The Highest Good in Kant's Philosophy. Ed. by Thomas Höwing. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. 294 p. ISBN 978-3-11-036900-7.

Höwing, Thomas The Highest Good in Kant's Philosophy. Ed. by De Gruyter Berlin 1 294 2016 978-3-11-036900-7

Kant's doctrine of the highest good has long stood as among the most controversial aspects of his practical philosophy. To some, it is merely a residual notion from his pre-Critical ethics, an item of "nostalgia" towards ancient and medieval thought, or an "albatross" that is incompatible with his mature ethical theory and best ignored. To others, it is a crucial component of his mature ethical theory, or the foundation of his philosophy of religion.

Many of Kant's contemporaries, including Schleiermacher, Fichte, and Reinhold commented on Kant's treatment of the highest good, and we may trace the modern era of scholarly debate on it to the works of John Silber, Lewis White Beck, and roughly two decades later, to John Rawls, who advanced the so-called "secular" interpretation of the highest good in his lectures on the history of moral philosophy. This position was then popularized primarily through Andrews Reath's article "Two Conceptions of the Highest Good in Kant." Further issues of debate include: whether or not the highest good prescribes a distinctive duty, or whether, as Beck argues, its purported duty is ultimately empty; whether or not the highest good can be an object for the will while not being a "determining ground" or motive; how ought implies can operates within this doctrine; and how it and its postulates can fit within the epistemic strictures of Transcendental Idealism.

Thomas Höwing is to be commended for assembling a collection of essays which address these and other key issues of contemporary debate. Moreover, one of the further impressive aspects of this volume is that it covers much of the interpretative spectrum. If there is any shortcoming, it is that the majority of the chapters migrate into issues related to the practical postulates, with relatively less attention paid to other issues. Nonetheless, given the growing interest in Kant's philosophy of religion and related matters within his normative epistemology, Höwing's volume reflects such trends in recent scholarship.

With regards to the status of the highest good as an object of the will, we have the chapters by Frederica Basaglia, Pauline Kleingeld and Stephen Engstrom. Basaglia, for example, shows her awareness of the potential hazards of assigning to the highest good a motivational role, for the place of happiness within it could turn it into a "material determination of the will" (25). In light of this, she opts to treat the highest good as just "the object of the will determined a priori by the moral law" (29), though she does not provide a case as to why its status as an object of the will may not also serve as the will's determining ground.

That issue, however, is more directly explored in Birgit Recki's contribution, where she portrays the highest good as "supposed to do justice to the necessary claim that sensibility makes on practical reason" (85). That is, Recki's treatment of the highest good aligns with its portrayal as a response to our "natural need" for happiness, a need that otherwise stands as a "hindrance to moral resolve" (RGV, AA 06: 05). As such, the highest good serves both as the "total object" of the will, as it reflects the ends we have by nature and reason, and it also is regularly presented as having a motivational function, one that would not be necessary for a holy will, but is granted in light of the "inescapable limitations of human beings" (RGV, AA 06: 07n).

Kleingeld and Engstrom likewise attend to the nature of the highest good as an object of the will, though their two chapters align with the secular interpretation seen in Rawls' pedagogy. Hence, they inscribe our "natural need" for happiness within our duty to promote the highest good. That is, rather than assigning the distribution of happiness in accordance with moral worth to God, they regard our duty to promote the highest good as a duty to "collectively bring about the happiness of all" (48), with "happiness resulting through that very cognition's production of it" (107).

On the other side of the interpretative spectrum, Recki and Gabriele Tomasi regard the postulates as essential to the highest good. Recki, for example, likens Kant's doctrine to Pascal's Wager, or what we may see as a moralized or purified version of the Wager, where a need of pure practical reason calls for the "necessity to assume the existence of God" (87). Likewise, Tomasi writes that "assenting to the proposition that God exists has the non-epistemic value of allowing him or her to avoid a sense of practical incoherence" (126).

Paul Guyer's contribution also may be situated within the secular-religious debate, for while he regards the postulate of God as vital to Kant's doctrine, he maintains that Kant eventually "replaces the postulate of immortality" with the "possibility of the moral influence of human individuals on their successors" (177). Hence, Guyer sets aside Kant's continuing endorsement of both postulates through the 1790s (e. g. MpVT, AA 06: 69; RGV, AA 06: 135; SF, AA 07: 40; TP, AA 08: 279; VNAEF, AA 08: 419; FM, AA 20: 298-299), and opts instead to read the ethical community in the Religion as somehow a replacement for the postulate of immortality endorsed elsewhere in the text (e. g. RGV, AA 06: 69, 06: 126, 06: 135, 06: 157).

Guyer also uses in support of his position a passage from Theory/Practice where Kant discusses our duty to "influence posterity that it becomes always better" (TP, AA 08: 309). As Guyer presents the matter, we see here what Kant is eventually electing to use in the place of the postulate of immorality. Yet, as noted above, the 1790s is still replete with affirmations of this postulate, a point we can even find in Theory/Practice as well (e. g. TP, AA 08: 279). The same difficulty applies to Guyer's reading of the ethical community, for Kant is not using it as substitution for immortality, but rather through it, he is (finally) filling out the content of our duty to promote the highest good, a duty that concerns the need for a corporate response to the propensity to evil, i. e., "a duty sui generis not of humans beings toward human beings, but of the human race toward itself" (RGV, AA 06: 97).

As noted earlier in this review, a further theme which shows prominently in Höwing's volume involves the epistemic status of the postulates. Markus Willaschek's chapter, for example, focuses on whether or not we must believe in the realizability of our ends, and if so, how best to understand the doxic attitude proper to the postulates. His ultimate proposal is that if we are to believe that the highest good is at least not impossible, we need some "account of how ... it is not impossible" (240).

On a similar note, Andrea Esser discusses how Kant utilizes the highest good in the Third Critique, both in his response to the "righteous atheist" and as an element in Kant's teleology of nature. For Esser, Kant remains concerned with the "problem of motivation and moral incentives" (250) and held that atheism (or at least certain kinds of atheism) undermine both our moral motivation as well as the conceptual framework for moral agency. Unfortunately, however, Esser falls into the common trap of reading "in the world" as in the order of nature, and thus proposes that Kant would have us see nature as designed by God such that morality will be rewarded with happiness "in the sensible world" (252). Such, however, Kant repeatedly rejects (e. g., KrV, A 811/B 839; KpV, AA 05: 134, KU, AA 05: 469; VNAEF, AA 08: 419; FM, AA 20: 294-295).

Lastly, let me comment on Höwing's own contribution. His interest in the epistemic status of the postulates leaves its mark on the collection overall; and Höwing himself directly champions a strong interpretation of Kant's conception of belief/faith [Glaube]. As seen in the works of Wood, Chignell and myself, Höwing advances an account of belief rooted in a "non-epistemic justification." But the challenge, as Höwing presents the matter, is to explain how belief (i) "requires the agent to form a particular assent" but in such a way that (ii) "it does not require every agent to whom it is available to form the assent in question" (221). This "puzzle" is unfortunately not really solved by Höwing, for the thrust of his "solution" is no more than that it is "precisely the combination of the two features that reflects Kant's account of non-epistemic justification" (220).

After a lengthy (and inaccurate) presentation of Chignell's views as well as my own on the topic, Höwing proposes that the gap between (i) and (ii) can be explained because the "normative grip" expressed in (i) is only triggered when "the agent decides to act in a certain way" (220). What Höwing overlooks, however, is that, per either Wood's "absurdum practicum" argument or my own treatment of the highest good in relation to the moral "revolution" proposed in the Religion, insofar as the "normative grip" that enjoins belief is triggered by a decision to commit to the highest good, it is nonetheless a commitment to which we are universally enjoined to will. It may be granted that in the absence of this commitment, the highest good's postulates will have no "normative grip," but for Kant, no morally "upright man" (KpV, AA 05: 143) can be without these beliefs.

What Höwing finally proposes is that belief (i) "requires the agent to form a particular assent" but only under the condition that "the agent decides to act in a certain way" (220). This then allows a personal commitment to a belief without requiring that "every agent to whom it is available to form the assent in question" (221). Unfortunately, Höwing presents this as the solution to the "puzzle" about belief set out earlier in the chapter, yet, what he represents as the solution offers no more than a restatement of the point at issue.

Despite any objections I have here raised, I would still encourage all interested in Kant's conception of the highest good to read Höwing's collection. Every chapter is worthy of study and every chapter contains original contributions to the debate.