Acting from Duty

In the first section of the Groundwork, Kant introduces the distinction between acting from duty and acting merely in accordance with duty to explicate the concept of a good will (G 4:397-8). This distinction has provoked a lot of controversy, not least because Kant’s Neo-Aristotelian critics have treated it as evidence of yet another variety of rigorism in Kant: motivational rigorism. The critics take issue with Kant’s claim that only actions performed from duty have moral worth. In their view, Kant is not only wrong to deny that actions from certain other-regarding emotions such as love or sympathy can be morally worthy, he is also guilty of neglecting that, in many cases, expressing emotions is precisely what morality demands (Williams 1973: 225-9, and Stocker 1976: 453-5).

The most influential response on Kant’s behalf is the so-called non-accidentality response.176 According to this line of response, Kant’s opponents misunderstand his

objection to dutiful action from inclination. Kant’s complaint is not that inclinations are essentially partial, nor that they are unreliable guides to dutiful conduct. His issue is rather that, even if someone’s inclinations were such that they did lead to moral outcomes with perfect regularity, this would be a mere accident. It would depend on a “fortuitous alignment of motives and circumstances” (Herman 1993: 6). On this basis, Kantians can refute the charge of motivational rigorism by, on the one hand, allowing that emotions can be involved in various ways as long as their involvement does not render dutiful conduct accidental, and, on the other hand, debunking the critics’ idea that anything more than this is required for a plausible account of moral worth. They can admit, for example, that acting from duty is compatible with being

176 _{For statements of this response, see Herman 1993: 3-6 and Baron 1995: 130, 173. This is not the}

only Kantian line of response to the above objection, however. Among other strategies, Kantians have also appealed to a distinction between motive and manner of performance (Tannenbaum 2002: 324- 7).

inclined to act in this way, with relying on one’s affective dispositions to determine what exactly the situation demands, and even with acting from a sensible incentive, if the incorporation of that incentive into one’s maxim is sensitive to moral demands.177

My aim in this section is to show that this response will not satisfy the critics, unless it is modified so as to reflect the distinction between two kinds of counterfac- tual robustness that I introduced as part of the Agent-Scope Reading in sect. 2.2. We can begin by looking at Kant’s discussion of dutiful action in the Groundwork. Having set aside all actions that are contrary to duty, he distinguishes between two kinds of actions that accord with duty but are not performed from duty: actions from mediate inclination and actions from immediate inclination. The former, he claims, are easily recognized for what they are, whereas, with respect to the latter, we are prone to confusion. For example, if a shopkeeper “keeps a fixed general price for everyone” when “there is a good deal of trade” (G 4:397) but overcharges his inexperienced customers when he considers himself to be unobserved, it is safe to assume that he is not acting from duty. Since he is only inclined to charge fair prices when the circum- stances make this policy an efficient means to profit-maximisation, since he is only mediately inclined to do so, his conduct when unobserved will attest to his unworthy motives. By contrast, if someone is “so sympathetically attuned that, without any further motive of vanity or self-interest they find an inner satisfaction in spreading joy around them” (G 4:398), that is, if someone is immediately inclined to beneficence, then it is far more difficult to discern whether their actions are performed from duty or from inclination. It is harder to assess the worthiness of their motives because they have a more stable tendency to act in conformity with duty. So the hypothesis that they are acting from duty is harder to falsify.

According to proponents of the non-accidentality response, the two cases are alike in that, in both cases, the agents’ dutiful conduct is a mere accident: it is a mere accident that the shopkeeper and the philanthropist do what duty demands. It seems to me that this account underestimates the difference between the two cases and, in

177 _{For Kant’s thesis that incentives have to be incorporated into maxims, see R 6:24. This thesis is}

known as Kant’s “Incorporation Thesis” – a term coined by Henry Allison (1990: 39-40). Note, also, that, according to Herman, non-accidentality is necessary but not sufficient for an action’s being done from duty and, thus, for its having moral worth. This is because, in her view, there are some actions – permissible actions – that are not done from duty, despite being in non-accidental conformity with moral demands. In these cases, the motive of duty operates as a limiting or secondary motive. Herman 1993: 13-7.

order to bring out how it does, it will be useful to briefly consider Herman’s version of the response. Herman is alive to the fact that sympathy is a more reliable guide to dutiful action than greed (Herman 1993: 4), but, in her view, the difference is a dif- ference in degree:

Is the motive of sympathy only fortunate when it hits on a right action? Doesn’t it necessarily prompt a person to help others? Suppose I see someone struggling, late at night, with a heavy burden at the backdoor of the Museum of Fine Arts. Because of my sympathetic temper I feel the immediate inclination to help him out. (Herman 1993: 4)

Herman leaves it to the reader to fill in the gaps here. Her point is: at first glance, it might seem as if the philanthropist’s dutiful action is not a mere accident because sympathy is a disposition to help others and, as such, a disposition to fulfil a wide duty. However, on closer examination, she finds that it is a mere accident after all, because, even for a philanthropist with a perfect “moral record”, we can imagine circumstances in which their sympathy, their willingness to help, would lead them astray. For example, as someone who enjoys helping other people, any other people, the philanthropist would be as willing to cover for an art thief as they would be to rescue a child. What does this line of thought tell us about Herman’s conception of (non-)accidentality? Presumably, she would not feel the need to show that there are circumstances in which sympathy leads us astray, if she did not think that a failure to come up with such examples was tantamount to a concession – to the concession that actions from sympathy are non-accidentally dutiful and hence morally worthy.

However, if this is right, the above line of thought commits her to a conception of non-accidentality that is grist to the mill of the critics. It is grist to the mill of the critics because, as Neo-Aristotelians, they agree that morally worthy actions cannot be accidental in this sense: such actions have to result from a proper responsiveness of motives to circumstances, not from a mere fortuitous alignment between the two. When these critics say that someone exhibits the virtue of sympathy or beneficence, they mean that this person is disposed to help others in circumstances where doing so is appropriate, and not in circumstances where it is not. As a virtuous person, the philanthropist is someone who has the right affective dispositions in this area; they are someone who would never help art thieves or any other criminals. Since sympa- thy in this sense cannot lead its bearer astray, Herman’s non-accidentality response

would fail to convince the virtue ethicist that helping actions from sympathy have no moral worth. It is not convincing because it seems to overlook the possibility of someone having perfectly virtuous inclinations.

I believe that we can salvage the non-accidentality response if we pay attention to the above distinction between objectively relevant variations in circumstances and merely subjectively relevant variations. In fact, Kant himself implicitly draws on this distinction when he contrasts actions from mediate inclination with actions from immediate inclination. As many commentators have observed (e.g. Baron 1995: 146- 7, Timmermann 2009: 46), each of his examples of actions from immediate inclina- tion features a protagonist who goes through a change: we are asked to imagine, for example, that “the mind of [the] philanthropist [is] overclouded by his own grief, which extinguishe[s] all sympathy with others” (G 4:398). This thought experiment, I submit, serves the same function as the unobserved shopkeeper case. It is meant to draw attention to a set of circumstances in which we could judge the agent’s motives on the basis of their outward conduct. If, having lost all sympathy with others, the agent stopped helping, then we would have reason (though perhaps not conclusive reason)178 to believe that he used to help others from inclination, not from duty. This

scenario is importantly different from the unobserved shopkeeper scenario, however, because, in this case, the grieving agent would not be led astray by his sympathy (whereas the unobserved shopkeeper is led astray by his greed). Before he was struck by grief and lost his sympathy, he may well have had perfectly virtuous inclinations that disposed him to do his duty in each and every situation – as the Neo-Aristotelian insists. But the fact that he conformed with duty would still have been a mere acci- dent. For although, for some time, his disposition was “virtuous” in the sense that it was properly responsive to how the circumstances bear on what he, as an agent, ought to do (e.g. to the import of whether the recipient of his helping action is a thief), it only took a distorting factor like grief to throw him, as a judging subject, off balance.179 Once this factor prompted a change in his inclinations (or, as a Neo-

178 _{Herman points out that he could have become a bad person overnight. This is a possibility that}

Kant seems to rule out when he says that revolutions of the heart can only go one way: from bad to good (R 6:47).

179 _{I have put the term “virtuous” in inverted commas because Kant would not call such a person}

virtuous – and perhaps a virtue ethicist wouldn’t either. It is worth keeping in mind that Kant is not arguing against virtue ethicists here, but rather against sentimentalists. If and to the extent that virtue ethicists maintain that we are responsible for our affective dispositions and for failures to retain them in the face of adverse circumstances, their view is quite close to Kant’s. Note, also, that there is an

Aristotelian might say: in his moral sensibility), his moral judgments and actions changed as well.

This conception of accidentality is not only better suited to refute the charge of motivational rigorism, it also makes better sense of what Kant says. For if Herman was right that actions from mediate and immediate inclination differ only in degree, and, importantly, that their being in accord with duty is accidental in the same sense, then Kant’s discussion of changes in inclinations would seem rather odd. In order to make his point, he would not have had to imagine a philanthropist who goes through a change; instead, he could have imagined a philanthropist who is confronted with an art thief or some other criminal.