Kant’s Lectures on Ethics: A Critical Guide is a recent volume in the Cambridge Critical Guide series. It is the sixth of twenty-two Cambridge Critical Guides on Kant, and the second on Kant’s lectures. The volume is a welcome contribution to current scholarship on Kant’s moral philosophy. What’s more, it is the first substantive discussion of Kant’s lectures on ethics. One of the main virtues of such a study is that it provides us with deeper insight into the development of Kant’s moral theory. This is especially evident in the Herder lecture notes (1762-64), the only set of notes from the pre-Critical period.
The volume contains fifteen essays on Kant’s Lectures on Ethics, the 1997 volume in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, edited by Peter Heath and J.B. Schneewind. The Heath/Schneewind volume is comprised of four sets of lecture notes, named after the student who took the notes: Herder (1762-64), Collins (mid-1770s), Mrongovius (1784-85), and Vigilantius (1793-94).
The collection is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the sources of the lectures; there is one essay devoted to each of the four sets of notes, as well as a paper by Stefano Bacin that explores the relationship between Kant’s lectures and Alexander Baumgarten. For almost thirty years—from the early 1760s to 1790—Kant taught ethics, using two volumes by Baumgarten as his textbooks, Initia philosophiae practice primae (Introduction to Practical Philosophy) and Ethica philosophica (Philosophical Ethics). The second part of this volume deals with issues in Kant’s lectures pertaining to the Initia, the third with themes from the Ethica.
The volume covers a range of topics in Kant’s moral philosophy, including religion and moral motivation, obligation and the freedom of the will, the Categorical Imperative, virtue, love, and the highest good.
Patrick R. Frierson discusses Kant’s efforts in the Herder notes to “determine the concept of obligation” in light of accounts of moral motivation found in the moral theories of his predecessors—e.g., the perfectionism of Baumgarten and the moral sentimentalism of Frances Hutcheson and Anthony Ashley Copper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (36). Frierson’s discussion focuses on “religious motives for moral action” (37). Frierson shows how—unlike Kant’s ethics from the Groundwork onward, which required that one’s moral motives be pure—Kant’s early ethics allowed a role for religious motives. These could function directly, “cooperating” with purely moral motives (i.e., proper fear of God, which is awe combined with love), or indirectly, as a “preparatory” for moral action—weakening the hold of sensible incentives and alleviating the “moral despair” that arises from our awareness of the high demands of morality in light of our weak nature (48).
Bacin’s essay considers the significant influence of Baumgarten on Kant with respect to central themes in his ethics—notably, the priority of obligation. Bacin demonstrates that, long before Kant had a fully worked out account of obligation, he recognized it as “the fundamental concept” of moral philosophy (24). Moreover, Bacin shows that, despite the importance of Baumgarten for Kant, there is no “deep continuity” between the two thinkers (32). In particular, Kant objects to Baumgarten’s account of obligation because it mistakenly grounds obligation in God rather than something internal. Oliver Sensen follows Bacin in arguing that obligation is “at the heart” of Kant’s ethics (139). His contribution considers obligation in connection to its condition: freedom of the will.
Manfred Kuehn, who also examines Kant’s lectures in relation to Baumgarten, presents Kant’s ‘proto-critical position’ in the Collins notes, which reveal the difficulty Kant had in moving away from the view that God is required for morality. Kuehn thus picks up on themes in Frierson regarding the role of religion in moral motivation.
Stephen Engstrom provides an excellent discussion of the relationship between Kant’s conception of happiness and the highest good and ancient eudaimonistic accounts, showing that, contrary to popular opinion, Kant’s ethics are not “radically opposed” to ancient ethics (116). Allen Wood also discusses Kant’s understanding of ancient ethics as part of a broader essay on Kant qua historian of ethics.
Lara Denis and Anne Margaret Baxley, respectively, consider the self-regarding elements of ethics. Denis discusses proper self-esteem [Selbstschätzung] and its importance for duties to oneself, which Kant took to have primacy over duties to others in that they are necessary in order to fulfill the latter. Proper self-esteem is presented in the Vigilantius notes as involving the assessment of ourselves in light of what the moral law requires. Baxley offers a study of Kant’s theory of virtue as consisting in strength of will that is achieved through self-mastery, which Kant calls ‘autocracy.’ As such, virtue involves a struggle and, so, is distinct from holiness. The import of this for Kant’s ethics, Baxley notes, is that morality will always be difficult for us.
In closing, it should be noted that Kant’s lecture notes—be they of ethics or another discipline—present interpreters of Kant with a challenge, namely, how seriously should we take notes written by Kant’s students—at times, long after the lectures themselves, and by no means Kant’s own notes? In his Introduction to the 1997 volume, Schneewind says of the Herder notes, “[they] are not altogether reliable. He worked them over at home, and he may have put words into Kant’s mouth” (xiv). The editors note in the Introduction to this volume: “Scholars still debate whether Kant spoke extemporaneously or read from a prepared booklet” (2). Yet, despite this qualification, little mention is made in the remainder of the volume of how much we should take these lecture notes to be indicative of Kant’s views. At times, one gets the sense that they are merely taken for granted as reliable sources of Kant’s thoughts. That said, readers will no doubt benefit from the serious and in-depth treatments of a range of issues in this collection of essays.
