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Show Chapter V. How Reason Causes Action 206 motivate only by being reflectively incorporated into the maxims of action.6 Baron thus shares with other New Kantians the interpretation of Kant according to which rational moral actions are the result of conscious acts of reasoning and deliberation that resolve into explicit mental acts of affirmation of, incorporation of, or taking up of desires into universalizable maxims of action.7 Of course merely being affirmed by, taken up, or incorporated into an agent's universalizable maxim could not be sufficient for distinguishing the moral motive from non-moral ones that equally satisfied O'Neill's contradiction in conception test. 8 Consider the maxim, (1) From self-interest I make it a permanent rule always to keep my promises, in order to avoid even the possibility of social sanction. - this would be what Baron calls a secondary motive; or the maxim, (2) Out of craving I verbally deny my addiction to gumdrops, so as to maximize my access to them. - this would exemplify a primary motive on Baron's view. (1) licenses keeping promises for reasons of self-interest. (2) licenses lying for reasons of desiresatisfaction. On the face of it, both (1) and (2) formulate intentions that are universalizable without contradiction. Clearly, neither maxim furnishes a moral motive. What makes a motive a moral one is not merely its incorporation into a universalizable maxim. It must be the right kind of motive, which neither self-interest nor desire can be for Kant. Not even respect for the universalizability of (1) or (2) can be the right kind of motive on Kant's view. I offer an account of the right kind of motive in Section 5.1 below. I do not agree with Allison's or Baron's account of maxims,9 and, as indicated in the introduction to Chapter II above, I do not read Kant as requiring any such explicit and complex, conscious deliberative process as a prerequisite for morally worthy actions. Such a process makes moral agency Henry Allison, Kant's Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 7 I do not mean to identify Henry Allison as a New Kantian and am fairly sure he would not identify himself as one. 8 Onora Nell [née O'Neill], Acting on Principle: An Essay in Kantian Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), esp. Chapter Five. 9 I offer an analysis of maxims in "Kant on the Objectivity of the Moral Law," in Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman and Christine M. Korsgaard, Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 240-269. 6 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
