Abstract

In the past few decades there has been a trend in Kant scholarship of pushing back against the ‘traditional view’ of Kant’s moral philosophy, which is portrayed as holding Kant’s moral philosophy to be rejecting of, or hostile to, all emotion and feeling. Such scholarship argues in various ways that there in fact is a positive role for emotion therein, and more specifically, in Kant’s theory of moral deliberation (sometimes referred to simply as his ‘moral psychology’). In this paper I in turn push back against such arguments. I hold that while there are indeed aspects of the ‘traditional view’ which should be corrected, it remains that there is no positive role for emotion or feeling as we ordinarily understand them in Kant’s theory of moral deliberation.
In this paper I proceed in two steps. First I present an argument for why feeling and emotion as we understand them have no role in Kant’s theory of moral deliberation. In support of this I show that, in the original texts, the sentimental-phenomena that importantly are included in Kant’s theory of correct moral deliberation are distinct from emotions as we understand them. Second, I critically assess three scholars’ arguments for the importance of emotion in Kant’s moral philosophy, in the interest of exhibiting the shortcomings of arguments for a role for emotion in his theory of moral deliberation. By this I hope to demonstrate that while there are important sentimental-phenomena within Kant’s theory of moral deliberation, there is no role for emotion in the ordinary sense of the term.