Description
- Abstract:
- Abstract of “Kant on the Intertwining of Individual Moral Development and Ethical Community” by Emily Hodges, Ph.D., Brown University, February 2022 I seek to resolve a tension within Immanuel Kant’s works. On the one hand, Kant’s central moral tenets require that any individual at any point has the ability to act from the moral law. On the other hand, Kant’s historical works might seem to view moral development at the level of the species, painting a deterministic picture of human history that precludes individuals from the ability to act morally until late historical eras and only within certain kinds of socio-political structures. I first suggest a novel interpretation of Kant’s moral psychology, including the idea of “human nature”. I argue that one’s human nature is a system of capacities and inclinations that orients one towards acting in the world in a certain way. It is an individual’s own responsibility to choose the fundamental principle of action that organizes this system and to develop the system as a morally-centered system. I go on to interpret moral development as an individual process of cultivating a virtuous disposition. This centrally involves cultivating attention to the moral law as the fundamental principle of action, the feeling of respect as the motivation to act from the moral law, and virtue as the resolve to act from the moral law. This enables morally-grounded systematic cultivation of one’s capacities and inclinations, which deepens one’s moral orientation in the world. From here, I show that immoral human nature is a kind of dysfunction of this system. This interpretation dissolves part of the aforementioned tension by showing that moral development does not take place at the socio-historical level of the species, but at the level of each individual. Finally, I offer a novel reconstruction of Kantian “ethical community,” with “ideal” ethical community as an intersubjective orientation and “actual” ethical communities as communities dedicated to support for individual moral development. I argue that ethical community is the bridge between socio-historical structures and individual moral development, such that socio-historical structures are reworked through individual actions supported by ethical communities.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2021
Citation
Hodges, Emily,
"Kant on the Intertwining of Individual Moral Development and Ethical Community"
(2021).
Philosophy Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:pvffdxfx/
