Kant and Consequentialism in Context: The SecondCritique’s Response to Pistorius

Abstract

Commentators disagree about the extent to which Kant’s ethics is compatible with consequentialism. A question that has not yet been asked is whether Kant had a view of his own regarding the fundamental difference between his ethical theory and a broadly consequentialist one. In this paper I argue that Kant does have such a view. I illustrate this by discussing his response to a well-known objection to his moral theory, namely that Kant offers an implicitly consequentialist theory of moral appraisal. This objection was most famously raised by Mill and Schopenhauer, but also during Kant’s time by Pistorius and Tittel. I show that Kant’s response to this objection in the second Critique illustrates that he sees the fundamental difference between his moral theory and a broadly consequentialist one to be one that concerns methodology.

Kant’s Derivation of Imperatives of Duty

“…There, Kant actually says: 'so all duties, as far as the kind of obligation (not the object of their action) is concerned, have by these examples been set out completely in their dependence upon the one principle'. 15 See for instance Beck (1963: 57), Sala (2004: 65), Timmermann (2007, Schneewind (2009: 143), andWalschots (2020). 16 The charge of implicit consequentialism was also made by H.A.…”

“…The fact that Kant arguably responds to both these charges separately indicates that even if he was concerned with the practicality of the categorical imperative elsewhere, he was not so concerned with the Groundwork. For discussion of Kant’s response to Pistorius see Guyer (2021) and Walschots (2021).…”