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Two centuries after they were published, Kant's ethical writings are as much admired and imitated as they have ever been, yet serious and long-standing accusations of internal incoherence remain unresolved. Onora O'Neill traces the alleged incoherences to attempts to assimilate Kant's ethical writings to modern conceptions of rationality, action and rights. When the temptation to assimilate is resisted, a strikingly different and more cohesive account of reason and morality emerges. Kant offers a "constructivist" vindication of reason and a moral vision in which obligations are prior to rights and in which justice and virtue are linked. O'Neill begins by reconsidering Kant's conceptions of philosophical method, reason, freedom, autonomy and action. She then moves on to the more familiar terrain of interpretation of the Categorical Imperative, while in the last section she emphasizes differences between Kant's ethics and recent "Kantian" ethics, including the work of John Rawls and other contemporary liberal political philosophers.
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Constructions of reason
Constructions of reason Explorations of Kant's practical philosophy
ONORA O'NEILL University of Essex
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia © Cambridge University Press 1989 First published 1989 Reprinted 1990, 1994, 1995
Library of Congress Catalogjng-in-Publication Data is available. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-521-38121-5 hardback ISBN 0-521 38816-3 paperback
Transferred to digital printing 2000
Con O'Neill 1912-1988
In Memory
Contents
Preface List of abbreviations
page ix xii Part I: Reason and critique
i 2 3 4
Reason and politics in the Kantian enterprise The public use of reason Reason and autonomy in Grundlegung III Action, anthropology and autonomy
3 28 51 66
Part II: Maxims and obligations 5 6 7 8
Consistency in action Between consenting adults Universal laws and ends-in-themselves Kant after virtue
81 105 126 145
Part III: Kant's ethics and Kantian ethics 9 10 11 12
The power of example Children's rights and children's lives Constructivisms in ethics The great maxims of justice and charity
References Index
165 187 206 219 235 2 4 3
Vll
Preface
Kant is revered for his unswerving defense of human freedom and respect for persons, and for his insistence that reason can guide action. He is also reviled for giving a metaphysically preposterous account of the basis of freedom and an intermittently repellent and simultaneously vapid account of human obligations. Many contemporary proponents of "Kantian" ethics want the nicer bits of his ethical conclusions without the metaphysical troubles. They hope to base a "Kantian" account of justice and of rights on broadly empiricist conceptions of self, freedom and action. In these essays I have taken a different tack. I have tried to set Kant's ethics in the context of his own accounts of reason, action and freedom, to argue that these should not be read as a metaphysical extravaganza and to show that his ethical theory is neither pointlessly empty nor relentlessly nasty. The governing idea behind this reading of the Kantian enterprise is that we must take seriously the idea of a critique of reason. From this almost everything else follows. The very standards of reason will have to be vindicated: If these are neither given nor self-evident, they can have a recursive but not a foundationalist vindication. Philosophy must begin with the task of showing