Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation

Book Review: Kant’s Cosmopolitan Theory of Law and Peace
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larities, according to Kant, morality is separable from, and logically prior to,
happiness, whereas for Aristotle, happiness encompasses moral action as the
object of moral striving (34–39). Höffe finds Kant victorious over Aristotle in
the description of moral action: for Aristotle, all action is performed for the
sake of happiness, whereas for Kant, some actions aim at one’s happiness,
whereas some actions are performed simply because one must do the right
thing. According to Höffe, Kant’s description of moral action fits our moral
vocabulary better than Aristotle’s, because sometimes we must do the right
thing at the expense of our happiness.
Höffe’s discussion of the similarities between Aristotle and
Kant is illuminating and insightful, but his judgment of the superiority of Kant
over Aristotle is made too hastily. Höffe appeals to a distinctively modern
understanding of happiness as a purely personal, conscious state. Aristotle, by
contrast, defines happiness as the “active exercise of the soul’s faculties in conformity
with virtue” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a15). One of these virtues is
justice, which involves doing the right or lawful thing. Aristotle thus would
reject the modern understanding of happiness as a base view of the good akin
to the bovine “life of enjoyment” (ibid., 1095b15). Thus to answer the question—Aristotle
or Kant?—we must not remain where Höffe leaves us, at the level
of better and worse descriptions of modern moral phenomena, but we must
delve into the differences between ancient and modern views of happiness.
Höffe takes up in chapter 3 a second caricature of Kant’s
moral philosophy, the view that Kant’s ethics precludes common sense or prudential
judgment, unreasonably demanding that rigid abstract laws be
mechanically applied to particular situations (45–47). Kant’s insistence on a
pure theory of morals seems to rule judgment out of court, since the latter
takes experience as its object. However, Höffe argues that we encounter moral
situations not immediately as instances of universal laws; rather, individual
instances must be made intelligible as “an instantiation of the universal” moral
law with practical judgment (51). Experience, then, is essential to moral and
political situations in order to refine our ability to deploy the right law at the
right time, place, and setting, but we must not allow the complexities of experience
to obstruct our duty to the moral law.
With this defense and refinement of Kant’s moral philosophy,
Höffe paves the way for grounding political right on the moral good in part II.
A cursory glance at the Metaphysics of Morals and his political essays reveals
that Kant explicitly connects political right with the categorical imperative, the