Kantian autonomy and the moral self

Review of Metaphysics, The, Dec, 2008 by Eric Entrican Wilson

This act of identification is normative in the sense that it is at bottom evaluative. In identifying with the reasons supplied by my intelligence and will and disavowing those supplied by my inclinations I express my commitment to what I take to be the greater value of the former. I thereby show that I place greater stock in what my intelligence provides reason for than I do in my desires and inclinations. That Kant subscribes to such a normative demarcation strategy is evident in passages such as the following, which couches the issues in explicitly evaluative terms. Reflecting on what happens when an agent deliberates about action from the moral perspective, Kant writes:

   With a will free from impulses of sensibility he transfers himself
   in thought into an order of things altogether different from that
   of his desires in the field of sensibility ... ; [from this] he can
   expect only a greater inner worth of his person. This better person
   [Diese bessere Person], however, he believes himself to be when he
   transfers himself to the standpoint of a member of the world of
   understanding, as the idea of freedom, that is, of independence
   from determining causes of the world of sense, constrains him
   involuntarily to do; and from this
   standpoint he is conscious of a good will that, by his own
   acknowledgements, constitutes the law for his evil will as a member
   of the world of sense--a law whose authority he is cognizant even
   while he transgresses it. The moral ought is then his own necessary
   will as a member of an intelligible world, and is thought by him as
   ought only insofar as he regards himself at the same time as a
   member of the world of sense. (48)

This long dense remark raises many questions that cannot be answered here. For our purposes, what is most interesting is the way in which it makes what I am calling the normative strategy seem so central to so many fundamental issues in Kant's moral theory, particularly to the question of autonomy. The Verstandeswelt ("intelligible world") is "only a standpoint" and I, as a deliberating and judging agent, adopt that standpoint when I take myself for this "better person" that I find articulated in the idea of a will that is motivated by the demands of the moral law rather than by incentives that stem from desires and inclinations. In doing this, I identify myself with the demands of morality; I take them to be expressions of my own volition. More precisely, I take them to be expressions of the ideal to which I aspire and about which I care deeply. (49) That is why the imperative of morality (das moralische Sollen) is not foreign to my will, something imposed upon me from outside.

According to this view, the distinction between what is internal and what is external to the self is not metaphysical. It is normative in that it reflects a set of commitments concerning the respective values of the various sources of practical reasons. Reasons that stem from the pure will (or pure practical reason) are considered more valuable or important than those that stem from the incentives provided by desire and inclination. They express our better selves. Kant's term for this ideal self is "moral personality." (50) To be a person in a moral sense is to possess several characteristics and capacities: a person is a "lawgiving being." (51) In fact, as a "subject of pure practical reason," a person is "the supreme lawgiver." (52) A person, unlike a mere thing, is also an "end in itself." (53) And a moral person is a being that is accountable or responsible (zurechnungsfahig) for its actions. (54) According to Kant, when we think of an individual human being in terms of his moral personality, we think of his "invisible self," (55) his "freedom and independence from the mechanism of the whole of nature," (56) and his "freedom [as] a rational being under moral laws." (57)