Kant and the British Moralists

I am currently writing a monograph, the aim of which is to offer an account an important but under-appreciated influence on Kant’s moral philosophy: eighteenth-century British moral philosophy. I have already published on topics such as: Kant’s critique of Francis Hutcheson’s conception of the moral sense [here]; Adam Smith’s role in the development of Kant’s famous notion of respect (Achtung) for the moral law [here]; and how Kant’s psychology of moral motivation has less in common with a broadly Humean theory of action than many scholars have claimed [here]. The monograph both expands on these topics and explores additional ones such as:

1.  Kant’s engagement with Hutcheson's moral sense theory during his pre-Critical period;

2.  how both Kant and Smith conceive of sympathy as involving the imagination;

3.  Kant's disagreement with Hume's claim in the second Enquiry that there is no ‘proper name’ for the special kind of pleasure that accompanies our judgments of moral approval.

I intend to have the monograph complete by the Summer of 2026.

Normativity and Obligation in Modern Moral Philosophy

Philosophers from H. A. Prichard and G. E. M. Anscombe to Bernard Williams and Stephen Darwall have claimed that what is distinctive of ‘modern’ moral philosophy is its attempt to ground the normativity of morality without reference to a divine lawgiver. My second major research project takes this claim as its starting point and explores how 17th- and 18th-century European philosophers understood the normativity of morality by means of analyzing the concept of ‘obligation.’ I have already published on topics such as: Hutcheson’s theory of obligation [here]; how Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant understand reluctant action and the ‘constraint’ involved in moral obligation [here]; and how German figures from Leibniz to Kant conceived of moral obligation, moral permissibility, and moral impermissibility in modal terms, that is, in terms of moral necessity, possibility, and impossibility respectively [here]. I am currently working on the following papers as part of this project:

1. 'Adam Smith on ‘Why Be Moral?’’ — argues that Smith holds we desire to be moral both out of self-interest and for its own sake. I suggest that these two reasons for acting morally map on to Smith’s distinction between the desire for praise and the desire for praiseworthiness.

2. ‘Moral Impossibility and the Formula of Universal Law’ — Proposes a novel interpretation of the contradictions generated by maxims that fail the requirements of the Universal Law Formulation of the categorical imperative in light of how Kant’s rationalist predecessors, and Kant himself, understood the principle of non-contradiction.

My long-term goal for this project is to write a monograph on how eighteenth-century German philosophers built on the views of their predecessors Grotius and Pufendorf to offer novel conceptions of the normative authority of morality.