| 3919 | Conclusions of reason do not affect our emotions or decisions to act [Hume] |
| Full Idea: Inference and conclusions of the understanding have no hold of the affections nor set in motion the active powers of man. | |
| From: David Hume (Enquiry concerning Principles of Morals [1751], I.136) | |
| A reaction: I disagree. This is a typical empiricist separation of ideas from experience, of inner from outer, of analytic from synthetic. |
| 5605 | Moral blame is based on reason, since a reason is a cause which should have been followed [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Moral blame is grounded in the law of reason, which regards reason as a cause that, regardless of all the empirical conditions, could have and ought to have determined the conduct of the person to be other than it is. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B583/A555) | |
| A reaction: This appears to be a description of akrasia, in which case it is hard to see how a reason is a cause if it doesn't actually produce the result it judges to be right. Kant is an intellectualist about morality, but not about practical reason, it seems. |
| 5632 | Moral laws are commands, which must involve promises and threats, which only God could provide [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Everyone regards moral laws as commands, which they could not be if they did not connect consequences with their rule a priori, and thus carry with them promises and threats, which must lie in a necessary being as the highest good. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B839/A811) | |
| A reaction: This reveals the thinking of Kant's moral argument for God rather more nakedly than elsewhere. |
| 4345 | For Kant, even a person who lacks all sympathy for others still has a motive for benevolence [Kant, by Hursthouse] |
| Full Idea: Kant, we may suppose, would say that if a man were 'cold in temperament and indifferent to the sufferings of others', he would still find in himself a source that would enable him to do what is benevolent. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [1785]) by Rosalind Hursthouse - On Virtue Ethics Ch.4 | |
| A reaction: This identifies a strong appeal of Kant's theory - that whether we are morally good should not be a matter of luck in our upbringing or natural temperament. How is the vicious person to be saved, if not by reason? |
| 4251 | If we are required to give moral thought the highest priority, this gives morality no content [Williams,B on Kant] |
| Full Idea: The Kantian view of what is important is that people should give moral considerations the highest deliberative priority, which Hegel attacked because it gives moral thought no content. | |
| From: comment on Immanuel Kant (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [1785]) by Bernard Williams - Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy Ch.10 | |
| A reaction: Interesting. This points towards empathy and compassion as motivators, rather than reason, because there is some content to the morality, which calls out to us. |
| 16004 | If Kant lives by self-administered laws, this is as feeble as self-administered punishments [Kierkegaard on Kant] |
| Full Idea: Kant thought that man is his own law - he binds himself under the law which he gives himself. This is how lawlessness or experimentation is established. This is no more rigorously earnest than Sancho Panza's self-administered blows to his own ass. | |
| From: comment on Immanuel Kant (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [1785]) by Søren Kierkegaard - The Journals of Kierkegaard JP-I, 188 | |
| A reaction: It really is tempting to go easy on yourself rather than on others. Kant had the right ideas, but human beings aren't as disciplined as the categorical imperative requires. [SY] |
| 3711 | Only a good will makes us worthy of happiness [Kant] |
| Full Idea: A good will seems to constitute the indispensable condition of our very worthiness to be happy. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [1785], 393.2) |
| 3713 | The function of reason is to produce a good will [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Since reason has been imparted to us as a practical power, which thus influences the will, its true function must be to produce a will which is good. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [1785], 396.7) |
| 3729 | Our inclinations are not innately desirable; in fact most rational beings would like to be rid of them [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Inclinations, as a source of needs, are so far from having an absolute value to make them desirable for their own sake that it must rather be the universal wish of every rational being to be wholly free from them. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [1785], 428.65) |
| 4344 | Actions where people spread happiness because they enjoy it have no genuine moral worth [Kant] |
| Full Idea: There are many spirits of so sympathetic a temper that they find an inner pleasure in spreading happiness around them. ..I maintain that an action of this kind, however right and amiable it may be, has still no genuinely moral worth. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [1785], p.66) | |
| A reaction: We understand what he means (that principle is everything), but this still seems a big hole in his account, one which drives us to Aristotle's sensible views about what a nice person is really like. |
| 6186 | A holy will is incapable of any maxims which conflict with the moral law [Kant] |
| Full Idea: A holy will is one which is incapable of any maxims which conflict with the moral law | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.1.1.§7) | |
| A reaction: If such a will is 'incapable' of conflicting with moral law, it will not need to think or assess before action. This means that Kant's moral ideal can ultimately exclude the free-thinking intellect. Kant is describing a state of true Aristotelian virtue. |
| 6195 | Reason cannot solve the problem of why a law should motivate the will [Kant] |
| Full Idea: How a law in itself can be the direct motive of the will (which is the essence of morality) is an insoluble problem for the human reason. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.1.III) | |
| A reaction: If that is the great man's final word, then it is tempting to switch to an empirical moral theory, such as that of Hobbes or Hume or E.O. Wilson, which starts from what motivations are available, and builds morality up from that. |
| 21062 | The will's motive is the absolute law itself, and moral feeling is receptivity to law [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The will must have motives. But these are not objects of physical feeling as predetermined ends in themselves. They are none other than the absolute law itself, and the will's receptivity to it as an absolute compulsion is known as moral feeling. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (True in Theory, but not in Practice [1792], 1Bb) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like our natural motivation to get the right answer when doing arithmetic, which is the innate motivation towards truth. I once heard it said that truth is the only value. So why does Donald Trump fail to value truth? |
| 22448 | We sometimes just use the word 'should' to impose a rule of conduct on someone [Foot] |
| Full Idea: It would be more honest to recognise that the 'should' of moral judgement is sometimes merely an instrument by which we (for our own very good reasons) try to impose a rule of conduct even on the uncaring man? | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Morality and Art [1972], p.18) | |
| A reaction: This is a good example, I think, of the ordinary language tradition that Foot grew up in. We load a word like 'should' with a mystical power, but the situations in which it is actually used bring us back down to earth. |
| 24012 | Kant's love of consistency is too rigid, and it even overrides normal fairness [Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: There is a certain moral woodenness or even insolence in Kant's blank regard for consistency. It smacks of Keynes's Principle of Unfairness - that if you can't do a good turn to everybody, you shouldn't do it to anybody. | |
| From: Bernard Williams (Morality and the emotions [1965], p.226) | |
| A reaction: He says it also turns each of us into a Supreme Legislator, which deifies man. It is clearly not the case that morality consists entirely of rules and principles, but Williams recognises their role, in truth-telling for example. |
| 2180 | If reason cannot lead people to good, we must hope they have an internal voice [Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: If we think the power of reason is not enough by itself to distinguish good and bad, then we would hope that people have limited autonomy, that there is an internalised other in them that carries some social weight. | |
| From: Bernard Williams (Shame and Necessity [1993], IV - p.100) |
| 2179 | If the moral self is seen as characterless, then other people have a very limited role in our moral lives [Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: The conception of the moral self as characterless leaves only a limited positive role to other people in one's moral life. | |
| From: Bernard Williams (Shame and Necessity [1993], IV - p.95) |
| 3255 | We find new motives by discovering reasons for action different from our preexisting motives [Nagel] |
| Full Idea: There are reasons for action, and we must discover them instead of deriving them from our preexisting motives - and in that way we can acquire new motives superior to the old. | |
| From: Thomas Nagel (The View from Nowhere [1986], VIII.1) |
| 3552 | If excessively good actions are admirable but not required, then duty isn't basic [Annas] |
| Full Idea: Supererogatory actions are admirable and valuable, and we praise people for doing them, but they do not generate obligations to perform them, which casts doubt on obligation as the basic notion in ethics. | |
| From: Julia Annas (The Morality of Happiness [1993], 2.6) |