The Dear Self

Abstract

Harry Frankfurt 1. At the beginning of the Second Section of his treatise entitled Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant reflects upon the fact that, as it seems to him, it is practically impossible for us ever to know with any real assurance that what a person does possesses genuine moral worth. He is struck by how irredeemably uncertain we must always be concerning whether someone is properly to be regarded as having actually been virtuous. The difficulty that troubles him in this connection does not arise out of any doubts as to our ability to identify the particular sort of action that, in the circumstances under consideration, the laws of morality prescribe. For Kant, that is the easy part. The serious problem in arriving at judicious moral evaluations of what people do lies, as he sees it, in the impenetrable obscurity of human motivation. Even when it is clear that what a person has done conforms exactly, so far as his behavior goes, to all pertinent moral requirements, it may remain quite unclear whether the person acted virtuously. Indeed, however fully his explicit conduct satisfies the commands of the moral law, it may not earn him any moral credit at all. The mere fact that he has behaved in just the way that duty demands does not of itself warrant a judgment that he was morally worthy in what he did. Reaching a judgment of that kind is not warranted simply by what a person has done. It must take into account what was actually moving the person as he did it. According to Kant, there is no virtue in performing an action when the performance is decisively motivated by nothing more than what you yourself happen to want. If the desires that move you are desires by which you are moved simply for reasons of your own, it makes no difference whether those desires are directed benevolently towards the