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Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary
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Reasoning to Obligation
Barbara Herman

University of California , Los Angeles, USA

Published online: 20 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Barbara Herman (2006) Reasoning to Obligation,

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 49:1, 44-61, DOI:
10.1080/00201740500497415
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Inquiry,
Vol. 49, No. 1, 4461, February 2006

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Reasoning to Obligation
BARBARA HERMAN
University of California, Los Angeles, USA

(Received 31 October 2005)

ABSTRACT If, as Kant says, the will is practical reason, we should think of willing
as a mode of reasoning, and its activity represented in movement from evaluative
premises to intention by way of a validity-securing principle of inference. Such a view of
willing takes motive and rational choice out of empirical psychology, thereby
eliminating grounds for many familiar objections to Kants account of morally good
action. The categorical imperative provides the fundamental principle of valid practical
inference; however, for good willing, we also require correct premises. These come from
specifications of the two obligatory ends our own perfection and the happiness of
others. Interpreting good willing as good reasoning not only fits well with Kants
metaphysics of free action, it also offers a sound method for reasoning to and about
individual as well as role-dependent moral obligations.

In this paper, I propose to set out an attractive simplification of some basic

elements of Kants moral philosophy. My focus will be on the familiar idea
of the will as practical reason, but I will emphasize its active mode, as a
faculty of practical reasoning. It is a small shift, but one that resounds. The
plan is to walk through the simplified account, to point out some obvious
advantages it offers for defusing familiar objections, and to indicate some of
what would have to be the case for the account to work. I will not often
touch down on stretches of text; most of what I will be talking about is very
well known. What I say will often be close to what others have said about
Kants theory, just put in an unusually literal way; the upshot is significantly
different because the simplification resists psychologizing Kants account of
moral action and motivation. That allows us to lay some worn worries to
rest, and redirect our attention to more interesting questions.
In the spirit of Kant to Hegel, I will at the end briefly discuss a problem
that joins with one of Hegels criticisms of Kants ethics, and which is of
Correspondence Address: Barbara Herman, Department of Philosophy, UCLA, Los Angeles
CA 90095-1451, USA. Email: herman@humnet.ucla.edu
0020-174X Print/15023923 Online/06/01004418 # 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/00201740500497415

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Reasoning to Obligation

45

concern in its own right. The problem arises from a fact that Hegels own
ethics starts from, and that he believes Kant did not fully appreciate: that
most of our obligations are set by social roles of various sorts doctor,
parent, soldier, clerk. Ordinary moral life would not make sense otherwise.
The problem is that the institutions that set the social terms of our actions
may not be morally benign, even if they fill a morally necessary social
function (that is, they fill it badly). So the question naturally arises about the
limits of these socially-determined obligations. It may not be clear that we
can think about any of this from within Kants ethics. Kant doesnt
talk much about such issues; the discussion in the essay What is
Enlightenment? should make us hesitant to judge Kant unaware of them,
but its uneasy solution, balancing freedom of thought and obedience, is
not broadly illuminating. My conjecture is that features of the simplified
view amplify the resources Kantian theory has to make room for the
embeddedness of ordinary moral life in social roles and practices, while at
the same time preserving the kind of autonomous authority and individual
responsibility that is, if anything is, a touchstone of Kants moral theory.
I.

The Basic Picture

Suppose the identification of the will with practical reason amounts to (at
least in part) the claim that in the realm of action and choice (including the
setting of ends) we are to come to action by reasoning appropriately. When
our action follows from correct reasoning we act well. A good wills good
willing is then in its correct reasoning about action; this is what it means to
say that its goodness is in its principle. The terminus of practical reasoning
or willing is an intention to act or refrain from acting; the intention is
normally completed in action (unless it is impeded, or there is conflict or
weakness of will).
If good willing is a mode of good reasoning, then to understand good
willing we need to attend to what makes for good reasoning a matter of
getting it right about premises and about appropriate principles of inference:
warranted transitions from thought to thought, thought to belief, thought to
intention or choice (or between the propositions or sentences that represent
them). Anything that counts as reasoning will involve that. In the moral
case, it need not be easy to grasp what the appropriate premises and
principles are, only that it is premises and principles of inference that we
seek. Later on I will make a case that the two obligatory ends identified in
the Metaphysics of Morals determine correct premises. It is not much of a
reach to see the principles of the practical imperatives (however many there
are) as the candidate principles of inference. I think it is obvious that Kant
views the principle that underlies the categorical imperative (the principle of
the formula of universal law) as the ultimate standard or most basic

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principle of practical inference: the principle that sets final terms of validity
for the movement of thought from practical premises to intention to act.
Heres what reasoning to obligation looks like.1 Someone has given me
something of value to hold for her (a deposit), but she dies before its date of
return. No one else knows I have it. Correct practical reasoning takes me
from some complex evaluative premise about possession to some conclusion
about what is to be done by way of a principle or rule of inference that in its
most abstract form says: act only on that maxim that can at the same time
be willed a universal law. When, by contrast, my proposed principle is to
increase my property by every safe means when that is my maxim then
my reasoning by way of my maxim from the premise of possession to
keeping the deposit involves a contradiction in just the sense that it would if
I reasoned in some way to not q, when I knew that both p, and if p then q,
were the case.
A couple of cautionary points. I am assuming that for Kant there is no
barrier to talking about principles of inference in this broader way: that is,
that we are not restricted to the patterns of reasoning warranted by logical
connectives, modes ponens and the like, to what can count as a legitimate
principle of inference. Part of Kants purpose in insisting on the possibility
of synthetic a priori judgment is to extend the domain of necessary
connection between cognitions. So, for example, the category of causality
warrants our regarding some temporal sequences as involving cause and
effect; we can of course be wrong about which sequences are properly
represented as warranting the causal inference this so then that, but we
could not even be wrong unless we were warranted in forming causal
hypotheses. Downstream, we will encounter specific laws laws of gasses,
the laws of thermodynamics, etc. which are, ideally, empirically articulated
instances of the general a priori principle. It all gets very complicated as we
move into science, but the basic point the point that Hume denies and
Kant asserts is that causal reasoning, reasoning that maps the idea of
necessary connection between events, is possible. Moral reasoning involves a
parallel story.
Second, for purposes of laying things out, I will just accept Kants basic
claim about the generation of action: that a human rational agent has the
dual capacity to be moved by either inclinations or rational considerations.
That is, we have the ability to take our inclinations as giving us reasons to
act, and then, with a bit of means-end deliberation, form an appropriate
intention. Or, we can start the chain of reasoning elsewhere in rational
premises and decide on the appropriateness of an intended action by
attending, as Kant would say, to our maxims form, not merely its matter.
(We can also start in inclination and constrain our action by a rational
standard. This is the space where permissible action resides.)
With just this much, for now ignoring what the correct moral premises are
(but assuming there are some), and not worrying about the specific form of

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47

moral inference, we can say some significant things about reasoning to

obligation. If a good will is a will that acts on or out of correct reasoning
about action, then someones finding an action difficult or easy is irrelevant
to the question whether there has been good willing. Similarly, a morally
worthy action is commendable independently of effort or cost, whether it is
welcomed or disliked, simply as it is a dutiful action intended as such as the
result of correct reasoning to it. We may have reasons to admire persons
who are able to be rational in the face of apathy or adversity, but that is a
very different kind of commendation than the judgment of correctness in
reasoning to action (we might equally commend someone who can think
clearly about physics in the midst of distracting noise or lack of sleep). We
can then restate the second proposition about moral worth2 as, simply: an
action has moral worth if and only if the intention to do what is morally
required is the result of good i.e. correct reasoning. That is what it is to
act from duty. An action that merely accords with duty, while the right
thing to do, is arrived at some other way, from a principle about ones own
interest, or for the sake of some further end, etc. One gets the right result,
but not for the right reasons.
One might wonder whether or in what way it matters that the reasoning is
easy or difficult. Kant thought the reasoning required of a moral agent was
accessible to the ordinary person (perhaps through the use of deliberative
heuristics, a subject we will return to). Many if not most impediments to
correct deliberation occur prior to reasoning to action in settling which
moral considerations bear and in what way (the killing is not murder but
pre-emptive self-defense; the promise is a lie but the circumstances are
exceptional). But there surely will be difficult cases, where it is hard to figure
out what to do. A first thing to say is that while norms of correct reasoning
frame problem-solving, they are not a problem-solving device. Their good
use depends on practical knowledge. Just as when I want the roof to stop
leaking, while its a simple step to the conclusion that it has to be repaired,
whether it needs a patch or to be replaced is not a question this reasoning
can answer, though the right answer will have the rational form of leakstopping roof-repair. If I dont already know a lot about roofs, I call for
expert advice. There has to be a place for technical or casuistical expertise in
morals as well as roof-repair. It can make sense to seek advice to clarify the
issues we may be facing, and, sometimes, directly about what to do. But
none of this bears on whether we reason well, given what we know or accept:
that is entirely up to us. I think we cannot be taken to be engaged in moral
reasoning at all if we cannot grasp what we do in terms that are connected to
moral norms of reasoning; so the reasoning cannot be too demanding.
Insofar as one reasons to action in accordance with a moral norm or
principle, there is no extra step of commitment or volition required to get
from maxim to action, nor any further conception of the action as morally
required that is not already present in the reasoning. Correctly reasoning to

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B. Herman

a promise-keeping intention, I will keep my promise, other things equal, and

I will conceive of what I do as required by the promise. There is also nothing
moralistic or oddly impersonal involved in coming to act in this way.
Recognizing As situation of need as one that makes a moral claim on me, I
act for As sake, not for the sake of duty, though I arrive at the intention to
help A by reasoning from a recognition of As moral claim. My intention
carries its value source, which inflects what I aim to bring about. This will
show in the urgency with which I act, the costs I am prepared to bear, and
the way I negotiate other moral demands I may have.
We are now in position to dispose of the vexing pair of issues about the
moral worth of dutiful actions: can actions have moral worth when they are
the product of good but nonmoral motives, and must they lack moral
worth if overdetermined by concurrent moral and nonmoral motives? On the
good or correct reasoning account, neither issue can properly arise. Consider,
first, the claim that motivation by one of the positive emotions, such as
sympathy, can compete with acting from duty for assignment of moral worth
to an agents action. If moral worth signals correct reasoning to a morally
required action, on no account of an emotion as a motive is it a course of
reasoning or even an element of one. Emotions can be important for correct
reasoning, but as sources of information for the premises, or as something
that can facilitate reasoning. The claim on behalf of the emotions is not
stronger if an action arises from a maxim grounded in an emotion (I make it
my principle to act as sympathy prompts...). If, as Kant clearly holds, both
premises and principle of the maxim must be a priori justified if the reasoning
is to be moral and the willing good, then any emotion-based maxim is
disqualified because it is a maxim with empirical grounds or premises.
The problem about emotions as motives and moral worth will seem acute
if one thinks there is another modular motive the motive of duty that
plays an analogous causal role: moving us to act towards an object that the
motive picks out. If the motive of duty were some kind of attachment to
doing the right thing or doing the right thing because it is the right
thing, then doing that right thing out of some emotion-based care or
concern could seem equally good or admirable or, as many have thought,
better. But acting from duty is not acting from any such motive of
attachment to duty; it is acting or intending from correct reasoning. There
may be, as Kant allows, all sorts of reasons to value acting from certain
emotions; but assigning moral worth to actions from feeling is to make a
category mistake.
It is then easy to understand the further claim that a maxim of duty
a maxim that expresses a course of moral reasoning about action has a
different content than a maxim that arises from emotion, or a course of (e.g.
instrumental) reasoning prompted by emotion. This is the point Kant makes
about sympathy and the inclination to honor: no maxim of acting from
either has moral content because the reasoning to action they support is not

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moral reasoning neither premises nor principle of inference are moral.3

(One might act from sympathy or honor on condition that ones actions
were permissible. That the condition on action is a moral one does not make
the intention a moral intention.) When we think of the philanthropic man
whose mind is overclouded by grief, who is able nonetheless to be beneficent
from duty, or the person of cold temperament who acts from duty, we are to
think of someone reasoning well, of getting something right for the right
reasons, in less than optimal conditions. This is not an especially moral
virtue, though moral virtue depends on it. In any of the domains where
getting something right for the right reasons matters, we are often impressed
when someone reasons well in a direction not supported by, or opposed by,
her interests or feelings.
Now, about overdetermination of action by concurrent motives. Is it
inappropriate or less good, less morally worthy, to act from duty and
sympathy? Again, this is a problem that should not have seemed difficult to
resolve. If we are focused on the overdetermination of an action qua event,
we will tend to see the action as coming about in more than one way, as the
possible effect of more than one cause; it then seems natural to ask, Which
motive, which cause, is the cause? In response to the question put this way,
I once argued that the cause is the motive in whose terms the agent conceives
of what she does, or the one that she is committed to acting on.4 So long as it
is morality that guides his will, the agents action has moral worth.
However, if the concurrent motives in question are competing modes of
concern, or even just competing causes, it can seem difficult to assign just
one of them authority in ones action. There then seems to be required
something like a higher-order motive to make the motive of duty the motive
that matters. But then why assign moral worth to the primary motive of
duty in circumstances of overdetermination when it is the second-order
motive that is, so to speak, getting it right for the agent if it is the motive in
control? Apart from this not being Kants view, it is also not a very good
strategy of argument, given familiar problems about the iteration of
overdetermination at the higher level. One could, and I did, insist that
without appeal to second-order anything, it is intelligible that we have
multiple motives active in us and yet not act on some of them in the
instance. Though an action may be in our interest, even one we would take
for our interest were the circumstances different, as things are, we sometimes
want to insist that we are moved to action by a different motive. Some might
speak of commitment, integrity, endorsement. Or we might talk about how
we would be guided in certain counterfactual situations. Neither is a
comfortable answer.
But if moral worth marks good willing as good reasoning, and the upshot
of good reasoning is an intention (not the action separate from the intention
or maxim), then in circumstances where there is a motive of a different sort
sufficient to bring about the required action, that motive yields a different

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B. Herman

intention (intentions getting their content from the motivational source or

reasoning that leads to them). And if it is a different intention, there is no
overdetermination problem. That one action can realize multiple intentions
does not make it murky whether I act with the moral intention derived from
good reasoning. The authority of the moral intention comes with the
reasoning that supports it: that is, it is part of the content of the reasoning to
intention in the moral case that if an action is by this reasoning required,
then one sees it as required, and acts independent of this or that contending
or cooperating motive. That in some sense one could have acted contrary to
the dictates of good reasoning does not impugn its authority or its effect on
ones intention when one reasons well.
This point is not peculiar to the moral case. Evidence for or against some
empirical proposition p is not in competition with the utility of believing
that p. Perhaps my sympathy for you, or my desire for your friendship,
makes me want to believe that though you caused harm, you meant well; it
was just an accident. When I investigate, I find that the evidence clearly
points away from a deliberate doing. I am pleased by that outcome. But if I
have fairly evaluated the evidence if I have reasoned well then the fact
that I come to believe in the right way what I want to believe anyway does
not impugn my warrant for the belief. Counterfactual possibilities about
what would have happened had desire and reasoning come apart may say
something about me, about my epistemic virtue, perhaps, but nothing about
how I reasoned when, as it happened, I reasoned well.
Likewise, my willingness to cheat in some competitive activity does not
imply that when I do not maybe Im just better than everyone else that I
didnt fairly gain my victory. Norms of practices and games prohibit
behaviors, not long-range conditional intentions. In general, openness to
civil- or norm-disobedience does not undermine the quality of ones lawful
actions.5 What distinguishes morality on the good reasoning model from
other norm-governed activities is that the willingness not to follow the rules
for the sake of some actual or possible purpose is proscribed by the rules
themselves. Not because there is a meta-rule in morality, but because the
(moral) rule of good reasoning is authoritative in the domain it governs, and
the domain in question is all of intentional action.
II.

Refinements

In focusing on the interpretive issues surrounding the companion ideas of

good willing and acting from duty, we have in effect been closing in on
Kants notion of motive especially the possible determination of our will
independent of sensory impulses (of desire in the narrow sense) and by
reason. The natural next step is to take a closer look at the elements
involved in correct reasoning, and the powers of agency necessary to
support them.

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If we consider the agents maxim, which represents her reasoning to

action, the elements represented are an intention to act related to a desired
end, and a motivating ground that gives the agents conception of the ends
value. The relation between intended action and end is either instrumental
or constitutive; the relation between end and motive is explanatory, and,
ideally, also rationally justifying. Since the motivating ground provides
the evaluative content of the maxim the respect in which the agent sees the
action-end pair as good (and so to be realized) it must be an element of the
agents practical reasoning, either as a premise or in the principle(s) of
inference (or both). In good willing both premises and the rule of inference
are a priori rational; it then must be possible for the motivating ground to be
a priori rational too. But if, as Kant maintains, the principle of pure
practical reason fully determines good willing, it must then in some sense
provide both the principle of inference and the necessary practical premises.
This is possible if (and only if) the principle of pure practical reason is the
constitutive principle or law of our power of free that is, not empirically
determined choice. And it is.
It is a further and essential fact that the role of the principle is not limited to
moral action; the same principle is also constitutive of our most basic
evaluative ability: to make and respond to comparative judgments.6 A
comparative judgment is not just a matter of liking one thing more than
another animals do that but of judging one thing better than another on
some rational ground and being determined to action by way of that judgment
(determined, not caused). The development of our general ability to make
evaluative judgments, and so also of our ability to reason from what we judge
good or better to action, is a process as natural in us as our coming to see the
world in causal terms.7 What can be misleading is that we dont start our
evaluative lives with a complete concept of the rational grounds of choice;
rational abilities not only can but must be able to inform cognition without
our having a full or reflective grasp of their constitutive principles. Part of the
normal work of human cognitive development is gaining more explicit and
fuller understanding of concepts already at work in our experience.
Drawing on an analogy to the categories of experience, we should say that
the principle or law of practical reason the a priori concept of the rational
will is the possibility condition of all evaluative practical judgment (and so
all choice for a reason). Its role is not to fully determine what we judge good
or bad, but to make it the case that our judgments are evaluative judgments
that they have a certain form, and so are answerable to formal standards.
Although the initial mode of evaluative judgment is comparative, it would
be a mistake to regard better than as any kind of primitive, or as pointing
to an independent evaluative norm. It is to be understood as a partial
representation of, as well as a developmentally early step in acquiring access
to, the full concept of the good (that is, the concept of the object of the
law-constituted will). Better than points beyond itself, though in an

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indeterminate way. In its formal function, the partial representation makes

possible the ordered structure of preferences necessary for an idea of
happiness, as well as the proto-moral intuitions and responses that
characterize our early relationships with others (judging something better,
we become sensitive to infringements on choice; a bit later, when
comparison involves others, we are concerned about unfairness and
inequality). When conjoined with other developmental pressures to put
order in desire-satisfaction e.g., to accommodate our awareness of the
extended temporal horizon of a life we are drawn towards more complex
evaluations and to the acquisition of various skills of reflection and selfmanagement. And as we become aware of the extension of our evaluative
and practical abilities, our effective power of choice is transformed. The
process is only completed when the agent takes on the standard of judgment
provided by the moral law. Ideally, from the point of view of practical
reason, a healthy agent will have an integrated conception of the good,
one that subordinates her concern for happiness to the authority of the
fundamental law of practical reasoning.8
Our next step is to integrate these elements of the account of rational
agency into the basic moral story. We start with the evaluative capacities
that structure our apprehension of actions and objects of action under
rational concept(s) that determine choice. In so apprehending actions and
objects, we value them. As with other basic conceptual tasks, the tools that
make them possible are not neutral about their own proper use: that is, we
do not have ultimate discretion about how we evaluate objects and ways of
acting there are standards. Of course, given the nature of our evaluative
capacities, their dependence on other capacities, and our less than complete
grasp of their principle, we go wrong in matters of value in various ways. We
can err because we fail to judge particulars correctly, but we can also
mislead ourselves about their evaluative valence: we can be biased in our
appreciation of options or costs; we can miss or discount information we
dont want to consider. In all such cases we exercise rational choice (that is
why we are rightly held responsible for what we do), but exercise alone does
not imply success in reasoning or willing well.
In the normal case, relatively general judgments of value provide evaluative
premises of practical reasoning. We think: this is a kind of thing worth
having, that good to avoid; we reason from the evaluative premise to an
intention to act, according to a principle of practical inference.9 Because the
same (material) end can be represented in different ways merely as an object
of desire, as an object judged more important than others, as an object of
desire whose pursuit is subject to moral constraint, or as an object of moral
requirement agents who appear to have the same end will reason from
different premises (though not necessarily to different actions). How an agent
reasons is typically signaled by her apprehension of the evaluative content of
her premise in what sense she regards the object of her action as good.

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It is natural to interpret Kant as holding that when agents reason in these

different ways, they follow different practical principles instrumental,
prudential, or moral. I believe this is misleading. Despite talk of hypothetical imperatives, there doesnt seem to be a distinct principle of this sort
that is, one that applies to and is not implied by willing an end. There are
actions and intentions to which we are committed in adopting an end, but
not because of a separate principle of practical inference. In adopting an
end, we already conceive of ourselves as its proximate or at least initiating
instrumental cause; questions that remain are technical, about the details of
effective action. This aspect of practical rationality is thus not exhibited in
reasoning from ends, but in satisfying the conditions of end adoption.
Having adopted an end, any end, our practical reasoning has instrumental
form that is, it goes from an end-related premise to an intention to act (to
promote or act with respect to the end).
There may seem to be a better case for the principle of prudence as a
separate practical principle. The mark of an independent principle is that it is
directive independently of the specific ends we adopt. Since each of us is
motivated to shape our life such that it will be, as best we can manage it, an
object of satisfaction, once we form an idea of our happiness and make it our
end, we get reasons both to do things and to adopt ends. But this is not the
kind of separateness that marks an independent principle. First, it is nothing
about the end of happiness that gives us reason to adopt ends, it is simply that it
is a complex end, requiring subordinate ends as means.10 And second, insofar
as there are distinctive counsels of prudence, they are no more than empirical
generalizations about how best to form and pursue an idea of happiness.
The status of the principle of practical inference in the moral case is
delicate it is in one sense separate, not implied by our willing any thing, but
it also cannot be independent of our will. Under the law of morality, the
connection of the deed with the will is a priori, independent of any
inclination. There must therefore be, Kant argues, a practical proposition
that does not derive the volition of an action analytically from another
volition already presupposed (for we have no such perfect will), but connects
it immediately with the concept of the will of a rational being as something
that is not contained in it (G 420n). That is, a principle of practical
reasoning can show an intention necessary (derive it), not from a
presupposed willed end, but from something about the nature of our
rational will. Although the metaphysics of this claim is difficult, what is
claimed fits nicely with the basic view I am presenting. There is one, and
only one, principle of valid reasoning that takes us from premises (ends) of
whatever sort to intentions.
If an a priori principle of willing is immediately connected to the
concept of the will of a rational being, then conformity to the principle is
essential to rational willing.11 Then to say of a maxim, or volition of action,
that it cannot be derived from the concept of the will of a rational being is at

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least to say that it is in some way inconsistent with the a priori principle of
rational willing. So if one erroneously supposed that ones maxim was
consistent with the a priori principle that it was (in conformity with) a
valid principle of rational willing methods of good reasoning ought to be
able to show a contradiction. Unhappily, we cannot follow this direction,
not having an adequate cognition of the a priori principle or of how to apply
it (this is in the argument Of the Typic of Pure Practical Reason, (KpV
6770)). But we are not without resources.
The task is assigned to the two tests of the formula of the law of nature.
By showing that a given maxim lacks the form of a possible law of (human
rational) nature, they show a fortiori that it is inconsistent with the a priori
principle of rational willing. We can think of the tests as the moral analogue
of truth trees, a heuristic for a priori rational inference. If the heuristic is
valid, in using it one is reasoning as one should. So while we cannot tell
which principles are the principles that all rational wills could rationally will,
we can show that some principles could not be rationally willed (e.g., a
maxim whose instrumental success noncontingently depends on its not being
willed by all). More precisely, the tests are a device of representation, a
projection of the bare idea of universal form in reasoning into a modality we
can employ. In speaking of a projection, I have in mind literal projections,
like maps. We cannot get around the city carrying a three-dimensional
model of the city, but we can with an abstract two-dimensional map. Using
the map we judge accurately about how to get from here to there, though
not about what well see when we get there. I take the idea of using a law of
nature as a heuristic to be just such a projection. Thinking about what
cannot be or be willed a law of (rational) nature allows us to say if a
principle of volition could not be derived from an a priori law of reason.
If the formula of the law of nature is a heuristic in this sense, we should
expect it to contain elements that are not present in the thing it represents, and
to lack elements that the thing represented has. So it will be no objection at all if
the argument-forms inside the projection use, for example, prudential or
instrumental practical considerations within the conditions of the device of
representation. It is what we should expect. In trying to work out what follows
from the bare idea of a universal law of reason, the materials we have to work
with are laws of nature, including our psychology, and empirical modes of
practical reasoning. The two tests allow us to manipulate material that we know
how to think about to produce conclusions that apply in a domain we cannot
think about directly.12 Whether the law of nature tests are an accurate device of
representation is another matter. My purpose here is only to explain the kind
of thing they are intended to be such that they could aid us in moral judgment.
It is important to emphasize that even though the formula of the law of
nature is a projection of the a priori principle of rational willing, because of
the limits of what it can show, conformity to its standard is only a necessary
condition of good willing. Maxims it allows can fail to have a moral premise

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(this is to say: permissibility is not sufficient for good willing). We will return
to this.
Having connected ideas of evaluation with an a priori principle and a
method of judgment, we can put another set of chronic questions to rest.
When we think of practical cognition as choice under some evaluative
concept, given the possibility of knowingly contra-moral choice, it seems
hard to show that the way we cognize or choose our actual standard of
choice is, contrary to appearances, not up to us. It can look as though we
need an additional principle or an act of endorsement to secure the adoption
of the moral law as authoritative for me, for each individual. But there
cannot be such an act of principled choosing (there are no terms of choice
for it), nor is any sort of bare endorsement intelligible.13 But if it is the
principle of practical reason that makes evaluative or practical cognition
and so choice possible, it is not a standard we can do without (or replace
with one of our own). Fundamental powers are normative for their exercise.
Natural powers determine their effects by necessity, but the rational power
provides motive grounds that must be interpreted by the agent to play
their role in choice. This creates room for error, and for the appearance of
free, contra-moral rational choice. But we should not conclude that our
permissive psychology can contest the authority of ability-constitutive
rational standards, nor humpty-dumpty like, embrace falsehood for truth.14
There is also no gap in the application of rational principles, though there
can seem to be one, given different and possibly conflicting objects of
choice: the best means may not be permissible; a moral requirement may be
costly in terms of ones happiness. This separation is, in the ordinary sense
of the term, practical, or world-driven: circumstances prompting us to
separate out objects of choice under the appearance of different evaluative
concepts. Further, because the same fundamental evaluative concept brings
order not just to our own desires but to the conditions of desire-satisfaction
of others the good is not my good any more than cause refers to the order
of things the way it seems to me there will be occasions when not everything
one might permissibly want is normatively-speaking available. This doesnt
show that there is any gap in morality or between morality and the pursuit
of happiness. That I turn out to want what you happen to have is a
consequence of limited material resources or our limits as agents (unless I
want what you have because you have it; then the issue is a moral one). It is
because our access to the concept is through reflection on the conditions of
different elements or moments of our practical experience, the side of the
good present to judgment and choice is circumstance-sensitive, so both
partial (or perspectival) and not unified into a whole. Nonetheless, like
reason itself, the good is one. This sets the agent the difficult practical task
of bringing what she initially encounters as competing elements of value
under a single practical concept.

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The situation can be improved on the theoretical side by philosophical

reflection that provides greater clarity and distinctness to the evaluative
concepts we have, and on the practical side, by experience that directs us to
a more evaluatively unified life, and by social institutions that make what is
rational for us to do less likely to come apart. Some things we cannot do at
all without the intervention of a system of positive law e.g., to give
possession the moral status of property; other things can be made easier, as
when welfare institutions assume moral burdens that would overtax our
well-being if we had to act alone. We might go so far as to cast the role of
public order or justice as supporting a secular element of the Highest Good,
in the sense of making it more likely that good intentions lead to overall
successful action. This would put the state and civil institutions square in the
middle of Kants moral story just where Hegel thought they should be, but
werent.
III.

Premises

As I have assembled and discussed the elements of the basic story, I have left
to the side the matter of the premises from which we correctly reason. We
already have some parts of an account of them. The premises must be a
priori necessary and constituents or aspects of the concept of good, the
object of pure practical reason. The concept of the object of pure practical
reason is the concept of an end a necessary end of reason in its practical
mode. In the Metaphysics of Morals deduction of the basic principle of the
doctrine of virtue (the account of ends that are also duties), Kant says,
What, in the relation of a human being to himself and others, can be an end
[for pure practical reason] is an end for pure practical reason (MS 395).
This directs us to two obligatory ends, of our own perfection and the
happiness of others. These are to be the premises, or the general form of the
premises, of practical reasoning. Towards ourselves we have the task of
developing and maintaining our rational agency; towards others we are to
attend to the agency-related effects of our actions on their pursuit of
happiness. (At the extreme, making someones life too hard or too easy can
affect their ability to sustain or value rational activity.) How we should act,
given these ends, will be determined, or derived, by means of the rules of
inference of the categorical imperative.15
Obligatory ends thus set the fundamental norms of correct regard for self
and other: that is, they make certain considerations permanently salient in
correct reasoning, and so in our practical thinking about ourselves and
others. If I am considering acting in a way that will deceive you, or cause
you bodily harm, or obstruct your action, I may not ignore those features of
my action in favor of a more benign description (as I once put it, they
provide us with rules of moral salience). Whatever else I am doing, both the
needs of others and the well-being of my own agency matter.

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Some will find the moralization of self-concern troubling. I think it is

arguable that our first duty is to ourselves. In any case, we should avoid a
foolish reading of what is involved. An obligatory end of ones own
perfection would not require that when deciding between going to a
concert and spending an evening with friends I must deliberate about self(or other-) improvement; that would be absurd. But it would imply that if I
work so much that I have no time for friends or pleasures, that I may be
neglecting myself in ways I ought not, or that I have failed to understand the
material conditions of healthy human agency. It may seem strange to think
that an erroneous decision about work versus friendship takes us to the
terrain of the impermissible, but if impermissibility in general marks
mistakes of reasoning with respect to the objective good about what we
ought and ought not do it is what we should expect.
Norms of prudence also bear on all of our actions, though their authority
operates in a different way Kant says assertorically, in the mode of belief.16
If the action I propose to take is not consistent with elements of my idea of my
happiness, but I am both able and willing to revise my idea to accommodate
the possible effects of this choice (e.g., I will accept greater risks; I will not
make living in the country a condition of my well-being), then I may act as I
will without violating the prudential norm. I cannot just tell myself that I will
accept the risks or costs; the requirement is that I do. It is a requirement
of belief, in the sense of comporting with the evidence, only here in
circumstances where I have some say about what the evidence concerning
myself is. By contrast, once we adopt an end, any end, or are in the business of
acting on ends already adopted, we are under the unconditional authority of
the norms of correct practical reasoning. We cannot adjust the evidence to our
ends17; if we do not recognize or correctly identify salient features of our
circumstances, we will not reason correctly to action.
To see that reasoning from correct premises is necessary to reasoning
morally, consider once again the sympathy example. In circumstances of
need, if I reason to action from a sympathy-grounded premise, I can act
effectively, easing pain. But I cannot, from that premise, capture the rest of
the normative conditions that apply. Helping in this case must be an
acceptable end e.g., not inappropriately paternalistic; the helping action
must be permissible; my doing the helping must be appropriate; I must do it
in the right way, e.g, not disrespectfully; but also, the possible effect on other
ends (of mine, and perhaps of the person helped) has to be taken into
account; I must be prepared to take on the consequences of getting involved,
both pragmatic and moral (e.g., once one starts, one may not always cease
at will). Acting from sympathy does not engage me with all the moral
reasons that bear. Some things can be brought along piecemeal: I can take
permissibility on as a side constraint; I may learn about the pragmatics of
dependence. But because I lack the full moral conceptualization of the end
that fits these circumstances, I cannot reason about or around the action

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correctly; I do not have access to the range of norms that apply. But they do
apply, whether I apprehend them in the case or not.
This gives us the right answer to another common objection to Kants
ethics that an agent who misses or ignores morally relevant facts will not
be judged to have acted impermissibly if the maxim she acts on passes the
categorical imperative tests. We are responsible for getting the moral (and
morally relevant) facts right by virtue of obligatory ends that require that we
attend to what is reasonably obvious and morally salient in their purview
(ends direct our attention; obligatory ends require it). So if someone is
plainly in dire straits and in need of aid, it is a culpable mistake not to
register it.18 It is also a mistake to regard the situation only through the lens
of sympathy. The circumstances demand to be recognized as falling under
the duty to aid. That is as much a fact about them as is the injury or deficit
to be remediated in action.
IV.

The Other Formulas

Although the interpretation I have offered is designed for the Formula of

Universal Law, the Formula of Humanity readily folds into the picture. We
can think about it this way. Being constrained by principles of practical
reason, or by any principles of reason, is to have reason (the principle of
rational nature) as an (objective) end. One may think about what one wants,
or want to satisfy any desire, but the beliefs and intentions one forms should
not violate the norms of good reasoning: viz., the correct premises and valid
principles of inference for cognition and will.
So how do we, in ordinary action that aims at the satisfaction of desire,
treat our rational nature as an end? One reasons to desire-satisfaction from
premises that represent rational nature as an end by way of obligatory ends
that provide the categories in terms of which material desires can, on
rational grounds, enter maxims. So even if ones premises refer to desire (the
pleasure of eating a piece of that pie over there), if they also reflect an overarching concern for ones rational nature (simple pleasures belong to a
healthy life a person who takes pleasure when and as she ought is less
likely to overvalue bad pleasures, or undervalue the pleasure-seeking of
others), then one can reason from them as premises that instantiate both the
value of rational nature as an end in itself and pie.
Respecting rational nature in others is not harder to set in this framework.
One cannot have good reasoning as an end (an end of absolute, that is, nonrelative, value) and for the sake of some contingent interest, permit oneself
to reason badly. Nor can one consistently care about good reasoning and
think it is only ones own reasoning that matters. To put another in a
position where she will be made to reason from false premises (suppose
because of my deceit), or to subvert an obligatory end (suppose by
abandoning her will in the face of my coercive force) is to prefer an outcome

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over a sound rational process (if I cannot get what I want the right way, Ill
get it any way I can).
The Formula of Autonomy can be read in these terms as an expression of
the agential authority of rational norms. They are at once the principles of
our reason, and of reason tout court. That is how their authority can be our
authority over what we do and choose. Absent the rational will and its
principles, there is no freedom of choice, no imputable action.
The idea of a Kingdom of Ends follows. If we assume, as Kant does, that
instantiations of Reason are all in principle compossible, then a realm of
(human rational) ends (in themselves) willing ends that is, on the same
principles of rationality is a real possibility. It would be a possible world,
shaped by humans for human and other rational purposes. Kant expresses
this clearly in a famous passage in the Critique of Practical Reason: [T]he
moral law in fact transfers us, in idea, into a nature in which pure reason, if
it were accompanied with suitable physical power, would produce the
highest good, and it determines our will to confer on the sensible world the
form of a whole of rational beings (KpV 43).
V.

Hegels challenge

In this last section, I will consider, very briefly, some questions about moral
obligations based in social roles: whether the interpretation advanced here
makes room for them, and if it does, whether it is in a way that respects
agents moral autonomy. In addition to addressing yet another set of old
questions, the discussion will provide some idea of the resources this
interpretation offers to our thinking about hard cases.
First, there is nothing at all untoward about locally configured
obligations. Nothing in the moral theory requires there to be one way to
organize the family, or the burdens of taking care of those in need, or even
modes of promise or respectful address, though each local obligation is a
solution to a general moral problem. We can take it to be a general fact that
human beings require extended support through childhood, and that adults
tend to form (relatively) stable affiliations; there will therefore be
obligations with respect to children and family life because of the impact
of both on our rational well being. What must be the same across social
differences is the anchor of reasoning to obligation: our status and needs as
a rational being. We can see the obligatory ends of good willing as providing
a form for correct premises, the local variations shaping the matter. It
will be a real question whether this or that institution of marriage, or
charity, or friendship satisfies the form; but if it does, then one can reason
well in reasoning from it. Nonetheless, there is no reason why obligations
that depend on contingent social roles cannot be bona fide moral
obligations, and many reasons to expect obligations to have local content.

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As we have seen, some social or political institutions are arguably morally

necessary the law and a system of enforcement, certainly, but also some
form of public education, welfare, and health care. Some morally necessary
institutions allow individuals in defined roles to act in ways they would not
be permitted to act on their own (e.g., police use of coercive force; a hospital
policy of triage). We can explain this by noting that actions forbidden in the
pursuit of ones own ends that are permitted in the service of a morally
necessary institution are not the same action: in the latter case the agent
reasons (or could reason) to her action from a different end her social role,
not her private ends. But not everything required by an institution is
permissible; at the extreme, some things mass murder, torture of innocents
are morally impossible. Here we should say that the moral rationale for
the institutions sphere of permission would be undermined by allowing such
actions. A similar explanation applies in cases where the permitted and
forbidden acts might seem comparable. Public officials are permitted, even
required, to use force to gain compliance with the law, but they may not use
bribes as a means to the same purpose. If we think of the limits on the duties
of station as internal to the justification of the institution that defines them,
since the justification of the institution is that it serves the moral needs and
requirements of free, rational beings thats what makes its premises
legitimate we can see why the impartial use of force can be a condition of
free action, whereas bribery would undermine the conditions of cooperation
that a states existence is to make possible. This way of showing how it is
that some duties of some stations are not real duties creates room for the
exercise of individual autonomy within the sphere of institutions and
practices. If the reasoning from the institutions premises to the putative
obligation does not go through, the agent cannot be morally obligated to
act. So although social roles shape the obligations we have, they do not
change the form of reasoning that supports them.
By way of conclusion, let me mark four things I have tried to do with the
good reasoning interpretation. The first is to de-psychologize Kants view
of moral action and motive, freeing the moral theory from a variety of old
objections, as well as making it cohere better with Kants theory of rational
agency. Second and third, to make sense of the negative role of the
categorical imperative within a full account of sound moral reasoning, and
to explain why obligatory ends complete that account. And last, to indicate
how to capture the interdependence of moral obligation and social role
within canonical Kantian theory. The progress made on all four fronts is
evidence that the interpretation has some merit.
Notes
1.

The example is from the Critique of Practical Reason, pp. 2728.

Reasoning to Obligation
2.

3.
4.

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5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.

13.

14.
15.

16.
17.
18.

61

An action from duty has its moral worth not in the purpose to be attained by it but in
the maxim in accordance with which it is decided upon that is, in accordance with its
principle of volition (G 399).
Kant remarks in the Anthropology (p. 253), that sympathy and honor can guide us
provisionally: that is until reason achieve[s] the necessary strength.
Cf. Herman (1993) The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press), pp. 910.
Unless the conditional commitment alters the agents reasoning-to-action; then she will
be engaged in a different activity.
Cf. R 2628 and the essay, Conjectural beginning of human history (1786).
Only in some cases does a human being lack the power of free choice, e.g., in the most
tender childhood, or when he is insane, and in deep sadness... (A 255).
Because it is the concern that is subordinated, it remains an open question what the effect
on the pursuit of happiness will be.
We dont, of course, usually perform these operations explicitly; but we dont need to in
order for this to be an accurate representation or model of the process we use.
One might argue that happiness is formally the end of our ends, and so distinctive. But in
that sense it is also indeterminate, or empty.
One would say something like this of any norm-constituted activity its concept must be
represented by a principle for action.
Rawls Original Position is in just this sense a device of representation: self-interested
reasoning behind the veil of ignorance provides a representation of fairness. In this,
Rawls follows Kant.
Kant will speak in the Religion (pp. 2325) about a timeless adoption of a most
fundamental maxim, a Gesinnung. As related to choice, this can only be about the
constitution of the power that is the rational will our will and from no point of view
is that an act at a time.
Kant denies that we have a real ability to act contrary to the moral law (MS 226227).
Of course the same fundamental principle or law is the source both of obligatory ends
and the principle of rational inference. This is the point of Kants Paradox of
Method(KpV 6262): the moral law is a positive synthetic a priori principle for the
correct use of the faculty of free willing it objectively determines the good wills willing
and also is the object of good willing.
This fact alone should raise eyebrows in thinking about prudence as a practical norm.
Though we can of course abandon ends in the face of the evidence.
As with any standard where there is the possibility of negligence, it may be difficult to
say whether the agent is culpably or innocently mistaken.

References
References to Kants writings are given by abbreviated title G (Groundwork for the
Metaphysics of Morals); KpV (Critique of Practical Reason); A (Anthropology from a
Pragmatic Point of View); MS (Metaphysics of Morals); R (Religion within the Limits of
Reason Alone) and cited by the page numbers of the appropriate volume of Kants
gesammelte Schriften, Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: de Gruyter [and predecessors],
1902).