Allen W. Wood - Kant Quotes

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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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