Jörg Noller and John Walsh (eds), Kant’s Early Critics on Freedom of the Will Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022 Pp. xlvii + 315 ISBN 9781108482462 (hbk) £74.99

Abstract

account of rationalization than the one currently on offer in existing Kant scholarship. Anyone at all convinced, in ordinary life, of our talents for self-deception, as well as our ability to get so many things wrong in moral matters, will want to find as expansive an account of rationalization as possible in Kant. On the other hand, readers may wonder how far Sticker can really push a Kantian account of rationalization. As Sticker himself notes, rationalization against the moral law can never be ‘allencompassing’ (p. 42). To quote: ‘An ideology is not adopted instead of the moral law, but as an addition’ or ‘modification’ (p. 42; Sticker’s emphasis). But does it make sense to think of Garve’s eudaimonism as an ‘addition’ to the categorical imperative? Or, consider another fascinating example from the very end of Sticker’s book, namely a moral ideology according to which our duty to be philanthropic is so demanding that we can lie, cheat and steal in the name of benevolence (p. 55). Such an extreme morality admittedly contains vestiges of a Kantian conception of duty insofar as it acknowledges the importance of helping others. But I am less confident than Sticker that this form of altruism would count as a distortion of morality that only ‘adds’ to our representation of the moral law. Nonetheless, Sticker’s challenge to Kantians to widen the scope of rationalization is a well-taken one that anyone writing on self-deception in Kant will have to wrestle with. And overall, his book is a first-rate philosophical work and an extremely important contribution to the field.