Emma Cohen Edmonds
In our current age where “what is right” is commonly answered by “what feels right” we are
left with the question:
Why should we do anything if we do not feel like doing it?
Since his treatise in 1785, Immanuel Kant has become world renowned as a rottweiler for
duty and a dismissive disciplinarian of emotions. But here, my aim is to encourage some
reconsideration of Immanuel Kant’s vision of duty as integral in gauging moral worth.
Kant hinges moral worth on an agent’s will for duty. From this, a concern naturally arises that
all moral decisions become mechanised and have no emotional incentive. However, when
duty works toward respecting humankind universally, an attentive, emotive quality remains.
Where duty is concerned, there is room for willing what is ethically best, sentimentally and
otherwise, for agents on a universal level.
For Kant, moral worth is based purely on the will (duty) for the Law, not the will for a hoped
effect (Groundwork, 14). Kant’s “law” means a principle that cannot be broken that can be
accessible through reasoning. Therefore, the law is not a set of principles that exist
independently of each action. Instead, it is the thought behind the maxim of each action, the
primary principle, that acts as a law (Korsgaard, 179). For example, the principle of language
is to be able to communicate truth. Therefore, when communicating, it is moral to abide by a
law, in willing to communicate the truth. So in place of sentiment and emotion, it is reason
that qualifies the will of a moral agent.
Kantian moral worth persists in striving to do the right thing because it is right. For Kant, a
good will is good only because of its true intention to withhold the law of ethics
(Groundwork, 9). Thus, he expects an agent to withhold an overriding motive for doing one’s
duty for duty’s sake. Kant provides an example of an agent who is drained of all emotional
drive to be ethical. If this agent, regardless of lacking inclination, “were yet to tear himself
out of this deadly insensibility” and still commits to acting solely from duty, only then does
the action have moral worth (14). Therefore, Kant holds no value in sentiment.
A major objection to duty determining moral worth is that it ignores the morally significant
factor of emotion. One such criticism is manifested in the work of Michael Stocker, a 20th
century Political Philosopher. Stocker illustrates the struggle between duty and emotion in an
example of a hospital visit. In this scenario, a person comes to visit a friend in hospital purely
because it is a duty to do so, there is no drive in the agent to visit this friend out of love for
their character. This is effective in communicating a clear issue in attitudes towards each
other as moral agents. Stocker remarks this as too insensitive for a moral principle because
the visit is not purely for the sake of seeing that friend. He concludes, “surely there is
something lacking here… in moral merit…” (462). Thus, we run into a problem of Kant’s
framework failing to properly value personhood and the emotive quality of ethics. This is a
powerful objection due to its attack on the risk of “mechanising” morality.
This specific risk is made evident in Kant’s conception of an agent that takes pleasure in
spreading joy. For Kant, this agent’s actions have “no true moral worth” (Groundwork, 14).
Applying this notion to Stocker’s example, Kant’s argument is threatened. Kant would argue
that any personal intention to visit the friend would have no moral value except exclusively
the will to do what you should do. Stocker is intuitively right to assert that we should will the
good of the other for their sake and not for the pure sake of duty as if we are duty machines.
However, if doing the right thing inherently ends in goodness and is thus fruitful to persons
alike, this eliminates the issue of personhood being devalued. When Kant exemplifies
someone who thrills in spreading joy, he refers to someone who only spreads joy because it
pleases him to do so. This notion does not then reject those who receive goodness from their
moral decisions. Many misunderstand Kant’s meaning, concluding that he does not think
agents should appreciate good consequences in their moral actions. In Harvard, professors
like Christine Korsgaard have worked to make clear this misconstruction, explaining that for
Kant what gives an action moral worth “is not the agent’s purpose, but rather the “maxim” or
“principle of volition” on which it is done” (178). Here, “maxim” does not refer to any simple
reason one may have for acting, it is specifically referring to the prime, underlying reason of
why one acts. Therefore, Kant’s example refers exclusively to someone who is acting morally
for selfish reasons. He fails in wanting to help others which is what should be the prime,
underlying principle (179).
Kant’s true intention is to promote an orderly way of living so that we may universally
collaborate as individual agents. To be able to understand why Good Will is so important for
Kant, we must recognise the goodness that he speaks of is something sought by everyone
universally and intrinsically. This means that there exists a common goal for all agents to
participate in, namely to function in accordance with order. This order is arrived at through
reasoning. Korsgaard summarises this effectively in saying to think as a Kantian, dutiful agent is to “will to be part of an order of things in which everyone acted in the way specified
in [one’s duty].” Therefore, the dutiful agent for Kant “sees the value of the action as
intrinsic” (180). Conclusively, Kant does not intend to create “duty machines.” He intends to
encourage agents to seek goodness for humankind. This is the foundational crux of how
Kant’s moral worth functions.
In Metaphysics, Kant clarifies the highest end of pure reason and duty consisting in “that
virtue be its own end and, despite the benefits… also its own reward” (6:396). It is in this
precept that Kant’s placement of moral worth becomes most justified. This is because he
underscores a universal goal that is to be achieved and will bear a sense of fulfilment for
humankind at large. Some scholars have suggested that this foundation is better developed by
Kant in his Metaphysics of Morals which he wrote eight years after his Groundwork of
Metaphysics. Jing Liu of Nankai University writes comparatively that “in Groundwork, Kant
did not discuss very much how to realize humanity as an end in itself, while in The
Metaphysics of Morals, he explicitly points out that human beings should pursue it positively
and make humanity as end in itself come true.” In mentioning the realisation of humanity “as
an end”, Jing drives home the notion that Kant’s intention was to prioritise a far larger good
than Stocker outlined. Instead, Kant justifies his position by highlighting duty as
“[harmonising] with humanity as an end in itself” (468).
Philosophers are right to underscore emotive quality in morals, however this intuition is not
strictly at odds with duty. The importance that Kant places on duty in moral worth is justified
when it is understood in conjunction with his conception of a universal order that is
intrinsically good to participate in. Kant provides a vision of duty that includes the sentiments toward personhood on a larger scale. His true intention is to fulfil the end of humanity
through a common sense of duty.
Emma Cohen-Edmonds is a 4th year Philosophy and Theology undergraduate student at the University of Edinburgh. She is the president of the Edinburgh Thomistic Institute chapter. Her philosophical interests consist in Aristotelian hylomorphic, embodied conceptions of the mind and soul. Her literary interests primarily centre around biblical or theological comparative literature, with particular interest in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. She has been twice published in “Qualia Magazine” for articles on Embodied Cognition and Platonic Conceptions of the Soul. She has also been published in the “Edinburgh Student Literary Journal” for an article on Pauline “Sin” in English Literature.
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