Book Review of Robert Stern, Understanding Moral Obligation

GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL are perceptually conscious of everything because there are degrees of presence depending on measures of movement- and object-dependence; e.g., the front of the tomato is highly present while his friend in Berlin is only faintly there. This impoverished view of presence follows directly from the object ontology that Noë brings to the endeavor. Lawrence A. Berger The New School for Social Research Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, by Robert Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Whether or not Kant himself would have approved, moral constructivism has emerged over the past three decades as one of the most influential positions defended in his name. Given Kant’s theoretical commitments, it is perhaps not difficult to see why. Just as Kant ignited a Copernican revolution in theoretical philosophy, his moral philosophy takes a similar radical turn: Our actions gain their worth by conforming not to any law or will outside us, but to the law inherent in the very form of rational willing itself, i.e., autonomy. According to the constructivist reading—inaugurated by John Rawls and nurtured by theorists like J.B. Schneewind, Christine Korsgaard, and Stephen Darwall—taking autonomy seriously necessarily entails that moral values are not objective features of reality waiting to be discovered, but rather are the generated results of the procedure of rational justification itself. More recently, the constructivist approach has been adopted in reading Kant’s inheritors and critics as well, most clearly in the case of recent scholarship on Hegel. Against this current, Robert Stern’s provocative monograph sets its ambitions high, attempting not only to pry apart the now intimately associated positions of Kantianism and constructivism, but also to show how reframing our view of Kant creates a very different picture of the history of post-Kantian ethics, exemplified for Stern by Hegel and Kierkegaard. Stern’s book is carefully argued, imaginative, and often manages to retell familiar philosophical stories in a refreshing light. Above all, it succeeds in showing that a version of the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ethics outside the frame of constructivism deserves to be told. Stern develops his story by focusing on what makes a moral demand obligatory and each figure in his story represents a different answer: “ourselves,” says Kant; “other people,” says Hegel; and “God,” says Kierkegaard. Together the three positions entail one another in a 230 BOOK REVIEWS “dialectical ‘circle’ of positions” (3). Problems in Kant’s view lead us to Hegel’s; Hegel leads us to Kierkegaard; and Kierkegaard back to Kant. Stern concludes that the debate between the three theories remains unsettled. If there is a weakness in Stern’s book, it may be that this clever framing device is too tidy for its own good. One sometimes suspects that the thinkers’ positions are forced to conform to Stern’s narrative rather than the other way around, particularly in the cases of Hegel and Kierkegaard. This overarching worry will be the main criticism developed in what follows. Nonetheless, the first three chapters on Kant are by themselves sufficient reason to rank Understanding Moral Obligation as an important intervention of first-rate scholarship. Here Stern sketches the constructivist “standard story”—drawing from Rawls’ lectures on the history of moral philosophy—and begins to put pressure on it by showing that the so-called “argument from autonomy” against moral realism is more difficult to successfully make than many constructivists assume. The argument from autonomy claims moral realism ought to be rejected as founded in heteronomy, as it maintains that moral values are features of the world existing independently of our self-legislative activity. A serious commitment to moral freedom entails an anti-realist, in particular a constructivist, position. Stern’s simple yet effective counter-argument is to conceive of the process of independent value recognition as itself an exercise of reason and thereby as autonomous. While the “argument from autonomy” might exclude a cruder form of realism—say, one according to which I am immediately moved to act by independently existing values—it is difficult to see why this more sophisticated form should be charged with heteronomy. Stern goes on to bring out aspects of Kant’s Groundwork that could be read as value realist commitments, in particular, the unconditional value of the good will, the value of other rational beings as ends in themselves, and the grounding of morality in §3 of the Groundwork. Stern’s efforts are not simply to attribute to Kant a straightforward commitment to realism, but rather a “hybrid view,” a position incorporating both sides of debates between realism and constructivism, externalism and internalism, and natural law and divine command theories. Stern’s arguments in chapter 3 for the hybrid view are the centerpiece of the book, constituting both its most original moments and the arguments for the goodness-obligation distinction that structures the rest of his discussions. Stern traces the historical precursors of Kant’s hybrid view back to debates between natural law theorists like Leibniz and divine command theorists like Pufendorf and Barbeyrac. Here, the problem emerges that one can recognize something as morally good without thereby being obligated by it. If that is right, then the answers to the 231 GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL questions, What makes something good? and What makes something obligatory? can be addressed separately. This is precisely the “hybrid” move Stern sees Kant making, allowing him to be a realist and externalist regarding the good and the right, and a constructivist and internalist regarding moral obligation. Part 2 argues that Hegel’s “social command theory” of moral obligation arises as a critical response to the dualisms underwriting Kant’s hybrid view, particularly between reason and inclination. Unlike the Kant chapters, which are driven by close textual examination, very little of the chapters devoted to Hegel actually contain discussion of Hegel’s own texts. The majority of chapter 4 concerns Schiller’s critique of Kantian ethics, with only some suggestions toward the end of the chapter as to how Schiller influenced Hegel. Chapter 5 opens by discussing contemporary social command theories and ends with a section treating the moral theory of F.H. Bradley. In between we find a brief, five-page treatment of the “Ethical Life” portion of the Philosophy of Right (156–61). To be sure, a full treatment of Hegel’s expansive moral and social theory would have been impossible within the limited framework of Stern’s book, and he is focused on a single issue, moral obligation. Nonetheless, the brief treatment of Hegel introduces an uncharitably weak link in Stern’s “dialectical ‘circle’ of positions,” leaving the reader with more questions than answers about Hegel’s moral theory and rendering Hegel overly vulnerable to the Kierkegaardian criticisms Stern levels in the following chapters. On Stern’s account, Schiller sets up Hegel’s critique of Kantian morality by foregrounding its tensions: Schiller is convinced by the centrality of autonomy in morality yet is unwilling to sacrifice the moral harmony of reason and inclination that appears to be ruled out by Kant’s concept of duty. Hegel responds by adopting a “social command” theory of moral obligation, according to which my dutifully participating in what social institutions demand of me contributes to the actualization of my own freedom, thereby allowing me not only to do my duty, but to do it happily. In the rational state, the whole self can be fully behind one’s moral acts in a way that achieves the Aristotelian harmony Schiller wanted, while retaining Kant’s commitment to freedom. Although consonant in some respects with current interpretations that emphasize the sociality of reason and normativity, Stern steers clear of wholeheartedly embracing them by attributing to Hegel a version of the “hybrid” view, asserting that we can understand what is demanded of us in realist terms while understanding its obligatoriness by appeal to the force of society. Unfortunately, Stern’s all-too-brief treatment of Hegel’s texts is not enough to convincingly bear this out. In particular, one wonders 232 BOOK REVIEWS whether Hegel himself would have so willingly subscribed to the goodness-obligation distinction Stern attributes to him. First, in separating the two notions, one must hold that there is goodness that is not yet demanding, even when we successfully recognize it as good. This view of the good and our relation to it seems strikingly abstract in a way that Hegel consistently repudiates. Second, the distinction seems to be one that Hegel himself is explicitly concerned to overcome. Ethical life does not simply enforce the good for Hegel, but rather is defined in §142 of the Philosophy of Right as “the living good” itself, which is to say that the actualization of freedom-promoting institutions is the end of our ethical activities. Accordingly, that which is good and that which obligates turn out, in Hegel’s final analysis, to be one and the same thing, namely the fully rational ethical community. This raises problems for Stern’s story, since the reconciliation of a distinction between the good and the obligatory seems to be one of Hegel’s explicit goals in the Philosophy of Right. Part 3 continues the dialectical circle, spelling out how Kierkegaard responds to Hegel by offering a non-voluntaristic divine command theory, according to which God’s command is the source of moral obligation, yet not the source of what is good (whereas a voluntaristic divine command theory posits God as the source of both). According to Stern’s version of the Kierkegaardian critique, the Hegelian view misses the fundamentally transcendent and demanding nature of moral demands, which require us to “treat the good and the right as transcendent and thus beyond our full comprehension” (175). As a result, the Hegelian cannot comprehend the significance of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, as Kierkegaard lays out in Fear and Trembling. This critique is furthered in Kierkegaard’s later text Either/Or, in which the letters of Kierkegaard’s character, Judge William, depict a bourgeois, self-certain Hegelian ethicist, content to do no more than to simply fulfill his station in society. This view is contrasted with a sermon according to which we always fall short before God, a contrast revealing “the ethical undemandingness of William’s life . . . and the extent of his moral complacency” (200). Given the brevity of his earlier treatment of Hegel, Stern could have done more here to complicate this link in his “dialectical circle of positions” by bringing out aspects of Hegel’s thought that seem to counter the charge of complacency, like his ongoing critique of false forms of life, the demand for the actualization of rational institutions, and the struggle for mutual recognition. As it stands, Stern’s dialectical circle of positions seems to transition too easily here, with Kierkegaard easily dismantling a complacent ethics of social conventionalism. 233 GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL Moreover, it is worth asking whether Kierkegaard has a theory of moral obligation at all and was really concerned to put forward a “transcendent conception of moral value” (175). Indeed, Kierkegaard’s interest in the binding of Isaac seems to affirm the opposite. In obeying God’s command, Abraham resists the temptation to remain within the human ethical order and enters a different “absurd” space, referred to as a “teleological suspension of the ethical.” Hence God’s command to Abraham is not a moral command, but rather a divine command that overrides the moral as such. Indeed, Kierkegaard could be viewed as responding to the intrinsic failures and dissatisfactions of human ethical life by attempting to lead his reader away from regarding such a space as the absolute (as Hegel had done). This suggests Kierkegaard is attempting to place himself resolutely outside the tradition of accounting for moral obligation, i.e., outside the story Stern sees him as continuing. This last point reinforces the suspicion hanging over the reader throughout, namely that Stern’s attempt to fit Hegel and Kierkegaard into the “dialectical ‘circle’ of positions” gets in the way of a clear view of the thinkers themselves. Nonetheless, perhaps the most rewarding aspects of Stern’s book do not rely on his dialectical presentation and so we benefit from the text despite these reservations. There is no doubt that Stern’s book accomplishes its central goal: to convince us that a retelling of the history of modern ethics untethered from constructivist commitments can and should be told. Anyone researching eighteenthand nineteenth-century ethics will benefit from the alternative story Stern lays out here, especially those interested in how this period provides the foundations for our contemporary debates about realism and constructivism in moral theory. In following out the details of his story, the reader might be compelled to offer an alternative to Stern’s alternative, but this would be precisely in the spirit of Stern’s text. Matthew Congdon The New School for Social Research The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer, by Donald Phillip Verene (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011). The term “symbolic form” is Cassirer’s and is consonant with his singular contribution to philosophy in the twentieth century. By delineating and analyzing the interpretive schema of discrete symbolic forms, 234