Allen W. Wood Quotes

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Kant's argument [...] cannot and need not rest on the claim that all these alternatives to his interpretation of rational action can be conclusively refuted. It involves only the claim that his interpretation is more natural and reasonable than they are. I also think that so understood, Kant's argument does as much as can possibly be required of any argument purporting to establish a claim about what has ultimate value. In philosophy, as Aristotle wisely tells us, we must not apply the wrong standards to a subject matter (Aristotle 1094b25). This also means we must not expect more of a claim, or an argument for it, than is reasonable.

Allen W. Wood
As we have seen, reason is even our highest capacity in the sense that it is the only one capable of directing and criticizing all our faculties, including itself. Reason is the unqualified capacity to think and act, because it is the capacity to think and act according to norms.

Allen W. Wood
The moral theories of Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith, identify sympathy or love, perhaps combined with other psychological factors (such as disinterestedness, calm judgment, or impartial spectatorship) as the psychological foundation of all morality. Kant always had much respect for these theories. But it was a crucial turning point in Kant's thinking about morality when he decided that no such theory could give an adequate account of morality.

Allen W. Wood
It is [...] an elementary misunderstanding to think that Kantian ethics is committed to a system of inflexible moral rules just because it regards moral imperatives as categorical imperatives. [...] It is also an elementary misunderstanding of the concept of a categorical imperative to think that because Kantian ethics grounds obligation on such imperatives, it has no concern for ends or (therefore) for the consequences of actions.

Allen W. Wood
Treating a being as an end in itself means respecting the value of what makes it such an end. After we see that this value resides in rational nature, we see it implies that, at least in general, rational beings should not be subjected to deception or coercion. Instead, we should seek to harmonize our strivings with those of other rational beings toward their ends.

Allen W. Wood
Kantian ethics rests on a single fundamental value – the dignity or absolute worth of rational nature, as giving moral laws and as setting rational ends. The fundamentally valuable thing in the universe is a rational being, a person – or, more precisely, rational nature in a person. The demands made on us by this value depend on the kinds of conduct required to show respect for this value.

Allen W. Wood
When we turn to ethical theory in the face of hard cases, we should also be less interested inbeing told what to do than inbeing assisted in thinking better about what to do. On a theoretical level, this means understanding better the reasons not only why we should do one thing rather than another but also why some moral decisions are difficult, and why there is no single, clearly right answer to some moral dilemmas. Thus an ethical theory that places first priority on getting the right answer is not looking at its most important tasks in the right way.

Allen W. Wood
What interests Kant in all these cases is only this: Did the agents in these cases have to constrain themselves through respect for moral principles in order to perform the dutiful action? If they did, and the agent did the dutiful action, then that action was done from duty. If they did not, then the agent is not acting from duty in the sense intended in this discussion (whatever the real motive for the action may have been – in case that issue were to come up).

Allen W. Wood
The standard model of ethical theory may seem like merely a necessary consequence of applying to normative ethics the high standards of clarity and rigor prized by all of us who like to think of ourselves as philosophers in the analytic tradition. This way of doing ethics obviously parallels the way analytical philosophers treat many other subjects – by formulating generalizations about this or that and testing them against intuitive counterexamples. But I think the Sidgwickian method of intuitional ethics, or the Rawlsian method of reflective equilibrium, is not the only way to think clearly about ethical theory.

Allen W. Wood
Kantians may in turn be skeptical about all such projects, and whether anything deserving to be called either 'morality' or moral 'reasons' could ever be got out of them. A long philosophical tradition claims that there are powerful reasons to meet the requirements of morality, reasons that are necessarily connected with being a rational agent at all, and hence that conduct which violates moral principles necessarily constitutes a significant failure of rationality (even if we don't customarily apply to it the term 'irrational'). Kantian ethics does not need to apologize for adhering to that tradition.

Allen W. Wood
There are two main reasons that Kant refuses to allow that sympathy or any other empirical sentiment or desire could constitute the foundation of morality. One is that no sentiment of this kind can yield the kinds of objective and universal principles that morality requires. They can approximate to this only by claiming a greater empirical uniformity in human nature than experience shows to be there. […] Kant's other main reason for rejecting sympathy or love as the basis of morality involves his view of the empirical psychology of these feelings as they arise in us in our social condition, and especially in the civilized condition of modern European society.

Allen W. Wood
Kantian ethics [...] certainly may depart freely from what Kant wrote and thought. It may criticize and modify the theory Kant put forward as well as sympathetically interpret or defend it.

Allen W. Wood
Help given to others, even on moral grounds, is not the result of sticking to a principle. Beneficence to others carried out from such a mindset is bound to strike us as grotesque. In Kant's own terms, however, the motive of duty in this example would be much more plausibly regarded as love of human beings – that is, the sorrowful man helps others because he has moral grounds to care about them and make their well-being his end. Realizing that this option is open to Kant may help us to correct many common errors about what Kantian ethics must say in such cases.

Allen W. Wood
The standard or dominant conception of ethical theory has two main characteristics, the first having to do with moral epistemology, the second with the nature of moral principles–the demands made on them, and the way they are to be applied. [...] The dominant model takes intuitions about particular cases as the primary ground of appeal for the authority of moral principles. A moral judgment is not counted as an 'intuition' in this sense unless it is generally accepted and made after careful consideration. But even the best intuitions about particular examples are not regarded as infallible.

Allen W. Wood
Those of us who are sympathetic to Kantian ethics usually are so because we regard it as an ethics of autonomy, based on respect for the human capacity to govern our own lives according to rational principles. Kantian ethical theory is grounded on the idea that the moral law is binding on me only because it is regarded as proceeding from my own will.

Allen W. Wood
Kant claims that the three formulas also constitute a developmental progression. This strongly suggests, first, that we need all the formulas in order to have a complete account of the content of the supreme principle, and, second, that the later formulas FH and above all FA and FRE should be considered more complete and adequate statements of the law than FUL and FLN.

Allen W. Wood
A moral imperative is categorical because its function is not to advise us how to reach some prior end of ours that is based on what we happen to want but instead to command us how to act irrespective of our wants or our contingent ends. Its rational bindingness is therefore not conditional on our setting any prior end.

Allen W. Wood
Kantian ethics is fundamentally committed to a radical critique of human social life, especially of social life in its civilized form. This critical tendency is not a mere ancillary feature or contingent concomitant of Kantian ethics. It conditions the fundamental conception of Kantian ethical theory.

Allen W. Wood
Kant's view about freedom of the will, […] is one of the most unstable areas in his philosophy. It is a topic he frequently revisited, never saying quite the same thing he ever said before. Kant's theory of freedom, and especially the idea that we are free only in the intelligible world beyond nature, has also been the chief stumbling block to the acceptance of his moral philosophy. The scandal has only increased with the passage of time, as fewer and fewer moral philosophers find it tolerable to burden morality with an extravagant supernaturalist metaphysics.

Allen W. Wood
Free will is as philosophical a question, in that sense, as there is. Kantian ethics should not represent itself as having a solution to it. If the problem of freedom is a philosophical open wound, then the right way to think about Kant's utterly unacceptable theory of noumenal freedom is that it is the salt that philosophers have a professional obligation to rub in the wound so that they can't forget about it.

Allen W. Wood
In the First Section of the Groundwork, Kant is attempting to appeal to certain judgments of value that he thinks will be accepted by common rational moral cognition (roughly, healthy moral common sense) in order to motivate a formulation of the moral law.

Allen W. Wood
I think Kantian ethics must [...] reject the unity of the person account. A more consistent Kantian approach is based on the idea that we can treat, or fail to treat, rational nature as an end in itself not only in the person of a rational being in the strict sense but also in the way we treat other beings who are not persons in the strict sense.

Allen W. Wood
In Kantian ethics, the fundamental value is humanity or rational nature as an end in itself.

Allen W. Wood
When Kant distinguishes between actions that have moral content or [true, authentic, inner] moral worth and those that do not, he is not distinguishing what has moral value from what has none. Instead, the distinction he is drawing is between what has a special, fundamental, essentially or authentically moral value from what is valuable from the moral standpoint but does not have the sort of value that lies right at the heart of morality.

Allen W. Wood
Here is a conceptual truth about reasons: If it is impossible for us to do otherwise, that can never be because there is a reason to act as we do.

Allen W. Wood
Critics of Kantian ethics sometimes complain that the concept of a categorical imperative makes no sense because there could be no reason for obeying such an imperative. This is usually because they think that the only reason for obeying an imperative must be an end in the sense of an end to be produced. They do not notice that Kant's concept of an objective end in itself is precisely his answer to their question.

Allen W. Wood
It is far from self-evident why Kant chooses this triad as his vehicle for systematizing the formulas of the moral principle.

Allen W. Wood
I suggest that a Kantian should think of any formulation of the supreme principle of morality (including all of Kant's own formulations) as provisional expressions of a principle to the conception of which we limited and fallible rational beings must always aspire.

Allen W. Wood
Thus Kantian autonomy, once it is understood, will (and ought to) disappoint those shallow minds and immature souls who are attracted to the doctrine of autonomy for the wrong reasons. They were hoping for some radical individualist revolution in morality, in which paroxysms of human self-will overthrow the divine will's numinous majesty (thereby replacing, as many such revolutions sadly do, one arbitrary and unjust tyranny with another and bringing to power merely a different mob of unprincipled scoundrels). The sober rationalism of Kantian ethics is equally incompatible with voluntarism in its theological and its Promethean forms.

Allen W. Wood