Brief intern - Fakultät für Sozialwissenschaften und Philosophie

Brief intern - Fakultät für Sozialwissenschaften und Philosophie

Institut für Philosophie
Philosophisches Kolloquium
Sommersemester 2013
Organisation: Sebastian Rödl
Kontakt: sebastian.roedl@uni-leipzig.de
Mittwoch, 05. Juni 2013
Melissa Merritt (University New South Wales)
A Kantian View of Moral Reflection
One result of the recent surge of interest in Kant’s account of virtue may be that
Kantian ethics seems exposed to moral dangers to which it might not traditionally have been thought vulnerable. For as recent neo-Kantians working with the
‘self-constitution’ model of rational agency have suggested, every question
about what one ought to do is also, at least implicitly, a question about one’s
own character. The resulting view seems to advocate moral self-indulgence:
what might motivate the good Kantian to act in certain ways, and from certain
(first-order) motives, is the prospect of thereby bringing herself ever closer to the
ideal of virtue. My aim in this paper is to show that there are neglected resources
in Kant’s account of reflection to dismiss the charge of moral self-indulgence. I
extrapolate from Kant’s general view of reflection as a condition of sound judgment, and argue that the ideal of self-determination that informs Kant’s view of
what it is to be reflective must also, at the same time, be an ideal of humility.
From here I suggest a revised interpretation of Kantian moral humility, and reconstruct a Kantian view of moral reflection that does not attract the charge of
self-indulgence.
Zur Person: Melissa Merritt lehrt und forscht an der University of New South Wales in Sydney. Sie studierte Philosophie an der Yale University und promovierte
an der University of Pittsburgh mit der Arbeit "Drawing from the Sources of Reason: Reflective Self-knowledge in Kant's First Critique". Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen in den Bereichen Moralphilosophy, Philosophie der Neuzeit, Ästhetik und besonders in der Auseinandersetzung mit Kant.
18.30 Uhr, Neuer Senatssaal, Ritterstraße 26
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