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t each agent consciously chooses 6 1 agents impose moral requirements on themselves and 2 these self imposed requirements are motivationally effective in order for the self imposition of moral requirements to be genuinely autonomous it must presumably be a conscious process of self imposition and for these consciously imposed principles to be motivationally effective it must be the case that conscious moral principles are motivationally effective 7 we must presume that these consciously imposed moral laws have a substantial impact on behavior on the nietzschean view by contrast conscious beliefs play no such role in moral or immoral agency people s behaviors are determined not so much by their conscious beliefs as by certain underlying type facts 27 one reason that i think the research l k present poses no challenge whatsoever to kant is just that it poses a challenge only to the kantian view described here but kant held no such view in fact this view is highly improbable even before a single study is cracked open l k take kant to be laying out a theory according to which human beings consciously impose moral principles on themselves and then consciously act on them but keep in mind that the principles involved are what kant calls maxims which have the form i will do x in case in order to y typical kantian examples of maxims are i will end my life in order to avoid prolonged suffering and i will make false promises in cases where i can profit by this these examples are well known i think we need very few studies to realize that we do not under normal circumstances formulate such principles consciously before acting we do have intentions but cases in which those intentions are preceded by explicit formulations of principles which we then use to guide our intentions are incredibly rare one could of course read kant uncharitably and simply say yes his moral psychology is just obviously flawed but now consider the fact that kant was much smarter than you yes whoever you are reading this there is a pretty high chance that this is true so maybe we shouldn t take kant to be giving us an obviously flawed thesis about the psychological processes by which people actually make decisions but rather a thesis about how our actions are to be understood rationally let s say that you see freddie promising to pay back a loan when in fact you know and you know that freddie knows that he is actually planning to take the money and flee to mexico never to be heard from again of all the things going on in freddie s head it is unlikely that the explicit maxim stated above is one of them more likely he simply wants to get some money so he can make a comfortable getaway and he thinks that this is a good way to achieve that and even these thoughts don t need to be explicit for his action to be intentional but if you or freddie wanted to see his behavior as an action i e not as a process of being entirely pushed around by his motivational states but rather as somehow rationally structured then the maxim above would be a good way of formulating it the maxim is implicit in the action and to hold freddie responsible for the action we need to take him as acting on some sort of rational principle but this is not the same as saying that this principle was consciously formulated and adopted by freddie and that this conscious action on his part was the mechanism involved in producing his behavior in fact it is clear that kant cannot mean at least in general that maxims are consciously chosen principles this is clear from the fact that kant believes that human beings choose what kant calls their disposition gesinnung which is the maxim from which all other maxims are derived we adopt this maxim through an act of freedom since this maxim grounds all our other maxims its adoption must precede all our uses of agency and so the grounding maxim must actually be chosen prior to any rational action we might undertake in our lives as kant notes we may represent it as innate but of course we cannot choose an innate disposition consciously and kant is explicit that this disposition is chosen first in the rational order not in the order of time it should be obvious by now that kant is giving us a metaphysical and not an empirical theory a theory then that can be attacked on metaphysical grounds or through a rejection of metaphysics preferably not one that simply encourages us to stick to science but that it makes no sense to attack empirically we can confirm that kant is giving us a metaphysical and not an empirical theory by his constant use of the locution as if als ob that is what he is discussing is not how we are empirically but how we must see ourselves we must see ourselves as if we have adopted these principles this on kant s view is how we must see ourselves if we are to see ourselves as persons and not just as complex mechanisms and yes this marks kant as clearly opposed to the naturalism so dominant in contemporary analytic philosophy and of which leiter is so fond but it is question begging to simply adopt a naturalist position and from there argue against kant one must first prove that a thoroughgoing naturalism is both superior and justifiable anything else is just bad philosophy i want to conclude by asking why if kant is so very obviously not giving us an empirical moral psychology do contemporary philosophers many kantians included so often interpret him precisely as suggesting a model on which we consciously choose principles and then act on them one reason is that the thesis that we can endorse our action and which in some form kant really does hold is easily confused with the thesis i am considering here i will look at this in the next post another lies in the philosophical culture rawls who made kant respectable in analytic moral philosophy after decades of groundless slander and neglect explicitly bracketed the issue of moral psychology he was only looking for a decision procedure for ethics but his students wanted a kantian moral philosophy that first would give us concrete principles for action and second could do so without making any to them exorbitant metaphysical claims onora o neill for example interpreted maxims as psychological states korsgaard meanwhile has advanced what many have praised as kantian ethics without metaphysics but these projects are much like riding a bicycle without the wheels kant s moral philosophy is metaphysical the validity of the moral law is intimately bound up with issues of transcendental freedom and noumenal causation without these features one has a radically weakened kantianism and one that is not simply vulnerable to empirical refutation but is almost self evidently false in my next post i want to address a few other features of kant s moral psychology and question l k s claim to have provided arguments against kant in particular i will say something about the role of determinism in kant as well as his almost wholesale acceptance of hume s view that only the passions can determine us to action two features that are too often overlooked and i will address the issue of endorsement which does involve an empirical claim one that might look very similar to the view that agents consciously adopt principles continue reading at 12 14 am 3 comments labels ethics kant thursday february 14 2008 is kant s moral psychology implausible i a reply to leiter and knobe posted by roman altshuler in a cursory examination of brian leiter s nietzsche blog i stumbled upon a small exchange that involved leiter insulting kant scholars perhaps justified since it was in response to the claim that allen wood insulted nietzscheans i was going to let this go but then leiter also suggested that nietzsche s moral psychology is more plausible than kant s and i couldn t quite let this go the result was that people started arguing with me and giving me reading suggestions and it felt wrong to keep responding to them on leiter s thread which was on a completely different obama related topic so instead i promised to blog about it here what i mainly want to do here is defend kant in response to the sources that were suggested to me leiter and knobe s l k article the case for nietzschean moral psychology and briefly paul katsafanas s nietzschean arguments against kantians let me start with a preliminary in keeping with the theme raised on that thread my question will be whether kant s moral psychology is any less plausible than nietzsche s the plausibility is to be assessed at least in part in light of current empirical knowledge of human decision making i don t want to claim that nietzsche s moral psychology is less plausible than kant s i am very fond of it in fact or at least the little i learned back in the day what i want to argue is that there are no good grounds provided in l k s paper for thinking that kant s moral psychology is any less plausible and the main reason for this is that i think empirical evidence largely leaves kant s important points untouched the parts that seem to support nietzsche on the other hand strike me as largely compatible with kant i will get to this point in the next post first i want to question the assumptions made by l k specifically the assumption that they are somehow criticizing kant s views this post then relates more to meta considerations about the debate and particularly to the role of moral philosophy than to kant s moral psychology itself now my response is in part but i hope only in part something leiter will no doubt consider a cop out and this is because my response again in part does tend to follow the lines of a long familiar argument that l k start out by dismissing certain kantians might say kant s theory is not intended as a psychological hypothesis it should be understood rather as a statement of the conditions of possibility of moral agency hence if we find that no one actually meets the conditions set out by the theory we should not conclude that the theory itself was mistaken instead we should conclude that no one ever truly is a moral agent let us call philosophers who adopt such a posture above the fray moral philosophers afmps such philosophers are indeed invulnerable to empirical results they tell us how moral agents ought to be and they are indifferent to how moral agents actually are or can be we reject such an approach in this essay we assume that ought implies can is a reasonable aspiration in moral psychology indeed that ought implies realistically can is an even better aspiration we assume with most moral philosophers including many kantians that there are agents who perform morally valuable acts and thus the question for moral psychology is not merely a question about the possibility conditions for such psychology but how this psychology actually works 2 3 so let me comment on this if l k use such a claim to preface what they take to be an attack on kant then they are being intellectually dishonest and this is partly because they are failing to distinguish kantians from kant their objections in the paper do i think pose challenges to many contemporary kantians they do not as i will show pose any challenge to kant one reason is that kant is to a large extent what l k call an afmp l k may well disagree with such a position but an attack on kant that assumes this disagreement cannot reasonably be taken to be an attack on kant i do not to repeat disagree that the paper poses serious challenges to many contemporary kantians but i think kant himself poses equally serious challenges to be sure attacking kant by inaccurate proxy is a time honored tradition in 20 th century anglophone moral philosophy but someone who works on a figure in the history of philosophy leiter ought to know the difference between attacking kantians and attacking kant what would leiter say to the people who attack nietzsche based on a reading of heidegger and deleuze second l k s characterization of afmps certainly makes such an approach sound like silly outdated armchair stargazing nonsense but it is a lot more appetizing if we stop to think about what kant was trying to do instead of setting up a straw man for the fire or whatever one does with straw men we can approach this i think by noticing that l k seem to simply conflate as they also do later in the paper moral theory with moral psychology the first roughly being that branch of philosophy that tells us what principles of action or character traits or goals are good i am trying to be neutral here with regard to moral theories kant s own formulation of the moral question is what ought i to do the second being the study of how human beings actually comport themselves with regard to morally relevant concepts or principles by conflating the two l k essentially assert that morality must be utterly subservient to moral psychology there is certainly reason for a nietzschean to take such a position but again it kind of prejudices the argument from the outset we can of course with hume affirm that one cannot derive an ought from an is that philosophy can only study what is and that we can therefore throw the ought out the window but doing that involves taking a stance within moral theory and an argument against kant has to occur at this stage not after the stance has already been taken true l k s ought implies can reference may be intended to forestall just such a criticism but their move there is so fast and unsupported that it cannot justify using empirical moral psychology to question kant s moral theory third there are good reasons for kant to be an afmp because what kant was trying to do was precisely to 1 figure out how we ought to act and 2 give the conditions of possibility for so acting and the problem with the ought implies can principle is that either you base your moral philosophy entirely on moral psychology people want x y therefore they should do p q alternatively people have the psychological traits a b therefore they should do or can be expected to do p q or you figure out your morality independently of empirical data only the second approach allows you to say what we ought to do rather than just what we should do or what it would be best for us to do given what we are like as natural beings and in fact you can only figure out what we ought to do by refusing to start out with how we are by nature and this position becomes more tenable still i think if you ask yourself why we should reject psychologism in mathematics and logic but maintain it with regard to moral philosophy imagine some philosophers claim that the square root of 2 has a determine value regardless of whether human beings can calculate it in their head i maintain that to have a determinate value is to have a value determined by actual human capacities fourth ought implies can is obviously a principle kant takes seriously it is in fact an a priori truth for him kant explicitly uses the principle to argue from the fact of the moral law to the human ability to follow it sinc...