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A New Narrative for Post-Kantian Ethics

Review of Robert Stern, Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel,


Kierkegaard, Cambridge University Press, 2012, 277pp., $90.00 (hbk), ISBN
9781107012073.

Penultimate Draft
Please cite final version: Mind 123 (492):1246-1249 (2014)

Roberts Sterns new book offers an original and elegant retelling of the story of the
development of theories of moral obligation from Kant though Kierkegaard. Sterns
account is pitched against what he calls the standard story. According to the
standard story, Kants importance in the history of ethics comes from his
recognition of the fact that autonomy is incompatible with moral realism, and his
consequent attempt to reground morality in the self-legislating moral subject.
Kants most notable successors (Hegel and Kierkegaard) followed him in rejecting
realist accounts of value, but came to think that his alternative to moral realism
suffered from the defect of emptiness, a problem they attempted to solve in different
ways: either by recourse to some kind of normative social theory or by emphasizing
the importance of subjective choice or inscrutable divine commands.

Sterns counter-narrative begins by contesting the anti-realist interpretation of Kant


at the heart of the standard story. These anti-realist interpretations have been
under assault for some time now; several notable interpreters, including Stern
himself, have put forth powerful arguments for interpreting Kant as a moral realist
of one stripe or another. In the early chapters of his book, Stern carefully and even-
handedly reviews the arguments that have been made on both sides of this debate,
adding a few news ones along the way. He tries to show not only that there are no
good philosophic reasons to think that Kantian autonomy is incompatible with
realism, but that even the strongest textual evidence that Kant thought otherwise,
like his response to Pistorius in the second critique, is at best ambiguous.

Stern is not out to deny, however, that autonomy plays a crucial role in Kantian
ethicshe wants to show that its role has been misunderstood. Kantian autonomy,
he argues, is not intended as an alternative to realism; it is not a new account of why
certain actions are good or right. Rather, it has the more restricted function of
explaining why what is good and right has an obligatory or binding character. It was
meant to displace certain intermediate forms of divine command theory, which
offered an intuitive account of why we are obligated (by God) to do what was right
(independently of Gods command). Once these issues are clearly distinguished, it
can be seen that Kants own account of obligation has a similar two-tier character:
he is a realist regarding the content of our moral reasons, but appeals to autonomy
only to explain the obligatory form that moral considerations take in human life.
The rest of the book attempts to show that this insight into Kants ethics offers us a
new way to think about post-Kantian ethics. Rather than viewing Hegel and
Kierkegaard as attempting to solve the problem of emptiness, a problem which is
not really there on Sterns view, they can be seen to represent alternative accounts
of a more restricted problem: that of the source of the obligatoriness of morality.
Stern arranges these three figures in a tight dialectical circle. He argues that Kant is
driven from the inadequacy of divine command accounts of obligation to his theory
of autonomy as self-legislation; Hegel (following Schiller) finds this solution too
dualistic, so moves to a social command account; Kierkegaard finds that Hegels
solution fails to make morality rigorous enough, so moves back to a divine
command account. In his concluding chapter, Stern argues that the merits and
defects of each position are so balanced as to leave one in a kind of equipoise
between the three options.

No one who is familiar with Sterns previous work will be surprised to find that the
book is such a pleasure to read. Stern is crystal clear about what he is arguing and
what his evidence is, he is very generous to alternative interpretations, and he
always has something new and interesting to say. One might worry, though, that the
elegant structure of his argument requires simplifying the issues at stake here.

Stern writes as if there is a single problem of moral obligation to which each


thinker he treats offers a different solution. But the problem of obligation seems to
change in non-trivial ways throughout the book. In the chapters on Kant, the
problem is basically phenomenological: why it that a moral action appears to us as
commanded or necessitated (79)? In the chapters on Hegel, however, the problem
is motivated by means of Susan Wolfs argument that we need a distinction between
things that are merely morally desirable and things we are obligated to do, things
we can be sanctioned for failing to do (155). This second issue is clearly distinct
from the phenomenological one: for Wolf (and presumably Sterns Hegel), such
obligations are a sub-set of the moral reasons we are subject to, not the form taken
by all moral reasons in finite humanity. When we finally get to the chapters on
Kierkegaard the problem of moral obligation has changed into yet another form. It
is now the problem of accounting for the demandingness of morality: that its
commands sometimes pay no regard to our capabilities, requiring us to do what is
impossible on our own strength (206). This last cannot be the same problem of
obligation that Kant and Hegel were interested in, since both Kant and Hegel deny
obligation has this particular feature.

These shifts in the very statement of the problem suggest that deeper philosophic
differences are being minimized. Stern is certainly aware that there are
interpretations of Hegel in which notions of obligation have no central placehe
himself defended such an interpretation in an earlier essay on Hegel. But here, he
rejects this kind of approach as simplistic, rightly pointing out that Hegel continues
to speak of duty (Pflicht) throughout the Philosophy of Right. But, as Stern surely
knows, Hegels notion of duty is not equivalent to Kants notion of obligation, for
Hegel explicitly denies that duty is rightly understood as having the form of an ought
(Sollen) or a demand (Forderung). This at least suggests that Hegel is not offering an
alternative answer to the question of why moral actions must appear as
commanded or necessitatedhe is rejecting the claim that duties must have this
form. Stern might have good reasons not to read Hegels criticisms of the moral
standpoint this way, as dissolving the problem of obligation, but it is not clear how
Sterns own narrative can be made to square with this aspect of Hegels teaching.

The chapters on Kierkegaard offer detailed readings of several of Kierkegaards


works, but even there is room to worry that certain important differences are being
swept under the rug. Like others who have offered divine command interpretations
of Kierkegaard, Stern bases a large part of his argument on Works of Love. He reads
the Works of Love as arguing that morality is more demanding than Hegel
recognized and that this demandingness can only be accounted for if we are being
asked to comply with moral requirements by God. But Kierkegaard never
unambiguously speaks of the demandingness of morality as such. What he speaks
of is the demands of the love commandment: the specific Christ-given injunction
that we love one another as we love ourselves. This particular commandment is
demanding in the specific sense that it requires the humanly impossible: it requires
us to love in a way that goes beyond our natural capacities. But Kierkegaard never
says, nor is it plausible to think, that this feature of the love commandment is typical
of morality. This does not amount to skepticism about whether anything as
demanding as the love commandment really is a moral requirement on us (248).
The crucial issue concerns whether demandingness in this specific Kierkegaardian
sense is put forth as a universal characteristic of moral obligations, even those
pagans are under. If the answer to this question is no, as I think it is, then the Works
of Love cannot be said to include a general theory of moral obligation at all. Instead,
it must be read as offering a divine command theory of single divine command.

Understanding Moral Obligation is the first major attempt to use the realist
interpretation of Kant to re-narrate post-Kantian developments in ethics. It tries to
show that Hegel and Kierkegaard can be read as making internal criticisms of Kants
theory of obligation, criticisms that accept his way of posing the problem and do not
presuppose any dubious constructivist interpretation of his project. The resulting
picture of the deadlock between these rival theories of obligation is provocative and
original; it will certainly serve as a model for how historical research can be used to
contribute to contemporary debates.

Mark Alznauer
Northwestern University

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