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Show Chapter V. How Reason Causes Action 218 laws - that is, in accordance with principles …." (G, Ak. 412). The rational content of the principle she occurrently thinks or believes activates her rulegoverned disposition to enact this principle in her action. She thereby reinforces her own highest-order disposition to literal self-preservation, and so the rational coherence of her self. 5. An Instantiation: Kant's Descriptive Moral Theory Next I apply this analysis of ideally rational motivation in general to the case of ideally moral motivation in particular, using Kant's normative moral theory as an example. My remarks are intended to have application to any normative moral theory, not only Kant's. But since Humean moral theories are all Instrumentalist in structure, and since all Instrumentalist principles are conditionals that embed categorical principles in their consequents, it will be convenient to dissect a theory that consists exclusively in such categorical principles. Kant's is the most sophisticated theory of this type we have available.14 5.1. Descriptive In this section I extend Kant's own characterization of what it means to be motivated by reason alone to perform specifically moral action, through an analogy with the de facto motivational efficacy of certain non-moral principles of reasoning. In Section 5.2, following, I show that Kant's descriptive moral theory is genuinely explanatory, and so qualifies as theoretically rational in the sense already explained. Kant himself goes further: he believes that normative moral directives can be logically derived from principles of theoretical reasoning, so he often equates "rational" and "moral." As indicated in the preceding chapter, I do not share this belief. The success with which the obligation of promisekeeping was derived from McClennen's concept of resolute choice depended on relinquishing rationalist aspirations, whereas Kant's derivations depend on them. I believe that some substantive moral principles may instantiate universal rational ones without being logically implied by them, because no universal principle logically implies all of its instances. However, I sometimes use Kant's equation of "rational" and "moral" in the present section, in explicating Kant's own view. Kant's moral theory is often regarded as inherently prescriptive. Elsewhere I defend the view that this can be explained by a misinterpretation of Kant's concept of Achtung. Here I merely reconsider at greater length the passage quoted above from the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals in which Kant gives the notion of a perfectly rational being a moral inflection, in order to explicate the status he takes a moral theory to have. He says, 14 Besides, I like it. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
