Philosophy Speaker Series 2014-15, Donald Landes

ABSTRACT: 

To many readers of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), the suggestion that Kant ultimately offers a significant contribution to Virtue Ethics would be a surprising one. And yet in his late ethical treatise, The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kant in fact makes virtue central to his ethics. In this paper, I propose a phenomenological perspective into the ongoing study of the convergence between Kant and Virtue Ethics, and argue that such a perspective promises both to illuminate the continuity of Kant’s ethical thought through an emphasis on the implicit structure of moral experience and to reveal the rich insights his perspective contains for establishing a phenomenology of virtue and an embodied account of ethics. These two aims are accomplished by exploring Kant’s proto-phenomenological descriptions of the weight of the moral law, his implicit “existential” account of human nature as finite rational being (and thus embodied and temporal), and his rich notion of the art of navigating the complex moral terrain that admits of Spielraum (leeway), specifically in relation to Aristotle’s emphasis on phronēsis (practical wisdom). I argue that, when viewed through a phenomenological lens, Kant’s virtue ethics represents a subtle understanding of humans as embodied and temporally thick trajectories and contributes to an open and embodied virtue ethics.