This chapter is about the idea of the highest good in Kant: the unity of virtue and happiness as the whole object of pure practical reason. About the highest good, I start out as a skeptic. Its content and its place in Kant’s moral thought have always made me uneasy; I am perplexed by many of the arguments that led Kant to embrace it.1 However, my current interest in the highest good is primarily practical: I want to understand how engaging with the idea would play out in the moral life of the good person. My worry is less about system and argument and more about whether embrace of the idea of the highest good would corrupt the heart of even the best of us. I have found the question hard to frame and the answer hard to find. The text that I have found most intriguing on these matters is Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. In what follows, I will try to explain why.
1 Like many, my unease about the highest good centers on the idea of securing proportionality between virtue and happiness. One can agree that when happiness comes by way of wrongdoing, it can seem as if something is won or gained by cheating. But the “as if” matters, since happiness is not a prize or a reward (KrV 5:118). It is also true that we feel distress when the good suffer. But why is this a moral matter? Why should morality or practical reason or nature or God have the job of securing happiness for the virtuous, now or in the hereafter, for the individual or for the race? If the fix for this feeling of cosmic disorder is the highest good, it comes with the high cost of imagining a micromanaged eternity. Even if one can see how the postulates of practical reason could allow such a story to be told, it’s hard to come to terms with the need for it. I’m going to argue on Kant’s behalf that we don’t have to go that way.
In the Critique of Practical Reason, the highest good enters as the central topic of the Dialectic – that part of a critique that deals with tendencies of human reason to go beyond the cognitions warranted by the terms of its Analytic. When reason’s ideas outstrip our cognitive powers, we become vulnerable to illusions and contradictions. The danger posed by the highest good is the necessary connection it supposes between virtue and happiness: It is not conceptual; it can’t be causal. If we must have the highest good, and if it cannot be managed with critical reason’s resources, the moral law will be shown to be fantastic and therefore false (KrV 5:114). Faced with an antinomy, Kant resolves it through an appeal to the noumenal will and the postulates of God and the immortality of the soul; they render secure the necessary connection between virtue and happiness. For our purposes here, we don’t need to know the details.
What we do need to know is why practical reason has to venture into this dangerous space. I think there are two roads taken to the highest good. The first is internal to Kant’s system. The object of pure practical reason does not require the highest good – its object is the will willing well (KrV 5:57ff). But the faculty of practical reason has more in its portfolio than the good will; it also manages the pursuit of happiness, a necessary end for us finite and sensible rational beings, and, Kant insists, it is a happiness that involves feeling, inclinations, and needs.2 As the faculty charged with the good, practical reason must create unity out of this heterogeneity. This opens the door to the highest good. Call this the objective road to the idea of the highest good. We will not be taking that road.
There is also a subjective road. It looks something like this. While the human being’s pursuit of happiness can bend and accept morality as a condition, the concern with happiness cannot be set aside. It is then unbearable that virtue might leave happiness hostage to luck, or, if virtue is a condition of worthiness to be happy, that virtue might be out of reach, despite our best efforts. In response to this distress, the highest good might provide assurance: God will provide.
But is it clear that we must go down this road? After all, although we cannot have an end whose pursuit is or is seen to be impossible, the fact that intervening events, external or internal, prevent success in reaching an end is not practical incoherence, it’s just the way things go. Why should it be different with happiness and virtue? Thinking of the highest good in terms of deferred gratification writ large might be a source of (infinite?) patience, but if the prospect of failure to gain happiness affects our will to be good, then we are not good.
Further, the highest good can’t mitigate the sacrifice a person makes when faced with a hard choice. There is no conceptual failure in the very idea of absorbing a moral cost; it is what virtue requires. Perhaps it’s this: It is one thing to find that your integrity as a moral person can require a sacrifice of happiness, it is quite another to accept a view of one’s life, the life of a human being, as hostage to morality. Such a view devalues our nature. From the human point of view, the moral order that reason would bring forth has to be friendly to human happiness. But even if the highest good could deliver this, it would not speak to the struggling individual’s subjective need. That might make us worry that the subjective road is a dead end.
2 We get a somewhat different account of what might be at stake subjectively with the highest good in the Religion. Unlike the Critique of Practical Reason, where the main focus is connecting the highest good to the formal conditions for the unity of the rational faculty, the Religion’s focus on the highest good is as a final end for us as morally striving agents. In the Preface to the first edition of the Religion, Kant argues that morality as such needs no end, no higher being, nothing beyond itself or its law as a determining ground of the will. The idea of a highest good – bringing virtue and happiness together – arises out of the practice of morality as something that “meets our natural need, which would otherwise be a hindrance, to think for all our doings and nondoings taken as a whole some sort of ultimate end which reason can justify” (RGV 6:5). The highest good is that end: It is an end the human being can love and an end proposed by reason alone (RGV 6:7n). One will not as a result of accepting the highest good as a final end do anything other than what one is morally required to do; one will be able to regard one’s already completely determined actions as having an additional purpose. Because the highest good is an end the realization of which requires the contribution of an omnipotent moral being as ruler of the world, “morality leads inevitably to religion” (RGV 6:8n).
The second Preface tells us that the primary task of the Religion is to show that and how a liberal Christian theology both articulates and secures for us the needed object of rational faith and love. That makes the subject of the Religion religion: not the formal concepts that make rational space for religion – that’s the province of the Critique of Practical Reason – but religion as an historical phenomenon, embedded in sacred texts and practices and institutions.3 Kant’s view is that it is religion in this full sense that positions the highest good to answer the moral subject’s need. Its being able to play this role is in turn part of a religion’s rational defense.4 For the modern secular Kantian, this is surely a startling and uncomfortable claim – possibly part of the reason the Religion is a somewhat marginalized text.
Some moral philosophers coming to the Religion restrict themselves to the sections of Part One that amplify and greatly enrich Kant’s moral psychology (the account of the three predispositions to good in human nature [RGV 6:26–8], and [parts of] the discussion of the propensity to evil [RGV 6:28–32]). There is strain in doing even this, since the compelling parts are joined to the theology of original sin and radical evil and the philosophically difficult notion of a fundamental or supreme maxim (the Gesinnung), a disposition arising from an intelligible deed, an act not cognizable in time. Others are drawn to the idea of an ethical community introduced in Part Three which is thought to offer some insight into how Kant thinks concretely about a kingdom of ends. Of less interest is Kant’s view that the ethical community needs to be a church. The focus on Christology, church structure and priestcraft has no doubt kept moral philosophers away from Parts Two and Four. It’s always a delicate thing to abstract out bits of argument one finds useful from a text that does not overall appeal. The salvaged bits are easily mistaken for things they are not when the context that explains them is lost. It’s surely worth trying for a more complete view.
The main text of the Religion begins with the threat posed to morality by the Christian idea of radical evil in human nature. Were human nature at its root resistant to morality, were we determined to evil, then autonomy is not the defining principle of the will, or at least not the principle of the human power of choice, and morality is without a rational ground. Yet the doctrine of radical evil is a defining element of Christian theology. Kant takes the conflict seriously: Something has to give and it cannot be morality. If the doctrine of radical evil cannot be jettisoned, it can be interpreted: that is, a place for it found in morality’s agenda. Kant introduces the three “predispositions to the good” (animality, humanity, personality) and the three “propensities to evil” (frailty, impurity, depravity5) to relocate the religious idea of radical evil as part of an account of moral failure, thereby protecting human autonomy and freedom. As we shall see, it also opens the door to the highest good (RGV 6:26ff).
In the way that the three predispositions combine to generate moral character, there is enough turbulence in our good-oriented development to establish the potential, the propensity, for evil. Morality may be the telos of human nature, but moral character is the completion and resolution of a dynamic process that involves elements of our animal nature and the ordering of ends in the pursuit of happiness. Inevitably, empirically, we come to morality with confusion about ultimate ends and our status as persons. The condition is objectively resolved in the relations of equality and respect that come with acknowledgment of the moral law. But subjectively, a person’s moral character is the fragile terminus of a developmental path – rational telos combined with dramatic contingency. “Radical evil” is then identified as the permanent subjective instability of moral character that mars even the best of us: Despite being formed under the aegis of the good, we remain drawn to wrongful principles and choices supported by residual elements of moral character formation. So interpreted, radical evil is a threat to our moral goodness, not to morality itself.
To be clear: All three predispositions to the good are present in potential from the beginning of a human life; however, their expression is teleologically staged, and in any actual moral biography, partial and contingent. To get to morality each of us must negotiate instincts difficult to control, engage emergent rationality, and be challenged by a natural and comparative idea of happiness that introduces envy and jealousy (necessary for the acquisition of self-discipline and attention to others as separate selves). Teleology does not imply a straight path.6 One may, as it happens, have unusually strong passions; they may, as it happens, influence growth toward moral weakness or moral strength. It can matter to developmental success when and how the strictures of moral duties are introduced. Too early and they might yield a tendency to rigidity; too late might make it harder to freely accept moral discipline. And so on.
So while the objective telic aim of human nature is a character moved by the moral law as an incentive, taking conformity of the will to the moral law as its supreme object, the human being in real time falls short. Residues of earlier stages subsist in the mature adult, nourishing three propensities to evil. We are prone to weakness and frailty concerning action, too easily overcome by contrary feeling (the engine of animal self-love is not turned off as moral character is formed). Two more grave sources of failure – impurity and depravity – compromise moral character (RGV 6:29–30). With impurity, compliance with morality in action partly depends on incentives other than respect for the moral law (we can’t resist the comparative and competitive demands of happiness – a kind of moral immaturity). In depravity, the incentives of the moral law are subordinated to nonmoral ones (often a vain or usurpatory self-conceit). As a product of our coming to morality, the propensity to evil belongs to each human being, even the best of us (“it is woven into human nature” [RGV 6:30]).
However, since a propensity is not a cause, it is consistent with free acts of the human power of choice, even if it is also an inescapable siren call. We are free, so can and should be moral; we are also, by our nature, drawn to invert the order of incentives. This fact produces a crisis in even the best of us. For if there is even the hint that we question the order of incentives we have already failed. And since happiness cannot (and should not) be ignored or absorbed into or guaranteed by morality, the question will arise. Given our nature, this is as far as we can go on our own. This is stage-setting for the highest good: It arrives to help resolve the question for even the best of us in a way that neutralizes the propensity to evil (permitting us to disown the enemy within, as it were).
The problem is that if what the doctrine of the highest good offers us is warranted belief in the soul’s immortality and the eventual balance of virtue and happiness in a divinely ordered nature, it won’t help us get the order of incentives right. We are at risk because we rightly fear that we cannot maintain the correct inner alignment between virtue and happiness. Shifting that responsibility to a higher being removes the problem in one sense, but in a manner that confirms rather than resolves our doubts about our character. Autonomy would require dependency to maintain itself. I think this cannot be the role of the highest good in our moral economy.
Now, when Kant describes the human propensity to evil, he locates it in the heart, not the will. Why he does this is important. Recall that the predispositions are “elements of the determination of a human being”: structural attributes that dispose the person to self-organize around the good. They are not the root of any vices, though they generate elements of character onto which vices can be grafted. Their job is to prompt the developmental stages for the emerging human will as a rational power. The propensities to evil, on the other hand, are systematic vulnerabilities of the human as a practical being. They are not of the will, for the will cannot be or incline to evil and still be free (the will also does not incline to the good: the good is the object of its principle). Evil is rooted in the heart.
Metaphorically, the heart is the seat of our loves. We can know the good but not love it, or not love it enough, or love something else as well. That is why what is true for us objectively may not also be true of us subjectively. Even the best of us. The way(s) the human being comes to care about the good leave her vulnerable to contingencies of the heart. Passions, attractions, false ideals, loves – catch at the heart, taxing one’s attachment to the will’s principle.7 The resulting failure need not involve acting badly, for we can, even when the heart is weak or impure or depraved, comply with the law. The failure is about the alignment of our subjectivity, our heart, with the law’s authority – whether we are one with ourselves. Since the alignment is not necessary, and the heart is both hidden and burdened, there is always reason to worry about the integrity of our attachment to the good.
This suggests a different spin on the subjective path to the highest good arising from the propensity to evil. The problem that even the best of us faces is not about undeserved suffering or failures in the permissible pursuit of happiness – conditions that might be compensated for in the hereafter. It is not about bringing the external world into conformity with moral effort. The real worry is internal, about one’s heart, about what one loves. What the best of us wants is to be virtuous – to succeed in strength and purity and in the well-orderedness of her ends. Wanting this, she can do various things. She will resolve to make the moral law her highest principle; she can recognize past failure and embark on programs of self-improvement; she can discipline her body, avoid dangerous or corrupting relationships; and so on. What she cannot do is insure that her heart is in the right place (RGV 6:48–51). Neither her good actions nor her discipline stand guarantee for this. What the best of us must want is to be rid of the anxiety that, despite all her efforts, there resides in her heart a worm of corruption that compromises her moral commitment, her most fundamental maxim (Gesinnung). The best of us can’t be sure that she is who she thinks she is and aims to be; she can’t fully rely on herself or earn the satisfaction that comes with acting well. Because this anxiety is well-founded, the lack of confidence threatens steadfast moral resolve. That makes the subjective issue for the highest good resolving this anxiety about purity of heart. Taking the next step requires that we have some control of Kant’s very difficult concept of the Gesinnung.
3 A Gesinnung is a maxim, an agent’s most fundamental practical principle or rational disposition, “the ultimate subjective ground of the adoption of maxims” (RGV 6:25). Its content represents her ordering of two contending incentives or principles – morality and self-love. One’s Gesinnung is either evil or good; there is no middle ground. Objectively, the moral law is fundamental. Subjectively, it has to be made the condition of one’s practical life.
Part of what makes the idea of a Gesinnung strange and different from our other maxims is that, as the most basic expression of our freedom, it is both adopted and yet not a determination of the will in time (or at a time). Were its adoption to take place at a time, some event would have preceded and partly determined it; it would not then express practical freedom. But it also cannot be adopted for a reason, since nothing could be the source of such a reason if the Gesinnung is our most basic principle. And not least, the very idea of a Gesinnung as the one fundamental principle of a life seems to conflict with the idea that moral change and reform are always possible, even change of the deepest sort.
Here’s one way we might think about this. Whatever the source of our reasons, we do not choose reasons in the way that we choose things for reasons. Some reasons are given by the conditions of our agency – for Kant, reasons of self-love and of the moral law. This is the work of the predispositions: They set us up to find things good, which then come to be possible reasons or determinants of willing. (Kant speaks of the impossibility of ever losing the incentive for the good [RGV 6:46].) But if we get onto reasons by way of our psychology, how could the taking of reasons into a maxim be regarded as timeless? Think of a maxim as representing a course of reasoning about willing – one we believe to be correct. In a sense, every course of reasoning is timeless (e.g. a contradiction is timelessly invalid). A course of reasoning may be manifest at a time, realized or recognized in time, but its correctness is not a function of any act of reasoning. Subjectively, adopting either principle (morality or self-love) as the fundamental principle of one’s willing is to regard it as timelessly correct. That is why a Gesinnung speaks to a whole life: It is a subjectively authoritative and total point of view, addressing all actions one has taken or will take. But the adoption of only one of the principles gets things right: the two options are not on a par. So it is not difficult to see that a great deal is at stake for anyone who finds himself with the anxiety that he may not be who he is devoting himself to being – even, perhaps especially, the best of us. The trials of the Gesinnung create no metaphysical doubt that we are practically free agents with autonomy of will. It is because neither phenomenology nor external conformity to law imply correctness of principle that even the best of us will doubt their fundamental goodness. Increased effort or heightened introspection won’t touch the problem.
Although doubt that we are fundamentally good is inescapable, if we come to believe that we are not good, that our heart is corrupt, change of heart or moral conversion is possible (RGV 6:48).8 And of course, even the best of us was once not good. Suppose one takes oneself to have seen the light and tried to do whatever it is that gets the principle right. There is still no certainty about what one takes to have happened, or confidence that it will endure (RGV 6:51). Again Kant points to the highest good and now more directly religion as the source of the help that can get us past this kind of worry, but there is also a warning.
Belief in the highest good cannot cause conversion or change of heart or prove that one’s heart is constant. But mistaken belief in the nature of God’s contribution can lead us astray. The danger comes from the fact that reason “which by nature finds moral labor vexing, now conjures up, under the pretext of natural impotence, all sort of impure religious ideas (among which belongs falsely imputing to God the principle of happiness as the supreme condition of his commands)” (RGV 6:51). Such an error would resolve our anxiety, since it is a condition we can surely meet! As would a divine guarantee that God will make us better persons, if we just ask.
The problem is not in the turn to religion as such, but in religious content. Moral religion, by contrast with religion of supplication (rogation), demands good works as a condition for God’s cooperation [höhere Mitwirkung] with our efforts (RGV 6:52). So the new version of the subjective question is: What kind of divine cooperation with our good works and best efforts could relieve anxiety of the heart without corrupting the will? We of course cannot hope to understand the workings of divine cooperation. Kant says it isn’t necessary that we do. What we are given instead is an account of this cooperative relation with God as presented in liberal Christianity. It is the case study for a moral religion that makes proper use of the doctrine of the highest good.9 Part Two of the Religion works this through.
4 Part Two begins with a reminder that virtue is a battle: not, as the Stoics thought, against the inclinations, which “considered in themselves are good,” but against a principle of will we have adopted that resists the moral law as our most fundamental maxim (RGV 6:58–9). We have no natural understanding of how this battle is fought or won, just as we have no natural understanding of divine cooperation. The remedy moral religion offers is a kind of typic or projection of these notions in terms that allow us to have a rational response to the things we cannot directly understand.10 Instead of the mysterious battle between heart and will, we are directed to think in terms of an “invisible enemy,” an evil spirit or tempter outside us.11 Instead of God as a partner, we are given the Son of God as a prototype. Two moves frame the argument to come. Against past philosophy, we are to see innocence in the body and guilt as flowing from the heart. On behalf of religion, we are to be prepared to interpret its representations, its stories, as modes of access to things beyond our cognitive powers. The hermeneutic is moral: Religious doctrine is relevant only as it is able to typify elements central to our moral labors. The typic of our humanity, for example, a way of having access to the value of the human being as other than a mere created thing, is as a being loved by God, proceeding from God’s nature for all eternity, represented in his only-begotten Son in whom God loved the world; etc. (RGV 6:60–1).12
This launches what is surely the hardest part of the Religion for secular-minded readers – the Christology. It can hardly be avoided if, as Kant says, it is through practical faith in the idea of the Son of God as a prototype of moral perfection that the human being is enabled “to believe and self-assuredly trust” in the possibility of moral goodness or perfection for himself. What follows is a very tentative reconstruction of the main arguments.
A prototype is the original design or model from which copies are made. The Son of God is the prototype for us, the (other) children of God. Through the prototype’s life history we find out what we are designed to be. Whether or not we succeed in living the life we are made for, the prototype stands guarantee for its possibility. Though in one sense the prototype is a projection or a vivified idea, in the world interpreted through Christian doctrine, he is real. Inside the hermeneutic, we cannot doubt the purity of his heart or his moral force or his constancy. Absolute perfection in the prototype would make the idea as good as empty; to be a typic or schema for us, the prototype has to live the relevant pieces of a human life, including the lure of self-love and the costs of the moral life. The prototype therefore faces temptations and is made to suffer for the sake of others (indeed, all others). Through his steadfast good choices, his suffering and his sacrifice, the goodness of the prototype has a human form. Sustained by God’s love, which is the principle of his being, the prototype is recognizable to us as, at the deepest level, good. The effect of the typification is a shift in defaults: Phenomenology is replaced by theology, doubt about an unknowable principle of will is banished by confidence in God’s love. (That is: since being loved by God is a typification of rational nature, our inability to regard ourselves as loved, or valued as a rational being, is the theological interpretation of the source of our moral anxiety.)
The detail of our moral anxiety is represented in the theology by the gap between even the best of us and the prototype’s strength and purity of character.13 As Kant sees it, three difficulties need to be overcome to close (or bridge) the gap (here I simply follow the order of the text at RGV 6:66ff.). Each of them requires God’s cooperation, which we find typified in Christian theology. First, there is the business of our imperfection. We contrast the prototype’s simple goodness and our endless striving: We are at each instant and always only imperfectly good. The theology gives us warrant to regard our striving as part of an infinite sequence. Our improvement now (for every now) is then not to be regarded as we see it, as still marred by defect, but as God can see it in the prototype, as the germ or seed of perfection, good in its form (we don’t fault the sapling for being young). We thereby gain a new view of what we are.
Second, there is the anxiety about the constancy of our disposition. We are right to doubt that we will be constant. Yet, Kant says, we must have confidence in our constancy if we are to persevere (RGV 6:68). The best of us wants to believe they have adopted the good principle. We gain typified warrant to believe that given a sufficiently long life of good works, one is entitled to the conjecture that one’s fundamental disposition is stably good. How so? The theology confronts the anxiety with the challenge of eternity: In the best of us, with the experience of steady goodness, the idea of eternity induces no fear. Quite the contrary, it offers an arc of life that grounds hope. For the rest of us, if we respond at all, the idea of eternity either rouses conscience and heightens self-criticism or it foretells the misery of endless failure.
Note that we don’t need to believe in our immortality or that God knows something about us that we don’t. The typified idea of immortality is rather a rite of passage, a test.
The third and greatest difficulty for those who would be good has its source in events before moral conversion (adoption of the correct Gesinnung), from the time when even the best of us lacked a good disposition (even if there is no wrongdoing, the human will only becomes a good in time). The problem arises from our inability to disown our own past. In the language of the theology: Even though moral conversion can create a “new man” – one not guilty of anything – the “new man” carries the guilt of the “old man” left behind (RGV 6:72ff). If it is not yet clear why there should be a transfer of guilt, it is a bit clearer that if the “new man” is guilty for the “old man’s” sins, the “new man” will be unable to fully realize the good of his own disposition. The pairing of goodness and guilt is a recipe for despair.
This idea of transferred guilt is not altogether strange. Suppose, in the past, one had wrongfully harmed someone. There might be a debt to be paid, apology and forgiveness negotiated. That would remain true even if one had ceased being someone who could wrongfully harm in that way.14 Now assume there had been no wrong-doing only wrong-willing. Suppose that as an adult I realize that misplaced anger at a parent was the driving force of many of my adolescent actions. I would feel bad about this, even if there had not been any bad doings (perhaps I was an obedient and resentful child), and even if I am not now moved by anger. I feel guilt now at not having been a loving child. There is no repair available. My past interferes with my fully inhabiting the present; it is a consequence of being the kind of agent who has a history. One would want release from such a burden. We might begin psychotherapy.
The solution offered in the theology is the very difficult doctrine of “the vicarious substitute” (RGV 6:74f).15 The strategy of interpretation is the same: see if a bit of theology can work as a typified solution to a subjective problem of character. I think it goes this way. The prototype, who is himself wholly good (there is no guilt from his past, having been created in God’s love), is called to sacrifice for our sins. His act provides a “vicarious substitute” for our discharging our guilt. It is not quite that he is able to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, but that he is in a position to offer his suffering, not owed to anyone, as a pure gift. Inside the theology, wrong-willing, the adoption of an evil Gesinnung, is a sin against God. We have no power to repair that (it is timelessly wrong, as is the “old man” timelessly who we are). Some sort of penance is owed; nothing we can offer would suffice. As an act of love and of mercy, God receives the suffering freely offered by the prototype as a gift, for our sake. From our point of view, it is the gift of grace. It puts us in a position to move beyond our history. But how?
The theological typic adds a new piece to our moral repertoire (it is an addition to the moral imagination, I would say). Taking the prototype as our typified guide, it allows the person of good will to regard the “ills and sufferings” that befall anyone in the pursuit of ends as a freely offered gift – a gift from the “new man” on behalf of the “old.” The “new man” does not and should not regard the ills and sufferings as something he deserves; he can welcome them as a test and exercise for his reformed disposition, of value to him now because of the wrong-willing of the person he once was and as a discipline to stay the course. Following the idea of vicarious substitution, taking the ills and sufferings as a gift makes it true that the “new man” has left behind the calculus of pleasures and pains that were the marks of his past corrupt principle. And, by analogy with God’s grace, the ills and sufferings can serve for the “old man” as punishment – as paying the debt in a currency the “old man” understands: It was precisely to avoid the burdens of the moral life that he made his fundamental maxim conditional on happiness. The interpretive device thereby allows the good person to address the moral deficit of his past self without drawing the guilt into his present life. This resolves the last piece of the moral anxiety of even the best of us.
I would conjecture that the difficult notion of grace functions in the theological typic as the analogue of moral teleology in the Critique of Practical Reason account of the highest good – the God-sourced rational ordering of morality and nature that secures the proportionality of virtue and happiness. As I’ve interpreted it here, it gives the vexed notion of proportionality moral content that it otherwise lacked. Rather than the morally dangerous idea of God supervising a system of rewards and punishment into eternity, it interprets the good person’s ills and sufferings so that they do not detract from the happiness such a person can achieve or hope for.16 The person with a corrupt will, committed to the principle of worldly success as the condition of goodness, is untouched; he remains caught up in contingency and competition with others, and hostage to his past.
To my mind, this development of the idea of proportionality – of the fit between virtue and burden – is one of the signal contributions of the Religion to Kant’s moral thought. It criticizes the terms of traditional or natural idea of proportionality that prompts the highest good (that we should gain happiness because of virtue and regard the burdens of the virtuous as untoward) – showing that the natural idea carries with it the marks of unreformed character. I don’t think the Critique of Practical Reason embraces the traditional view; its argument has the task of showing that the abstract idea of the highest good – of some proportionality between virtue and happiness – does not disturb the central argument. It is not until the Religion that we learn how to think about proportionality from within morality.
5 We are not quite done. The subjective turn to the highest good occurred in Part One of the Religion as a response to the moral anxiety of even the best of us to sustain moral self-confidence in the face of the practical and theoretical limits of empirical character. The propensity to evil remains a threat so long as one cares about happiness and tries to make sense of the relations between morality and happiness in a good life. The highest good is supposed to provide an answer involving a turn to religion, and in Part Two Kant shows how an actual religion can bring God into the moral story to make moral character secure, without undermining moral goodness. What remains is to see how this extends to an account of the highest good as a final end – a purpose to be realized through our moral action. This is the subject of the third and fourth parts of the Religion.17 There is unfortunately only time for a quick survey of their argument.
We should continue, as Kant does, by looking at what remains a problem for the best of us after the deed of moral conversion that re-orients the heart, and after the resolution of the subjective anxieties. There is the risk of human frailty, being overcome by strong feeling, and the lure of the other loves that make up a person’s character and that tempt us to impurity. Even a good person seeks worldly happiness; we live and love socially in ways that make us vulnerable to comparative assessments of worth. The best of us remains “exposed to the assaults of the evil principle” just because he lives among human beings “who will mutually corrupt each other’s moral disposition and make one another evil” (RGV 6:93–4). The imperfect nature of human projects, the strains and costs of cooperation, the fog of self-confidence, are enough to erode virtue. It adds up. We don’t live alone; individual effort is not enough; there is no invisible hand to set things right. Since the threat to human goodness arises from the ways we pursue our separate purposes, the solution is a union around a common principle: an ethical community. (Morality on its own does not give rise to a community; the idea of the kingdom of ends gives the objective form of a moral order, not a plan for living together.)
The ethical community as Kant describes it has two defining features – its laws are laws of virtue and it is a church. We are to understand a law of virtue as a command of God. The contrast is with a political order that regulates external action; that is its purpose, and all it can do given the epistemic limits of human judging. Because we cannot know one another’s hearts, our law cannot be a law of virtue. No such limit applies to God: He can command where he can judge. So we are able to think of ourselves as in a community of virtue, as “a people of God,” whose law commands the heart (RGV 6:99).
Second, the ethical community can protect human beings from each other’s influence, combating natural tendencies toward “envy, addiction to power, avarice,” and avoiding “dissensions from their common goal of goodness” (RGV 6:97). It does this by providing a common end that orients the inner life of each member: They together pursue the “preservation of morality by counteracting evil with united forces” (RGV 6:94). The organizing principle of the community in the hands of human beings is a church, a disciplinary body in the Foucauldian sense: an institution whose practices and texts, its spiritual exercises, serve the law, maintaining the moral order of the inner life of virtue.18 Whereas the end of the political community is equal freedom (which need be no person’s end), the end of the ethical community is the highest good in nature, the improvement of the human race as a common end of all its members. It is an end we can love, and one that organizes our other loves. Indeed, by adding to our loves, it can aim to change human nature. The remainder of the Religion sets out the conditions and potential pitfalls of a church that would fulfill this moral purpose.19
The overall argument of the Religion is that liberal Christianity has both a theology that answers the anxieties of the best of us, and an ecclesiastical church (of worship and text) that creates an ethical community in which we together work toward the highest moral good in nature. Able to win the hearts of those who understand their duty, it answers their need for an ultimate end for moral action which reason can justify.
6 There is a more general lesson we can take away from this immersion in the Religion. Some appearances to the contrary, there is serious space in Kant’s moral thinking for the subjective needs of the human moral person. The issues are not foundational, but they are vital to understanding what morality is for us. Kant’s focus on subjectivity is not about the impediments to moral action (those are virtue’s concerns). It is about securing our confidence in our moral identity and finding a home for moral life in community with others. Kant thinks religion and the right sort of church can do this. In the next century, others make the same kind of argument in terms of a progressive history and the right sort of politics.20 One might almost say: Before the French Revolution the idea of the highest good has to involve religion; after, there is a secular option. It is interesting, though not surprising, that many of the questions that must be answered remain the same. Can we see beyond the limits of individual action to a good we might together be promoting? How do we approach the burdens of staying the course within a conception of a decent human life? How can we make peace with our past transgressions? What is surprising is to discover how clearly Kant saw that the material form of the highest good had to get it right about institutions as well as teleology to make a common highest good possible.21
1 I have for a long time shared John Rawls’ sense of disappointment that the marvelous edifice of Kant’s moral philosophy was judged, by Kant, to require religion for support. This chapter attempts to ease some of that.
2 Kant sets aside both the so-called happiness of Stoic contentment that jettisons desire-satisfaction and the beatitude of the holy will (KrV 5:118).
3 The General Remark that closes each part of the Religion details the aspects of the historical religions that cannot survive philosophical and moral scrutiny. Sometimes because the piece of a religion is metaphysically preposterous; sometimes because it would undermine morality. The relation between philosophy and religion is not unlike that between philosophy and natural science. In both cases the philosophical subject-matter is a human practice, found, not given a priori, yet making claims that stand only if they can be explicated in terms that connect them to an a priori principle or foundation.
4 It will turn out to be an open question whether only religion can play this role.
5 Frailty is a kind of weakness of heart in the face of contra-moral impulse; impurity marks a tendency to mix moral and nonmoral motives; depravity or corruption is the willful subordination of the moral principle to the principle of self-love.
6 This pattern of telic development is not unique to morality. Consider, to take a very different example, the emergence of sexual or gender identity. It too is the end-result of multiple tendencies present from the start of life that are triggered and realized sequentially. A child moves from primitive bond to object-sensitive love in a way that organizes sexuality and gender identity. The process is uneven, occurring in stages, never quite complete. Many think it requires a dynamic crisis – like the oedipal complex – to regiment emergent sexuality. New kinds of attachment are made possible: mature love and friendship regulable by choice. Alongside new powers there are also new vulnerabilities. While the overall structure is teleologically organized, an individual’s trajectory through it may be subject to contingencies.
7 Objectively, the human being’s relation to the will’s principle is not a matter of attachment but of realization.
8 This is a very obscure idea. Perhaps the condition necessary to realize that one has gotten onto the wrong principle is getting it right? Weakness and frailty would remain, but they pose more of a management problem once the fundamental principle is secure. The language of conversion marks the fact that change in Gesinnung is not for any reason in the usual sense.
9 Kant suggests that there are other moral religions and other adequate conceptions of divine cooperation. Whether from conviction or from strategic concern, he presents liberal Christianity as the most successful.
10 The resources of Christian theology direct Kant to the terminology of “personification.” The use of a typic or schema is recurrent in Kant’s thought; it provides a way of making judgment possible where ideas or concepts have no direct application in experience. The most familiar typic is the law of nature formulation of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. We need to be able to tell whether something has the form of law (simpliciter or for rational beings as such). We’re in no position to say. But we can judge whether something could be a law of nature – whether it fits with other laws; whether its governance is coherent for the things under it. If a principle could not be a law of nature on such grounds, we can say that it does not have the form of law. In general, a typic allows judgment in one domain to yield conclusions in another.
11 It is a benign representation, Kant argues, since no external tempter would succeed if “we are not in secret agreement with him” (RGV 6:60).
12 I include the “etc.” for the und so weiter at the end of the German paragraph – a plain indication of the kind of discussion we are embarked on.
13 By analogy with moral psychology we are here dealing with what we might call theological psychology: what must be assumed true of our personality for us to have our assigned place in the theological story.
14 We can imagine the shock of the wrongdoing being the cause of conversion. It is yet intelligible to say, “I, who could not harm you, apologize for harming you.”
15 One could see the equally difficult notion of transference in psychoanalytic theory as its secular variant.
16 It does not alleviate the burdens of accident and circumstance, but it shouldn’t do that. It rather offers a new dimension of self-love that comes from the power of free giving.
17 Kant clearly has multiple purposes in mind with these last two parts, and multiple battles to fight about interpretation of religious doctrine and the morally acceptable form of religious institutions. Since this chapter is meant to be about the highest good, I restrict myself to that line of inquiry.
18 The idea of the ethical community encompasses all people, maybe all finite rational beings, at all times (the church invisible); each visible church is a partial society, a representation or a schema of the ideal (RGV 6:96).
19 Topics range from relation to historical antecedents, to its view of inwardness versus deeds, the role of holy texts, the relations between laity and clergy, the nature of priestcraft; natural versus Christian religion, the threats of religious delusion, creed and conscience, etc. It is worth some study if only because it is one of the few instances we have where Kant evaluates institutions that have a moral purpose.
20 Although Kant has the idea of a progressive history, its account is part of an external view of the way a moral history works.
21 Like so many others, I am grateful to Paul Guyer for his many contributions to the study of Kant’s philosophy.