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Tentative Title: The Possibility of Acting from Duty

(The title is partly a nod to Nagel’s The Possibility of Altruism. That little book of Nagel’s has influenced me immensely, and in this dissertation I take up themes similar to ones in that book. But this title also helps to place emphasis on the weakness of the thesis of the dissertation. I only claim that acting from duty is something some of us are sometimes capable of doing. Unlike some Kantians, I don’t plan to have this capacity play a prominent or constitutive role in an account of agency, rational action, moral worth, and so on. I only want to argue that it is psychologically possible, a capacity we can exercise at least some of the time.)

Abstract:

Immanuel Kant famously thought that an action has moral worth only if it is done “from duty.”  He illustrates this with several examples in the first section of the Groundwork.  Kant discusses doing the right thing (e.g. charging an inexperienced customer a fair price for goods) for different reasons or from different motives.  He distinguishes both action from “direct inclination” and action for a “selfish purpose” from his action “from duty.”  The idea is that, at least on my reading of him, we can only act from duty if at least two conditions are met:

(a)    the motive of the action is ultimately unselfish (at least for cases involving duties to others), and

(b)   the “source” of the motive is “Reason,” not “Passion.”

The first condition is a rejection of a Hobbesian egoistic view while the second is a rejection of a Humean anti-rationalist view, or so I shall argue.  These two conditions are directly connected to the debates about psychological egoism and “Humean” theories of the will, respectively.  The Kantian view is that in order to be able to act from duty, we must have the capacity to have unselfish ultimate motives and to be “motivated by Reason,” where this is roughly the ability to overcome our mere inclinations.

There has been substantial debate about what Kant precisely means by “acting from duty” and whether this standard for moral conduct is simply too high.  But there is a more modest question that a moral psychologist might ask:  Can we act from duty?  That is the question of this dissertation.  And the thesis will be that if we look to the empirical and conceptual issues, we’ll see that we do have this important capacity.  While I won’t tackle the issue of whether “acting from duty” is necessary for moral action, I’ll be assuming that it’s an important question in moral philosophy whether we have that capacity.