It has been widely accepted that Kant holds the "Opacity Thesis," the claim that we cannot know the ultimate grounds of our actions. Understood in this way, I shall argue, the Opacity Thesis is at odds with Kant's account of practical self-consciousness, according to which I act from the (always potentially conscious) representation of principles of action and that, in particular, in acting from duty I act in consciousness of the moral law's determination of my will. The Opacity Thesis thus threatens to render acting from duty unintelligible. To diffuse the threat, I argue, first, that we need not attribute the Opacity Thesis to Kant. Kant's concern with the ubiquity of moral selfopacity does not imply the strong skeptical conclusion that knowledge of the grounds of one's action is impossible. Second, I show how moral self-opacity in cases of morally bad action emerges from the intrinsic inability of representing to oneself what one is doing, insofar one is pursuing the indeterminate end of "happiness." 1 | INTRODUCTION The greatest obstacle to moral uprightness, for Kant, is neither figuring out what the right thing to do is (everyone, in the first place, knows what duty requires of them, KpV 5:36) nor is it, strictly speaking, overcoming the temptation to transgress (for in knowing ourselves to be free we know that we could, in principle, overcome any pathological temptation and do what is right, MS 6:380, R 6:47). The greatest obstacle is rather self-deception, a peculiar "ability" to hide from our own selves the grounds of our own actions. For, repeatedly, Kant warns that even when we have done the nominally right thing, we can be deceived about why it is we acted as we have-fancying ourselves to have been motivated morally, when in fact we were only pursuing our contingent desires. 1 On the basis of Kant's statements about the possibility and ubiquity of moral self-deception, 2 interpreters have widely attributed to him the "Opacity Thesis," according to which we cannot know the genuine grounds of any given action-not only the actions of others but even our own. Consequently, we cannot know whether any given action is
Kant’s account of the feeling of moral respect has notoriously puzzled interpreters: on the one hand, moral action is supposed to be autonomous and, in particular, free of the mediation of any feeling on the other hand, the subject’s grasp of the law somehow involves the feeling of moral respect. I argue that moral respect for Kant is not, pace both the ‘intellectualists’ and ‘affectivists,’ an effect of the determination of the will by the law – whether it be a mere effect or the motivating cause of action – but is instead identical to it. Drawing on Kant’s general account of feeling as the awareness of how representations and their objects harm or benefit our own powers, I argue that the identity between moral respect and the determination to action contains two elements. Moral respect is, first, a form of practical self-consciousness which constitutes the subject’s recognition of the moral law and thus of herself as intrinsically bound by it, i. e., as a moral agent. Second, respect is a capacity for receptive awareness of particular features of our environment as well as other persons insofar as they benefit and harm us as moral agents. Thereby moral respect affords us awareness in concreto of particular, morally-conditioned ends. In this way moral respect provides the key for a Kantian account of genuinely free practical receptivity.
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