Allen W. Wood - Reason Quotes

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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
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
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
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
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
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
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