Barbara Herman: Kantian Commitments. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 222 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-284496-5

In this volume, Barbara Herman gathers ten essays published between 2006 and 2018, a “series of efforts to rethink many of the things” she took herself “to know about Kant’s ethics.” The topics covered are connected to what she describes as “a familiar set of issues in Kant’s interpretation,” such as (1) what counts as moral reasoning, (2) the status of human persons as moral agents, and (3) how the facts of our being socially embedded and materially embodied shape our duties. The origin of this need to rethink is her “growing conviction” that she “should be unsettled” in what she takes herself to know (vii). Hence, the first part of the volume is about rethinking Kant’s ethics, while the second part is about extending its boundaries. In the first essay of the first part, “Reasoning to Obligation” (which reworks the Kantian core of a “Kant to Hegel” conference she held at the University of Pittsburgh in 2006), Herman proposes to set out an “attractive simplification of some basic elements of Kant’s moral philosophy” by focusing on the familiar idea of the will as practical reason while emphasizing its active mode, as “a faculty of practical reasoning” (3). What she proposes is a “good reasoning” interpretation of good-willing that involves three steps: first, addressing the need to de-psychologize Kant’s view of moral action and motive, to free his moral theory from old objections (e.g., objections tied to emotions), and to make it better cohere with his theory of rational agency; second, making sense of “the negative or eliminative role of the categorical imperative formula within a full account of sound moral reasoning”; and third, explaining “why obligatory ends are needed to complete that account” (20). In the second essay, “The Difference that Ends Make,” Herman delves into the challenge posed by virtue theory for Kant’s project. As Herman notes, while Kant’s moral theory offers “an ethics of rules and duties,” all virtue ethics (from Aristotle onwards) offers “an ethics of character.” When tracing the line between Kantian ethics and virtue ethics, it helps to keep in mind, Herman suggests, “that Kant’s idea of good willing is not intended as an account of virtue” and that “its companion idea of acting from duty does not translate [to] any sense of acting for the sake of the noble.” By putting character first, virtue ethics has the unintended effect of minimizing “the role that ends play, especially final ends, as anchors of moral reasoning or deliberation” (21). Instead of being one among the many parts of Kant’s formal construction, the notion of taking “our rational nature as a final end, in reasoning from obligatory ends,” means expressing “our rational nature in action” while giving a rationale for “our pursuit of happiness.” Hence, while “we are not tasked to engage with morality for the sake of our happiness, our happiness is not a matter of indifference to morality” (41). “Making Exceptions,” the third essay, is about assessing Kant’s rigorism in the known cases of harming one to save the lives of others, e.g., by lying to the murderer at the door. While many try to reconcile a commitment to unconditional moral principles with the exceptions required by sane moral practices, Herman suggests that if it is true that Kant rejects exceptions, this does not make him “a rigorist in any worrisome sense”; instead, it makes him, “in a deep way, a committed casuist” (42). The eponymous fifth essay, “Kantian Commitments,” is about situating Kant as a powerful alternative to consequentialism. Herman lays out the central idea that makes an ethics genuinely Kantian by offering a set of comparisons with consequentialism. Herman reminds us that an action “is judged to be wrong not by evaluating produced states of affairs, but by assessing the reasoning of the agent who as a result produced the state of affairs.” Both Kant and the consequentialists look to the ends of the agent in assessing her/his actions, but they think about ends in different ways. For the latter, the “ends anchor instrumental reasoning and identify the action’s point or purpose in a state of affairs,” while for Kant, Herman notes, the ends play a further justificatory role insofar as the end, “under a description that shows its worthiness to be brought about, must be able to justify taking some action for its sake. That is, it must be possible to reason correctly from the end as valued to the intention to act” (88). Although it is hard to say whether a Kantian response to global poverty is more or less demanding than a consequentialist one, Herman suggests that “Kantian theory looks at the morally relevant needs of persons not directly in terms of well-being, but in terms of the objective requirement of moral agency (which will include considerations of well-being). The object of morality is not to satisfy human wants but to secure the material, institutional, and interpersonal conditions such that persons can reason and act correctly—locally and globally” (97-98). The future is not what the highest good is about. While we may not usually think of Kantian theory as offering “an empirically informed yet moral social vision for the future” (100) – that is, while we may view moral commitment as directed at the present, insofar as “we do have to have a positive impact on the rational well-being of those who exist now” – it is also true that by acting on universalizable principles and managing our motives, this commitment is in an important sense directed toward the well-being “of those who come to be in the future—on their capacity to deliberate well and to act effectively” (99). The second part begins with the sixth essay, “A Habitat for Humanity,” in which Herman addresses the role played by civil society in Kant’s Idea of Universal History by means of reconstructing the following progression. The first appearance of any person is formal; it is the “idea of a citizen with rights, each a limit to others’ actions and aims because they all act in the public space of coercively enforced law” (119). Second, alongside this, political conditions of justice, formal and material, support an environment in which the moral personality can emerge and find social support: “Self-esteem detaches from comparative and envy-driven pursuits and connects to the idea of participating in a shared civil life” (120). At this point, Herman raises a more speculative claim: “Among the things that come from our active engagement with the direction of history is the supplanting of nature’s cold indifference to our welfare by a concern for human happiness and well-being” (121), which requires the consideration of, third, “the social provision of education and the civic support of art and culture” (122). There is, however, a final cautionary word from the Idea: while it is true that nature, or natural causes, “can induce rational progress by worsening human conditions, we [human beings] may not do that. Nature’s acts are not justified by the progress they effect; it makes no sense to talk of justification there at all. But we require justification, and welcome features of outcomes don’t by themselves justify their being brought about.” “Morality Unbounded,” the seventh essay, takes up the Shelleyan call to consider whether there might be something about the nature or work of an authoritative moral requirement that necessarily limits its sphere of application. Herman’s starting point is the way in which some accounts of human rights—she mentions the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—offer “lists of specific rights, to education, work, marriage, and divorce, the literal implementation of which would leave the norms and practices of many groups in almost any social pluralism on shaky ground” (132). She lays out the following argument: first, there is no obvious nonmoral route to a group’s standing to legislate internally or make claims on other groups; second, while there may be a deliberative moral route to securing standing that can accept substantial differences in group practices, it “will not necessarily be in a group’s favored terms, and it may not preserve all the practices a group might think central to its way of life” (145-146). A group’s practice is morally possible—Herman concludes—if its system of actions and normative beliefs “can be reached deliberatively from fundamental moral ends”; hence, “many practices that make up pluralistic claims are morally possible, though not all are, and those that are possible will sometimes be so for reasons that do not match their original sources” (156). The eighth essay, “We are not Alone: A Place for Animals in Kant’s Ethics,” is about figuring out how animals might be brought into Kantian morality. The ninth, “Other to Self: Finding Love on the Path to Moral Agency,” sets off in the “artificial way of philosophers,” with the supposed question: “Who would you spend your life with, the person moved by love or the person moved by morality?” (175). Discussing papers by Bernard Williams, Herman delves into love and morality, describing love as “an engine of human development” (179). Rather than finding intractable conflicts between love and morality, she uncovers “a complex dynamic of their mutual dependence.… We are not egoist; we are not always nice. We are separate states of agency; we are not essentially separate. We come to perceive ourselves as persons in the moral sense by first seeing an other as having to be treated both as an object of love and as a source of other-centered reasons” (192). The tenth and final essay, “Religion and the Highest Good: Speaking to the Heart of Even the Best of Us,” is about the unity of virtue and happiness as the whole object of pure practical reason. Herman’s interest in the highest good turns out to be primarily practical. She wants to understand how engaging with the idea of a highest good might play out in the moral life of the good person. She notes that “when Kant describes [in Religion within the Boundaries of Pure Reason] the human propensity to evil, he locates it in the heart, not the will…. 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” (199). Some appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Herman concludes, “there is serious space in Kant’s moral thinking for the subjective needs of the human moral person.” The last of the Kantian commitments examined is this: Kant’s focus on subjectivity “is not about the impediments to moral actions (those are virtue’s concerns). It is about securing our confidence in our moral identity and finding a home in our moral life in community with others” (209). Regarding this volume’s place and role in contemporary Kant scholarship, one cannot fail to notice that its goal is impressive: rethinking Kant to lay the groundwork for an approach that coordinates different normative fields without either subsuming them or erasing their particularities. Herman’s main purpose in this volume, which deserves a place in every university library, is to present readers with a clear understanding of the structure and power of Kant’s regulative ideal of moral deliberation. While addressing Derek Parfit’s celebrated essay On What Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Herman distances herself from hybrid theories of morality (which combine a contractualist framework with an account of values), arguing that viewing the reasons that bear on judgment and action as value-responsive, as Parfit does, has a strong consequentialist character. Herman makes it clear that, the legitimate embrace of a “contractualist framework” notwithstanding, the fundamental aim of Kantian morality “is not to flat-out make things go best, but to find principles of action that everyone could rationally will” (58). In sum, Herman presents an interpretation of Kant’s ethics that shows it to be a powerful alternative not only to empiricist utilitarian ethics, but also to neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics and post-modernist individualist and existentialist ethical theories.