Kantian Moral Psychology and Human Weakness

Abstract

© 2021 Jessica Tizzard This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. <www.philosophersimprint.org/021016/> F ew issues reveal more about Immanuel Kant’s moral psychology than his take on human frailty or weakness.1 Interpreters differ widely on the topic, for it gets to the heart of a fundamental and controversial subject for Kant’s philosophical system. To give a reading of Kant’s view of weakness, one must delve deeply into the question of how our rational and sensible capacities relate to one another. For example, is all human action, even weak action, expressive of our capacity to reason and adopt practical principles for ourselves? Or do moments of weakness show that sense-based desire can interrupt our practical lives and direct our behavior? However Kant’s reader answers such questions, they become immediately committed to a general understanding of how our most fundamental human activities, sensing and knowing, relate to and inform one another. Their stance will inform a basic conception of human moral psychology and the structure of motivation. It will even fix a conception of how we as humans relate to other sensing creatures and a non-sensing purely rational being like God.2 In short, we cannot understand Kant’s view of weakness without saying a lot about human nature and its place in the universe.