(no subject)
Somewhat surprisingly, I'm getting good at this whole grad student thing. Although I went out on a limb and wrote a paper arguing that accepting simple hedonism entails accepting that reason cannot motivate action for my Plato class, W. Mann and K. Vogt really liked it. It was really fun to write, and it's giving me a better sense of how I want to do history of philosophy; I want my work to be far more informed by contemporary metaphysics and epistemology than I had expected in the past. That is, I want to look at the problems that various historical figures leave for us and see what kind of solutions their work might want to invite. I'm a lot less concerned as to whether ideal causation is a good response to Malebranche's occasionalism; I just want to see if it's a good view to have, and if not how figuring out what kind of mistakes Leibniz might have made can point us in the right direction.
That's the strategy I'm adopting in my metaethics paper. I'm trying to argue that Kant conflates two kinds of prudence, one kind that's merely hypothetical and another that's categorical. Since Kant (and McDowell following him) makes the mistake of believing that all imperatives of prudence are hypothetical, he can't support his claim that one would fail to be rational if she failed to do x even though she recognized that morality demanded that she do x. McDowell recognizes that the Kantian account he develops can't support this claim, but that's very unsatisfactory to me. A lot of the appeal of Kantian ethics comes from the connection it builds in between moral judgments and motivations without an appeal to some kind of weird property or the claim that moral judgments are non-cognitive. So, in short, I think it's better to find a spot for categorical imperatives of prudence and depart from the Kantian picture there than to just give up this picture of moral motivation.
That's the strategy I'm adopting in my metaethics paper. I'm trying to argue that Kant conflates two kinds of prudence, one kind that's merely hypothetical and another that's categorical. Since Kant (and McDowell following him) makes the mistake of believing that all imperatives of prudence are hypothetical, he can't support his claim that one would fail to be rational if she failed to do x even though she recognized that morality demanded that she do x. McDowell recognizes that the Kantian account he develops can't support this claim, but that's very unsatisfactory to me. A lot of the appeal of Kantian ethics comes from the connection it builds in between moral judgments and motivations without an appeal to some kind of weird property or the claim that moral judgments are non-cognitive. So, in short, I think it's better to find a spot for categorical imperatives of prudence and depart from the Kantian picture there than to just give up this picture of moral motivation.