Duties of right and duties of virtue. Kant’s division of the Metaphysics of Morals in the view of the „Table of the categories of freedom“

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Stephan Zimmermann
• Subject Area: History of Philosophy
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 491996920

The project addresses an increasingly controversial problem of Kant’s moral philosophy. In the MS, Kant develops his system of the doctrine of duties, the foundation of which has already been laid by the GMS and the KpV. According to this, all moral duties are primarily divided into duties of right and of virtue. This makes a twofold question necessary, that of the criterion and that of the justification of this division.As to the criterion of the distinction, Kant mentions several of them in the MS. Some of them seem to contradict the explanations on the concept of a duty as such, which the KpV and the GMS give. Therefore, some interpreters have questioned the unity of Kant’s moral philosophy (independence thesis). As to the justification of the distinction, certain remarks by Kant suggest that it is the categorical imperative from which the primary division of moral duties is to be derived. The project aims to develop an answer to the twofold question. I want to take up the suggestions disregarded by the previous research literature, which the KpV provides in the doctrine of the categories of freedom. For the first time, I want to examine the opposition of duties of right and of virtue in the view of the “table of the categories of freedom”. Kant himself suggests this by associating the function with the table to sketch the entire ground plan for the MS, which at that time was still to be worked out.My guiding idea is that some of the distinguishing criteria in the MS correspond to that classification of duties, which is the only one mentioned by the table of categories in the KpV and thus highlighted above all others: that of perfect and imperfect duties. The fact that duties of right are perfectly and duties of virtue imperfectly determined a priori can also be seen in transcripts of various lectures by Kant. The justification of the division would then fall into the “table of the categories of freedom”. It would consist in Kant’s metaphysical and transcendental deduction of the respective pair of categories from the underlying thinking functions of the intellect, the latter of which are listed by the so-called table of judgements in the KrV.But the MS also contains other criteria to distinguish between duties of right and of virtue. The natural law of the 18th century has developed the opposition between right, which is directed to external action, and ethics, which is directed to inner attitude. Until last, Kant tries to adapt this distinction, which probably causes many of the tensions of his late work. The project aims to preserve the unity of Kant’s moral philosophy: the dependence thesis gets support from the categories of freedom in the KpV and hence from the table of judgments in the KrV, which has not been noted so far. I want to argue from there that the criteria of distinction, which are provide by those earlier writings, are to be understood as the actual ones.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants