise has a real attraction for the agent which is that they are in clear difficulties. Given these difficulties there is a need for something like the appeal to the device of the typic to test the maxim in question. The maxim then emerges as one in which a promise is to be made that I do not intend to fulfil. It is only within the device of the thought experiment that the problem that such a maxim involves can be clearly stated. It is within the device that a contradiction emerges, not within the maxim simply as such. 


Allison considers the type of contradiction that is meant to emerge from the false promising case, discussing whether it is a strict logical contradiction or, as Christine Korsgaard has suggested, a "practical" contradiction. Whilst the former is suggested to show that the contradiction would render the institution of promising impossible, the latter is rather supposed to show that there is a problem with the end of the agent. Allison favours the latter view though he does not think there is a single form of contradiction underlying all of Kant's examples. In this case, however, Allison's reading leads to the view that it is the "intention qua universal law" that generates a contradiction.


The third example concerning the development of talents is treated by Allison as including two different lines of argument, one that concerns a teleological contradiction and the other a practical contradiction. The former, however, if it is involved at all, is one that runs into difficulties of the same sort that would apply to reading the suicide example in this way. The latter, by contrast, has the difficulty that it could simply amount to a case concerning prudential rather than moral reasoning. The way that Allison avoids the latter is by reference to a conception of "true needs" that are essential to finite rational agency and that would be compromised if talents were not developed. However this leads Allison to reading the third example in a way that is weaker than is standard since it produces the outcome not that we are required to cultivate our talents but only that we not adopt a maxim of completely neglecting them. The fourth example concerning non-beneficence is ruled out by Kant in terms of universal laws of nature but this is again viewed by Allison in terms of "true needs" of finite rational agents. This is again thought to produce a form of practical contradiction in the maxim in question.


After treating Kant's four examples Allison moves on to the decidedly tricky ground of the counter-examples that have been stated in the literature to Kant's account. There are two types of such counter-examples: false positives and false negatives. False positives come in two versions, those based on attributing to an agent a highly specific maxim, on the basis of which a proposed course of action could pass the universalisability test and a second set that don't involve such specific reference. The first type of examples are used in particular by Allen Wood. In these cases the high specificity of the examples is meant to evade the reference to universality. In response to these examples Allison stresses the point that increasing the specificity of the maxim has the consequence of narrowing the scope of universalization without evading the universalizability requirement. The more general problem that such a procedure of false positives is meant to reveal is, however, that actions can be presented under a variety of descriptions and not all of such descriptions exclude universalisation. In response Allison stresses the point that use of such false positives depends on a very specific conception of what "maxims" are, namely, identifying them with intentions or actions rather than general determinations of the basis of conduct.


The second type of false positives, by contrast to the ones based on very specific formulations of maxims, tend to concern what Korsgaard has termed "natural" as opposed to "conventional" actions. Such "natural" actions don't require reference to institutions (such as "promising") and, in not requiring this, are allegedly more open to response by invocation of false positives. So the example of killing babies who disturb one's sleep does not appear to run into an immediate contradiction of either logical or practical type once universalised. The strategies of dealing with these types of example that Allison mentions are not entirely successful as responses. Korsgaard, for example, responds to them by stating that they involve reference to some further end than that immediately suggested by the maxim and that this further end is one that cannot be secured consistently with willing the maxim itself (a kind of "practical" contradiction suggestion). However that requires clear assumptions concerning these further ends and is thus open to the kinds of objections that Allison has mentioned when treating the example of cultivation of talents.


The second strategy in responding to these types of false positives is to invoke the contradiction in the will test rather than the contradiction in conception test. Barbara Herman, for example, favours this response. However, this has the peculiar consequence that the maxim concerning the killing of babies appears now to only violate an imperfect rather than a perfect duty, which is surely false. The third strategy, promoted by Onora O'Neill, is to say that the examples in question presuppose practices that would undercut the agency of those they victimise (which appears to imply some kind of reference to humanity and/or autonomy). Allison takes this strategy to be the best on offer but to be implausible as a reading of the requirements of reference to universal law alone. In making this point Allison argues that the formulas of universal law are only intra-subjective and not inter-subjective. What is meant by this is that the formulas of universal law, on Allison's reading, test only the compatibility of an agent's maxim with the same maxim considered as a universal law whilst an inter-subjective test relates the maxim to its possibility of endorsement by other rational agents. Since Allison views the reference to universal law to only involve the former and not the latter form of universalizability he is correct to see the strategy of O'Neill as not persuasive though the case for seeing the formulas of universal law in this restrictive way is not seriously made in this chapter.


After treating false positives, Allison moves on to false negatives that are used against Kant. These are cases of maxims that would be generally agreed not to be morally objectionable but which, it is argued, would fail Kant's test. They include what Herman terms "timing" problems where we state maxims that include references to doing things at given times (such as playing tennis on occasions when the courts aren't widely used). Again, Allen Wood has invoked many of these cases. As with the false positives the real question being raised by these examples concerns the nature of the description of the maxims that is appropriate. Again, Allison responds by distinguishing maxims from intentions. In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant describes maxims as "propositions that contain a general determination of the will having under it several practical rules" though Allison indicates that the nature of the claim that practical rules fall under a maxim is ambiguous. It is ambiguous as the rules could be seen as deduced from the maxim or that the maxim could be seen as providing the normative criterion for the rules but Allison sees the second as correct.


On this ground Allison revisits the alleged problem with the tennis example and points out that the real question concerns the end for the sake of which the agent is engaging in the activity in question. This accords with his point that we should be focusing not on specific intentions when we consider maxims but instead on general determinations of the will. Maxims are thus viewed as containing grounds that are found in agent's practical interests not in their specific intentions.


However, even on Allison's account there are still some problems left unaccounted for. Assuming with him that maxims are best tested by practical contradiction tests and that universal law formulas are seen in terms of intra-subjective validity, it follows that the example of the killing of the baby that disturbs one's sleep, appears not to be ruled out by reference to universal law. Since this is so it follows that Allison will need a stronger account of Kant's other formulas than he gives for the formulas of universal law if Kant's procedure is to be robust enough to rule out maxims that it would appear clearly counter-intuitive to leave undisturbed.

The 12 Key Postings on this Blog in 2011

I opened last year with a summary of the best postings from each month of the year that had just closed and have decided to open this year's postings the same way. Amongst other things it enables a sense to emerge of how the blog develops over 12 months, in terms of trends of interest at different times of year and an indication of which topics have attracted or should have attracted wider engagement.


January:


A month that lacked any clear focus in postings last year but which did include a report on the Netroots conference I attended and which attracted some considerable interest from others who were present so I'd like to recommend this posting to anyone who wasn't there who might like an indication of what the conference concerned. 


February:


A quiet month in terms of postings but included a detailed description and response to the announcement of the philosophy panel in the so-called "research excellence framework". This posting provides important details on those involved in the panel and is worth consulting by anyone in the UK who is likely to have their work judged in due course.


March:


This was the busiest month of the year in terms of postings, which ranged in focus from discussions of the original version of John Rawls' notion of the "original position" to reports on campaigns to keep philosophy alive at Greenwich and Keele universities. Perhaps the most philosophically interesting posting, however, was the first of two that responded to an early Rawls paper on distributive justice. 


April:


A fall-off in quantity of postings followed the height of March, partly due to a difficult personal situation during this period. During the course of this month I began blogging my way through Rawls' Theory of Justice, something far from finished by year-end! One of the early postings on this topic that emerged this month is the first one on Rawls' view of utilitarianism which I would recommend. 


May:


A small number of postings, mainly focused again on Rawls but, towards the end of the month, I also laid out a sustained defence of the notion of open access publishing and journals which, I think, merits perusal.


June:


A month with a large number of postings on a variety of topics from a response to the New College of Humanities to the beginning of a series of postings on Derek Parfit's new book On What Matters, responses which are on-going on this blog. However, despite the beginning of the responses to Parfit occurring during the course of this month, I think the more important posting during the month concerned Rawls again with a piece on what is involved in constructing the original position that is, I think, one of the best of the year by far. 


July:


Postings during this month divided between responses to Rawls and Parfit with, however, the opening of some on Kant's Groundwork. One of the postings of this month succeeded however in attracting a fair amount of attention and this was my response to Simon Blackburn's review of Parfit's book which you can find here.


August:


This was a month with a lot of postings on a very varied range of subjects ranging from a reply to Nelson Potter's reading of the first part of Kant's Groundwork to some opening discussion of John Skorupski's book The Domain of Reasons.  The most visited posting of the year was posted this month on the topic of the wrongness of prostitution but I would prefer it if readers looked instead at the first of two postings that respond to Skorupski and his conception of "Critical philosophy". 


September:


A slight fall-off in the number of postings after the output of August. Postings again focused on topics as disparate as the annual report on the UK Kant Society conference and a response to the exhibition on Ford Madox Brown held in Manchester. However the response I set out to a profile of Derek Parfit in the New Yorker both served to informed readers of what that profile says and to indicate some additional sides to Parfit himself. 


October:


Postings during the course of this month included further replies to Nelson Potter's reading of Kant's Groundwork and a posting on a conference I attended in Romania on cosmopolitics. The month ended with a posting on the account Derek Parfit gives to treating persons as ends during his 2002 Tanner lectures. 


November:


A month in which the number of postings increased significantly again and ranged from the beginning of a series of postings on Henry Allison's new book on Kant's Groundwork to some new postings on Rawls. Perhaps the highlight of the month though was a report on Barbara Herman's account of moral worth in Kant. 


December:


Final month of the year involved responses to Allison's book on the Groundwork and Parfit's work. Of the Parfit postings the second on his account of treating persons as ends looks at how this developed in his early version of On What Matters which he called Climbing the Mountain.

Allison and Kant on Maxims and Moral Worth

In my last posting on Allison I discussed his initial account of the "good will" in Chapter 3 of his commentary on the Groundwork. In this posting I am moving on to an account of Chapter 4 of the commentary where Allison talks about 2 topics, the Kantian account of maxims on the one hand, and the dispute over the meaning Kant gives to "moral worth", on the other. The latter discussion expands upon some of the remarks about duty with which Chapter 3 closed.


The first part of the discussion in Chapter 4 on maxims opens with an examination of the two definitions Kant gives of the term "maxim" in the Groundwork. Key to these definitions is the view that "maxims" are "subjective" principles. Allison subsequently points that, in the Critique of Practical Reason (Ak. 5: 79), Kant also states that maxims presuppose interests and that interests rest on incentives. Further, in the Critique of Practical Reason, "incentives" are presented as subjective determining grounds of the will whilst an interest is defined there as "an incentive of the will insofar as it is represented by reason" (Ak. 5: 79). 


Maxims are ways of thinking and there can be a general orientation of the will that indicates its disposition to adopt maxims of certain sorts. They are the proper objects of moral deliberation and assessment and are related by Allison to a view of how deliberation takes place on a Kantian view. The generic account of deliberation includes a distinction between different forms of consciousness and self-consciousness but the key thing about these is that, in terms of practical deliberation, maxims are part of the spontaneity of an agent. When there is reflexive awareness of maxims then they become taken as guides for action.


Allison distinguishes three functions of maxims. Their first function is in moral deliberation where we examine maxims which requires their explicit formulation. By contrast, in moral assessment, we have to respond to the problem of Kant's account of the opacity of motivation. Allison argues, however, that Kant highlights such opacity only at the level of determination of the purity of motivation. Even spur of the moment decisions are choices made by agents and involve rational commitments. This point leads to the third level of discussion of maxims, which concerns their relationship to rational agency. What is crucial, on Allison's account, is that Kant's theory of rational agency requires that intentional action refer to some maxim even without requiring that there always be complete certainty about the nature of the maxim in question.


After going through the account of maxims, Allison turns to the objections that have been made to Kant's view of moral worth. One of the objections has concerned the relationship between duty and sentiment, in the name of more sentiment-based views. More radically, some argue that emphasis on duty is alienating (as Bernard Williams appears to have thought), a view that refers back to the traditional Schiller objection to the argument of Groundwork I. Allison mentions a number of possible responses to these objections, and, in particular, the more radical of them. The first response referred to is the one that was made by Paton and emphasised the view that Kant is practicing a "method of isolation" in the argument of Groundwork I. This argument has been taken further by Barbara Herman who takes Kant to be making not a general point about inclination but only a specific point concerning the alteration of the attitude of one person (as in the case about the sympathetic person who acts eventually only from duty). However, as Allison states, it is far from obvious that this is a sufficient reply to the Schillerian objection.


The second reply to objections given is the one formulated by Richard Henson and discussed in some detail here. Henson argues for a view he terms the "fitness report" model of moral worth in which the enjoyment of duty does not lessen its moral worth as long as the sense of duty is also present but this view is taken by Henson not to be the representative one given in the Groundwork where, instead, he found there to be a 'battle citation' model given which is essentially close to the argument that Schiller objected to. Not only is this so but, Allison argues, Henson's positive model reflects an empiricist view of agency.


By contrast to these two responses, Allison gives a third one in considerably more detail. This is the view argued for by Allen Wood which distinguishes acting from duty from possession of a "good will". Allison objects to the suggestion that someone with aversion or apathy to moral demands could be said to have a good will though this is in accord with Wood's own statements. However, unlike Wood, Allison stresses the need for self-constraint in following one's duty as there is always some temptation to act contrary to duty. Wood is also accused by Allison of failing to note the difference between taking duty to be a direct motivating factor and seeing it instead as an underlying commitment to do what morality requires. For Allison a maxim's moral content is evidently part of the maxim which leads him to the view that adoption of a good maxim is a reflection of possession of a good character. 


Allison's positive view of moral worth appeals to his conception of the "incorporation thesis", a thesis he famously located in a passage from Kant's Religion (Ak. 6: 24). On this view it is not the case that an incentive or desire can of itself provide us with a reason for action as such a reason is only given if the incentive or desire is incorporated into our maxim. Unlike with Henson's conception of overdetermination, Allison's view of the incorporation thesis does not take the will to be determined but it does involve seeing it as having determining grounds. When one adopts a maxim one also incorporates an incentive into one's reasons on this view. So you can act with inclination but from duty. However, as the previous chapter ended without a full enough view of moral worth emerging so this chapter ends without a full enough view of the incorporation thesis emerging and Allison promises to return to giving a fuller account of the latter later in the work.

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.