The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. , No.

ISSN

October

CRITICAL STUDIES

KANTIANISM, MORAL WORTH AND HUMAN WELFARE

B A W. W
Human Welfare and Moral Worth: Kantian Perspectives. B T E. H, J. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, . Pp. xi + . Price . or $. h/b, . or
$. p/b.)
The legacy of the late John Rawls includes not only his writings and their enormous
influence, but also his students, a number of whom count among the most
distinguished people now working in the field of ethics. These tend to be a combination of moral philosopher and Kant scholar, whose project (to quote Thomas Hills
self-description, which could apply as well to Rawls other prominent students as to
himself) is to develop a moral theory in the Kantian tradition that is as plausible as
possible (p. ).
Among Rawls students, Hill himself seems distinguished by his attempts to interpret Kants theory in such a way that it harmonizes maximally with moral common
sense. He has done this already in other similar books of essays: Autonomy and SelfRespect (), Dignity and Practical Reason in Kants Moral Theory () and Respect,
Pluralism, and Justice: Kantian Perspectives (). The present book deals significantly
with the fundamentals of Kantian moral theory, but less than the first two books did,
and more with a set of questions that have sometimes seemed problematic for
Kantians, among them questions about the nature of practical reason, the nonmoral good, happiness, human flourishing and personal values, conscience, guilt
and punishment. Kantian views on most of these topics have long been believed by
many to be deeply (and objectionably) at odds not only with common sense but also
with the decent feelings and impulses of healthy people. Hills aim in this book, to
put it in general terms, is to show that such beliefs are largely mistaken.
In the opening pages of many of the essays in this volume, Hill carefully limits the
scope of his defence of his version of Kantianism. The aim is typically restricted to
expounding the theory, comparing it with its rivals, showing how it harmonizes
better than they do with our common sense judgements, and explaining how it has
the resources to answer some common objections. He especially emphasizes that it is
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ALLEN W. WOOD

no direct argument in favour of a moral theory that it harmonizes with moral

common sense. But it answers standard objections to Kantianism when Hill shows
how a Kantian theory can do a better job of providing a rational theoretical account
of our common sense views on these matters than can the rival theories proposed by
Aristotelians, Humeans or utilitarians.
As a philosophical opponent, Hill is always fair, even understating at times the
advantage his arguments have gained him. As a Kant exegete, he never shies away
from the passages that might make trouble for his reading. He is always a moral
philosopher first, a Kantian second; and he never hesitates to criticize Kant or reject
his views if they seem less attractive or less defensible than what moral common
sense would endorse or the arguments would indicate.
The book consists of a dozen essays, and is divided into three parts. Part I, Some
Basic Kantian Themes, treats the relation of the moral law to autonomy, discusses
Kants thesis that a good will is the only thing good without limitation, and attempts
to describe and provide a limited defence of a version of Kantian constructivism.
Part II, Human Welfare: Self-Interest and Regard for Others, deals with issues surrounding self-interest, human flourishing and setting ones personal values, and also
beneficence toward others. Part III, Moral Worth: Self-Assessment and Desert,
discusses conscience and issues about punishment (which Hill argues are related to
each other), and concludes with a defence of the Kantian rejection of moral
dilemmas, while endorsing the Kantian position on how we should react to dicult
situations in human life that have been thought to give rise to moral dilemmas.
My discussion must concentrate on only a few points. I shall discuss three themes
in Hills book, one drawn from each section: moral constructivism, practical reason,
and the relation of conscience and punishment.

I. CONSTRUCTIVISM
One of the marks of a Rawlsian approach to Kant is the description of a properly
Kantian position in moral philosophy as a form of constructivism. I confess I have
always been mystified by such talk. Kant may (or may not) have been a sort of
constructivist in the philosophy of mathematics, but I see no basis for extending that
term to his moral philosophy. Hill acknowledges that its use by Kantians has been
unclear. Sometimes constructivism seems to refer to a kind of anti-realist position
in meta-ethics, sometimes a view in normative ethics or moral epistemology
according to which we accept or reject proposed moral principles by certain
standards (as Rawls does with principles of justice). I fear the term is often used more
for rhetorical eect than to convey anything substantive, as a loose way of dismissing
some standard realist or anti-realist views without oering any clear alternative, or
as announcing ones allegiance to an allegedly Kantian programme in moral philosophy without saying what that programme is.
Hill is less interested in the meta-ethical implications of constructivism than in its
implications for normative ethics. He describes constructivism generally as the view
that moral principles are to be seen as the outcome of certain procedures of thought
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KANTIANISM, MORAL WORTH AND HUMAN WELFARE

(or will) rather than as facts about the world (empirical or non-empirical) (p. ).
But here the problems begin, for this characterization gets virtually its whole
meaning from the assumption of a false dilemma. Suppose we accept that certain
procedures of thought are the right way to formulate or test moral principles. Does
this entail that these principles do not also report (or somehow reflect) facts about
the world? Hill makes no bones about the fact that constructivism, as he understands it, presupposes normative standards that are neither constructed nor justified
by any construction. He acknowledges that for a constructivist to take any other
position to suppose, that is, that all values and norms are constructed is to leave
no raw materials for the construction, and thus apparently to render the content of
morality entirely arbitrary. If Hill is right on this point, however, then these
independent standards might be facts about the world, and then the principles
constructed on the basis of them might also be seen as the outcome or expression of
those facts. Nor, on this understanding, does constructivism any longer seem
capable of lending any special support to any determinate position in meta-ethics,
since constructivism presupposes independent normative standards which, for all the
constructivist might know or care, might be metaphysically constituted by forms in a
Platonic heaven, or configurations of atoms and the void, or expressions of attitudes
and sentiments with no real referents or cognitive content whatever.
No doubt Kant himself would reject all three of these particular accounts of
them, but (as far as I can see) entirely on metaphysical and epistemological grounds,
not on grounds of moral theory. (Platonism about values would be transcendent
metaphysics; naturalism and emotivism would deprive moral principles of their a
priori status.) Kantian constructivists, as Kantians, might have reasons for following
him on these points; but as constructivists, there seems no reason why they should
take any position at all on the ontological status of the rational standards presupposed by their recommended construction of moral principles. Hill says that
expressing standards as rational guides and constraints on hypothetical choices may
discourage attempts to reify those standards as self-standing natural or supernatural
facts (p. ). But this discouragement can apply at most to our view of the rational
standards that are constructed, not at all to those presupposed by the construction; and it
need not apply even to the constructed standards to the extent that they are seen as
the necessary outcome of the presupposed ones.
So this leaves us with constructivism as the view that moral principles are to be
seen as the outcome of certain procedures of thought (or will), that is, with the part
of constructivism that most interests Hill anyway. His specification of the procedures
in question consists in giving an interpretation of Kants formula of the realm of
ends: the correct moral principles are those that rational agents would (or could)
agree to collectively as common moral laws binding on them under certain idealized
conditions. This would designate a family of possible views about the content and
justification of moral principles, which dier among themselves depending on the
choice of idealizations and on the content of non-constructed standards for rational
agreement. Hill does not pursue their further determination in this regard, but
attends instead to defending the general idea of such a construction against objections based on misunderstandings of its aims. His defences, however, recommend
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ALLEN W. WOOD

constructivism only as one possible approach to the discovery and testing of moral
principles. They do not recommend it as the only approach, or even as the best
approach. They certainly do not display constructivism as giving us any insight at all
into the nature of moral principles or moral reality. I suspect that most Kantian
constructivists (including Hill) think that constructivism recommends itself as an
approach to the discovery or testing of moral principles, because they think it does
aord us such insights. But I have never seen any reason for thinking they are right
about any of this, and nothing in Hills discussion of constructivism seems designed
to support that thought.
On the issue of Kant interpretation, I must also register my disagreement with
Hills claim that constructivism is the right way to interpret the formula of the realm
of ends. This is a variant of the formula of autonomy, which commands us to follow
those maxims that contain in themselves the volition that they should be universal
laws, and it tells us to act according to the laws of a realm of ends. What is a realm
of ends? A realm is sometimes identified by Kant with a community of rational
beings who, according to the formula of humanity, are ends in themselves. On this
reading, the formula tells us to act on the laws that are suitable for governing a community of ends in themselves. But Kant never speaks of the members of the
community as collectively making the laws or consenting to them. He also defines a
realm as a relation between ends more generally: so, for instance, the realm of
natural ends is the system of all ends we find in organic beings and their purposive
relations to each other. On this reading, a realm of ends is a systematic combination among all the ends set by rational beings (including, but not solely, those beings
themselves as ends in themselves). The test it suggests is not What laws could all
rational beings rationally consent to?, but rather What laws would result in a
harmony between all their ends?.
Hill includes in his essay on Kantian constructivism a careful and accurate
exposition of Kants own contractarianism, presented as an ideal standard of right
(of the justice of coercive laws). But he underestimates the importance of Kants
distinction between right and morality, together with the fact that Kant never
presents rational consent to an ideal contract as a moral standard. The ideal contract
is clearly a device for explaining how we can retain our externally free status while
submitting to a system of coercive laws. And even in the realm of right, the ideal
contract is never a procedure for constructing anything. Our innate right to freedom
and the postulate of property rights are both independent of it. The ideal contract
rules out unjust laws, but never by itself prescribes anything. (Even though Kant
holds that only a republican constitution accords with this idea, he does not conclude that only republican states are legitimate.)
Regarding the exegetical issues, then, I conclude that Kant shows no signs at all
of being either a contractarian or a constructivist about morality. Many people who
think of themselves as Kantians in moral philosophy may be constructivists, but
there is really nothing in Kant from which any version of constructivism could
reasonably be drawn. Taken literally, Kantian constructivism is a non-referring
term.
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KANTIANISM, MORAL WORTH AND HUMAN WELFARE

II. PRACTICAL REASON

My personal favourite among the essays in this book is Reasonable Self-Interest, in
which Hill develops a common sense view about standards of practical rationality,
and argues that Kant is much closer to common sense than are the main theories of
practical reason which other philosophers have proposed. Of the latter, Hill distinguishes and discusses three classic models: the self-interest model, which takes
the basic demand of reason to be the advancement of ones own self-interest; the
coherence-and-eciency model, which identifies practical reason with certain
techniques for the self-consistent and cost-eective pursuit of whatever ends one
arbitrarily adopts; and the consequentialist model, which identifies practical rationality with the maximization of whatever is supposed to be intrinsically valuable.
The most striking thing about all three models is the harsh restrictions each
places on what can count as a reason for doing something. The self-interest model
refuses to allow the interests of others or anything intrinsically valuable to count as a
reason for doing anything, the coherence-and-eciency model refuses to let the
content of ones ultimate ends count as a reason either for or against their pursuit,
and the consequentialist model refuses to let any but possible future states of aairs
count as reasons for action. Both common sense and Kant, Hill convincingly argues,
accept as reasons some things that these restrictions rule out, and the philosophical
rationales which the three models present for their restrictions are conspicuously
uncompelling. All three have devices for reconstructing the reasons they rule out, or
at least for displaying as somehow rational the conduct which common sense would
recommend on grounds they cannot countenance. For instance, they construct
sophisticated arguments to the eect that the practices of common sense are those
that would be selected by a committee of timeless and detached utility-maximizers
engineering the mental processes of human beings. Hill rightly points out that none
of this is to the point (it is too much and too late), since for common sense, what is
crucial is that the interests of other people, or the inherent reasonableness of some
goals rather than others, or facts about the past, are sometimes good reasons,
whether or not we could ever be convinced by the fantastic detours that have been
cobbled together by theorists to arrive at the same conclusions.
Hill also observes that the classical theories typically represent reason as far more
intrusive and demanding than common sense and Kantian theory make it out to be.
According to common sense (and Kant, as Hill reads him), reason need not find, or
even seek, a unique course of action as the one to be done, and it gives the wrong
explanation for this to say that there can be ties. For the point is that reason does not
necessarily seek to maximize the good, or to regard good as maximizable. Not only
can dierent goods be rationally incommensurable, but it can sometimes still be
rational to do something even though you have even better reasons to do something
else. Reason in general does not operate like a mathematical calculus or a
mechanism designed to achieve a determinate purpose (though of course it does so
when doing mathematical calculations or designing mechanisms for determinate
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ALLEN W. WOOD

purposes). People count their own interests as reasons for doing things, and also the
interests of others, but not by weighing them against one another according to any
determinate rule. The theories of rationality favoured by economists and their kind
usually seem to be based on nothing but rabid generalizations from a few simple
rules that might apply to gambling addicts (but oddly, they seldom allow for the
often highly rational thought that one should stop gambling).
In Happiness and Human Flourishing, Hill argues persuasively that Kant is
right in considering that prudence and beneficence use the thinner idea of happiness
(as something like overall desire-satisfaction), in preference to the richer Aristotelianinspired idea of a flourishing human life. This is not only because we know much
less than Aristotelians (still less Nietzscheans) think we do about what a flourishing
life consists in, but because our respect for the dierent paths others may choose
should guide our conduct towards them, rather than our views about how they
might live more abundantly.
I disagree, however, with Hills main idea in Personal Values and Setting
Oneself Ends, which is that contrary to what many Kantians and Kant-interpreters
think, setting an end does not commit you to ascribing any objective or moral value
to it. Hill thus rejects, and understands Kant as rejecting, the scholastic slogan We
desire nothing under the influence of reason except under the species of the good
at least as this slogan is understood by those who think Kant argues, from our
capacity to set ends, that we are committed to the objective value of those ends, and
(then by a further substantive inference) to the objective worth, as end in itself, of the
rational nature that sets those ends.
Hill is right that this adage, and Kant interpreters who think Kant was right to
regard a choice of ends as committing one to the objective value of what is chosen,
are attributing to ordinary choice far more commitment than the choosers intend
(p. ) at least more than they sometimes intend. But that does not settle the
philosophical issue. A politician would often like to assert p (because that assertion
appeals to part of the electorate), and yet may not want (or even intend) to be committed to denying not-p (since that denial would cause trouble with other voters). But
what the politician intends does not determine what the assertion that p commits
one to. Calling something a choice is ascribing to it a certain rational structure
(involving rational commitments) that may go beyond what the chooser intends to
be committed to.
Hills arguments on this point also play fast and loose at certain points with terms
like committed. He disputes the Kantian idea that setting ends involves a commitment to moral values, by saying that history looks dimly on eorts to demonstrate
that anyone rational enough to deliberate from self-interested principles is
necessarily committed to moral standards (p. ). History would be relevant if the
issue were whether self-interested people show a commitment to moral standards
in the sense of exhibiting that they actually care about such standards. Of course
history strongly suggests that many do not give a fig about them. But if the issue is
whether setting your own good as an end involves a rational commitment to care
about moral standards (whether or not you actually do care), then history is not
decisive, or even relevant. On the exegetical point, whether Kant really held that
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KANTIANISM, MORAL WORTH AND HUMAN WELFARE

there is such a commitment, the textual issues are complicated; I find Hills discussion interesting and challenging, but in the end unpersuasive.

III. CONSCIENCE AND PUNISHMENT

Some of Kants most conspicuous statements about punishment appear to endorse
what Hill calls the intrinsic desert thesis, the general idea that it is morally
necessary, not just for contingent reasons, that wrongdoers ought to suer (p. ).
Perhaps this thesis was among Kants private opinions, but Hill argues that his
philosophical doctrines contain nothing to support it. Kants theory of right justifies
punishment only in so far as it serves coercively to prevent the violation of laws and
rights. Statements that appear to endorse the intrinsic desert thesis are consistent
with Kants theory of right only to the extent that they can be understood as
articulating standards of fairness and honesty in the application of penalties whose
sole legitimate function is the coercive enforcement of right by the state.
Hill and others (such as Sharon Byrd) who have made this observation about
Kants theory of right sometimes express it by saying that Kant has not a retributivist justification of punishment, but rather a deterrence justification (perhaps with
certain retributivist views about how institutions of punishment should operate).
This is basically correct, but the term deterrence can be misleading. The aim of
punishment, on Kants theory, is not merely to deter violations of right but coercively
to prevent them. Only the state has the right to coerce in this way, and it is justified in
coercing only to prevent violations of right (or violations of laws whose collective
purpose it is to secure a rightful condition). Not all deterrence is coercive prevention.
I might deter you from making a rude remark which I see you are about to make to
a friend of mine by throwing you a grimace that indicates it will displease me if you
continue. I have a perfect right to grimace in this way, and my grimace (even if it
succeeds in preventing you from making the remark) is not an act of coercion. It
would be an act of coercion, however, if I prevented you from making the remark
by pulling out a gun and threatening to shoot you if you insult my friend; and this is
something I would not have a right to do, not only because I do not represent the
state, but also because your insulting remark (while distasteful and perhaps even
immoral) would not be a violation of any law or anyones right. So my deterrent
grimace could not be justified as an act of punishment on Kants theory, even if it
were intended as one. On Kants theory, then, the function of punishment is, strictly
speaking, not to deter violations of right, but to prevent them through external coercion.
Punishment is a necessary function of the state in protecting right, but it has no
place whatever in the sphere of ethics, which has to do with the rational selfgovernment of the conduct of individuals by those individuals themselves.
Hills account of Kant on the relation of punishment to morality goes wrong in a
couple of respects through neglect of these points. In Four Conceptions of Conscience he presents an interesting exposition of Kants view of conscience, contrasting it with three other conceptions: a traditional religious one, an anthropological
relativist one, and Joseph Butlers naturalisticrationalistic view. Hill rightly stresses
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ALLEN W. WOOD

Kants idea that conscience is a kind of inner court, processing moral indictments
and defences of the agents own past or proposed future conduct, and rendering a
verdict of guilty or not guilty. But he presses the analogy farther than either the texts
or Kants theory of morality warrants when he declares that the court passes
sentence and punishes the moral agent: If it judges us to be guilty, we are made to
suer and at times the result can be torment (p. ). There is no question that Kant
conceives of our self-judgement through conscience as painful to us it is, he says,
self-contempt and inner abhorrence. But I question whether Kant ever does, or
even could (consistently with his theory of morality) regard the inner judge as
imposing this pain on us as punishment for moral misconduct. Violations of the moral
law and ethical duties, in contrast with violations of right, criminal law or juridical
duties, are not (in Kants theory, at least) fit objects of punishment at all. The pain
we feel at having fallen short morally is a feeling inseparable from rational recognition of our moral oence. But it is not a punishment, because it is not external
coercion, and its function is not to enforce right.
It is analogous with the moral disapproval of others. In contrast with Mill, who
regards both conscience and public opinion as external sanctions imposed on our
conduct by society, Kant holds that in matters of ethics (unlike matters of right), it is
a violation of our freedom for others to coerce us to behave in conformity with their
moral opinions, or even with our own genuine ethical duties. Because morality is
solely a matter of a rational agents free self-government, others have no business
trying to enforce it by punishing our moral faults or misconduct (when they involve
no violation of right). Hill recognizes this at one point when he says Perhaps
surprisingly, Kant did not encourage the enforcement of morals by informal social
sanctions (p. ). Yet it is perhaps revealing that Hill finds this surprising. On the
contrary, I would say, it is just what we should have expected from a philosopher
whose conception of morality is based on the idea of rational autonomy. To find it
surprising is significantly to misunderstand the spirit of Kantian ethical theory.
I would not make so much of this were it not that in Punishment, Conscience
and Moral Worth Hill undertakes to defend the thesis that fear of punishment,
including the self-blame of conscience and others disapproval, can be, for a Kantian
theory, a morally laudable motive for doing the morally right thing and avoiding the
wrong. What he successfully shows here is only that since punishment and the disapproval of others may often be aligned with what we ought to do, when this is the
case, fear of them may serve as a name (or rather a misnomer) for our own rational
motives to do and refrain as we ought. Beyond this, any suggestion that Kantian
theory should regard acting on such fears as having moral worth gets the basic spirit
of Kantian morality entirely wrong. At one point, Hill himself seems to question his
own thesis when he prefaces a statement of it with Whether we call the motive
fear or not ... (p. ). But of course fear was the precise term Hill himself had
chosen. He would never have found Kant using such a term in this context.
In his discussions of punishment, Hill also refers repeatedly to the idea (which I
suppose he picked up from Herbert Morris he could not have picked it up from
Kant) that punishment constitutes a communitys collective expression of moral
disapproval directed at lawbreakers. He even uses this idea in accounting for Kants
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KANTIANISM, MORAL WORTH AND HUMAN WELFARE

apparent endorsements of the intrinsic desert thesis, by saying that strict, consistent
and proportional punishments are the only way to deliver the social message in a
fair, honest and truthful way. Hill even betrays some doubts on his own part about
this function of punishment when he says Suppose we assume that, for better or
worse, punishment has an expressive function ... (p. ). What he does not realize
is that the idea that punishment might justifiably have an expressive function is
fundamentally inconsistent with Kants entire theory of right. Punishment is external
coercion in the service of protecting right. No individual and no community therefore has any right to coerce anyone as a means of expressing moral disapproval. It is
arguable that punishment inevitably carries with it some moral disapproval of
wrongful acts. Perhaps so; but this has to be incidental to its function as punishment,
and should not be permitted to shape institutions of punishment.
Hill once says this himself: We should not deprive people of liberty and make
them suer in order to express our moral disapproval (p. ). But he seems to think
that it is still all right for society to punish people precisely in order to express moral
disapproval, as long as it does so only while at the same time enforcing right.
However, I cannot see how his assertions here are self-consistent.
But what of Kants views that a morally good will constitutes the indispensable
condition of worthiness to be happy, and that the highest good consists in Gods
proportioning happiness to this worthiness? Hill correctly points out that Kant never
intends these views to constitute any sort of endorsement of the idea that it is our
business to proportion happiness to moral worthiness (p. ). But it also seems
entirely inconsistent with Kants theory to view Gods apportioning of happiness to
worthiness as a system of rewards and punishments (a cosmic enforcement of morality,
as though moral laws were laws of right). The only consistent way to express Kants
conception of the highest good would therefore have to be this: God is quite free to
apportion happiness to worthiness as he sees fit. Strictly speaking, he owes no one
(however good their will) any happiness, and neither he nor anyone else is entitled,
much less required by justice, to punish anyone (however evil) for transgressions of
ethical duty. But if it pleases a rational impartial spectator to see happiness bestowed
on a person with a good will, and displeases the same spectator to see a person with
a thoroughly bad will enjoying uninterrupted prosperity, then it is suitable to our
conception of the divine will as perfectly good that God should apportion happiness
according to worthiness.
I think Kant cannot always be acquitted of sometimes employing images of God
as judge which are inconsistent with his own doctrines, especially when attempting
to interpret traditional religious ideas in terms of his moral theory. Perhaps such
images, along with the views that punishment is permissible as a social expression of
moral disapproval, and that both conscience and the moral disapproval of others are
permissibly conceived as forms of punishment, accord better with moral common
sense than with Kantian moral theory. But in that case I think that here Kantian
moral theory is in the right and moral common sense in the wrong.
Stanford University

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