Allen W. Wood - Theory Quotes

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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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