Kant's Moral Psychology of the Will

康德的意志道德心理学

• 批准号: AH/E504493/1
• 负责人: Daniel Morgan
• 金额: $ 3.21万
• 依托单位: University of Bristol
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2007 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FE504493%2F1
• 关键词: Kant; Moral; Psychology; Will

The project aims to investigate Kant's views on the psychological roots of wrong-doing and evil, in order to bring them into dialogue with contemporary moral philosophical views on the subject. Kant clearly thinks that evil is at least a very prevalent characteristic of human beings; this is the main claim of a significant book in his corpus, the Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. But the exact nature of his view is rather poorly understood, and this part of Kant's ethical position has frequently been dismissed by commentators, as at best a curiosity and at worst as simply incompatible with other central views he holds about ethics. It must be said that Kant himself bears much of the responsibility for this situation, since his discussions of the topic are distressingly unclear. In particular Kant has brought significant condemnation upon himself by claiming that a formal proof of human radical evil is available, without actually telling us what that proof is supposed to be. Nevertheless the widespread tendency to ignore Kant's account of evil is a mistake, I think, since an account of how this claim fits into his moral philosophy as whole can be provided. Essentially, Kant thinks that beings with the kind of will that human beings possess have an inherent tendency to try to extend their sphere of free choice as far as possible, which necessarily involves the subjugation of the free choices of others to our own. Our free wills draw us to affirm our liberty, but also bring the tendency to extend that liberty to license. The project aims to develop this reading of Kant's moral psychology, and to suggest that contemporary moral psychology can usefully draw on these resources to help us understand better the motivation behind wrong-doing and evil.

该项目旨在研究康德关于错误和邪恶的心理根源的观点，以便将其与当代道德哲学观点进行对话。康德清楚地认为，邪恶至少是人类非常普遍的特征；这是他的著作《纯粹理性界限内的宗教》中一本重要著作的主要主张。但人们对他的观点的确切性质知之甚少，康德伦理立场的这一部分经常被评论家忽视，充其量是一种好奇，最坏的是与他所持有的关于伦理学的其他核心观点不相容。必须说，康德本人对这种情况负有很大责任，因为他对这个话题的讨论令人痛苦地不清楚。特别是康德声称存在人类根本邪恶的正式证据，但实际上没有告诉我们该证据应该是什么，这给自己带来了严重的谴责。然而，我认为，忽视康德对邪恶的解释的普遍倾向是一个错误，因为可以提供这种主张如何融入他的整个道德哲学的解释。从本质上讲，康德认为，具有人类所拥有的那种意志的存在体有一种内在的倾向，试图尽可能地扩大自己的自由选择范围，这必然涉及到将他人的自由选择屈服于我们自己的自由选择。我们的自由意志吸引我们确认我们的自由，但也带来了将自由扩展到许可的倾向。该项目旨在发展对康德道德心理学的解读，并建议当代道德心理学可以有效地利用这些资源来帮助我们更好地理解错误和邪恶背后的动机。