It is natural to think that it would be liberating if we had no norms or obligations whatsoever; that we would be more free if we were free to do whatever we wanted, unburdened by the voice of conscience or societal demands. And wouldn’t this allow us to actualize our full potential, since we would not be held back by internal or external constraints? Among philosophers who argue that this is not the case, but rather the opposite, Kant stands out for the striking extent of his views. Freedom from norms and obligations would not make us properly free, a society without them would collapse, and it would not help, but rather hinder our self-development and fulfillment of our human potential. Our very freedom, in the most modern sense of that term, requires that we submit ourselves to norms, primarily self-imposed but also external; otherwise we would end up with actions that are arbitrary, immoral, irrational, and thus unfree.

A long tradition in Kant scholarship has treated the bindingness of such norms of freedom, but that is not the primary concern of the papers collected here. Instead, the papers here concern the status, nature, and interaction of norms and normativity in Kant. They take these issues up from the perspective that norms are ubiquitous in our life and thought. They govern morals and legislation, but also our language, our conception of art and beauty, our social order and the forms of our daily interactions, even our feelings and the way we emotionally react to other people. Understanding any of these fields requires a solid grasp of the norms that govern them. But, of course, even though normativity and rule-following in general are a crucial part of our lives, we usually do not have a very clear understanding what precisely it means to follow a rule and how rules and norms are endowed with their authority. Adopting a phrase from Augustine, one might say: “What then is normativity? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

In many cases, and in some earlier Kant scholarship, normativity was identified with morality. Normativity is, of course, a crucial aspect of moral theory, but it does not yet serve to constitute such a theory, even if such a theory will make morality the central form of normativity, next to legality and other unwritten social or interpersonal obligations. Moral theories will help us understand what we should do and why we should do it; a theory of normativity in general would provide the groundwork for this by laying out the nature and scope of obligations in general and how we can explain their authority. The papers in this collection are not engaged in such a general theory, but they are engaged in the necessary preliminary work of understanding the differences and relations between the forms of normativity in Kant.

Norms can be constitutive for their particular fields of application. If you want to play a specific game, if you strive to belong to a specific artistic “school,” or even if you are simply required to follow a bureaucratic process, you may be required to hold certain beliefs or adopt certain modes of behavior. But these norms are dependent on specific social institutions or external circumstances, which they, in turn, allow to come into existence. Chess, for example, exists as a game only insofar as its players agree to move specific pieces only in a specific manner, thereby creating a certain agreement that is binding within the framework of the game. Clearly these rules can be rewritten or discarded, but then the game ceases to be chess; the same holds for a broad range of other societal institutions as well. The question “why do I have to do this?” is easily and pragmatically answered: “you have to do it if you want to play chess.”

Other types of norms and obligations are of a different structure and philosophical interest. These are deontic norms that are defined by their normative modality: prescription, permission, indifference, and proscription. Their violation is usually connected to some kind of sanction that goes along with the force of these norms—violating a moral norm may evoke my conscience, following the law of my country may help me define my identity as an upstanding citizen, and so on. These norms can be ordered into a system, such as a system of morals or of laws. Now I can ask the philosopher (usually an ethicist, value theoretician, or political or legal philosopher) “why must I follow this set of rules?” and she or he could provide different theories to answer this. In fact, a broad spectrum of highly differentiated answers is both possible and exemplified in the history of modern philosophy. A brief survey of answers to this question might include: because of self-interest, such as our innate desire for stability and safety (e.g. Hobbes); because we fear the consequences of breaking the law (e.g. Mill); because we tacitly assume a broad agreement by which we delegate power of law to a sovereign and rather corresponds to the general will of the populace (e.g. Rousseau); because feelings, common sense, or natural conscience tells us what to do (such as the English and Scottish common sense philosophers); because it is useful for our pursuit of happiness (e.g. Hume); because it is intuitively plausible and thus not in need of a rational theory as support (e.g. Sidgwick); because we owe each other reasonable justifications of our behavior, by virtue of recognizing each other as rational creatures (e.g. Scanlon); because moral agency is an expression of the way we constitute ourselves as social beings (e.g. Hegel, Marx) or simply as human beings (e.g. Korsgaard); or because every subject can derive these values a priori through reason (e.g. Kant). Of course, the question can be rejected (i.e. moral skepticism), perhaps because moral reasoning is actually an assertion of power, striving for control of ourselves and others alike (e.g. Nietzsche, Foucault)?

Clearly, this list is far from comprehensive, but Kant has a rather privileged position on this list. Along with Aristotle and Mill, Kant’s thought has been developed into one of the primary contenders for a going theory of moral normativity for contemporary philosophy. This is not only due to the rigor and comprehensiveness of his answer to the question but also due to the fact that in Kant we can find arguments for or against any such position (or rather, we can use his approach to develop arguments for or against any such position). There are many reasons why Kant is so important to contemporary ethicists, but a very brief sketch will provide some background for the essays in this book. But again, we want to repeat that normativity is broader than morality for Kant—it is just that in Kantian moral theory we get both the paradigmatic form of normativity for Kant and its most powerful connection to contemporary thinking on normativity.

On Kant’s account, norms, normative obligations, or constraints need to be universal (or at least it must be possible to give them a universal form). Furthermore, they need to be derived from something universal or non-contingent. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant articulates the axis on which his transcendental philosophy is developed: the question of justification or the quid iuris question (translated as “by what right,” as opposed to merely descriptive, factual [quid facti] questions). It is not sufficient to point out how it has come to pass that we believe what we believe; rather, we need to answer the question why we are justified in believing what we believe. This holds for norms as well, since norms have propositional structure and content and they differ from merely descriptive statements only in terms of modality.¹ As Kant puts it: theoretical judgments express “what happens,” while practical judgments are about “what should happen” (CPR, A 802/B 830).

Despite the complexity of his work, the basic idea of Kant’s answer to these questions is easy to articulate, at least in negative terms: the definite justification of our beliefs cannot be grounded in anything contingent. Such a justification would lead to an infinite regress of justifications demanding further justification. Kant also rejects the traditional ideas of the absolute as the ground of all justification: God is not a possible object of knowledge, but only of faith; and grounding our knowledge or our normative judgments on something unknowable is not rational. The Cartesian “I think” is not a viable ground either, if one interprets it as a temporal activity, since that would make it contingent as well. The Leibnizian principles of knowledge, such as the Principle of Non-contradiction or the Principle of Sufficient Reason, fail to identify viable sources of knowledge and thus cannot be used to distinguish between unknowable, non-sensical, and meaningful propositions. But Leibniz is on the right track, and the solution to the quid iuris problem is to look more deeply at the non-contingent form of our rational thought.

Such an approach has the advantage that this necessary form of thought can (in fact, must) be filled by contingent content, thereby allowing empirical applicability. Metaphysics should not so much be understood as ontological knowledge of transcendent entities, but as the formal and non-contingent principles of knowledge. The epistemology of these metaphysical principles (including the metaphysics of morals!) is called transcendental philosophy, which deals with the conditions of the possibility of theoretical or practical knowledge. The norms that are at stake here are not the norms of certain social groups, but the general principles of action—or at least the principles of directing the individual will, which, if acted upon, leads us to morally defensible actions.

However, one condition for any kind of meaningful knowledge is applicability, and transcendental philosophy therefore needs to be supported by other kinds of philosophy for the completion of a philosophical system in which every aspect of knowledge can be assigned its place. By itself, the philosophy of pure reason has a purely negative function by helping us to avoid errors, but does not contain any positive knowledge. At the end of the first Critique, in the Canon of Pure Reason, Kant insists that the use and end of all critique is first and foremost the practical use of reason, thereby effectively connecting the first two Critiques with each other. But even the second Critique does not stand alone: as a theory of practical justification it leads us to the systems morality, which are developed in the Metaphysics of Morals (more precisely: of virtue and law). Beyond that, ethics requires anthropology so that we know something about the human beings who are subject to the moral, ethical, and legal norms.²

Different aspects of normativity extend into different spheres of activity and thus into different subfields of philosophy—hence the subtitle of this book, Dimensions of Normativity. But the most obvious dimension is morality. Three main theories of morality have traditionally been discussed in philosophy; the first two of them are virtue ethics, which defines morality by the character of the agent, and consequentialism, which defines morality by the desired outcomes of our actions. While Kant’s ethics does in fact contain certain aspects of these approaches to ethics, he rejects them as ultimately unsatisfying, as they fail to provide non-contingent grounds for the justification of ethical thought. Kant instead adheres to deontic ethics, which defines morality by reference to the duties of free agents. The only permissible moral motive is respect for the moral law, which provides the standard for moral reasoning and justification. Due to the moral law we have to accept some duties, and these duties are inviolable to us because they are grounded in pure practical reason, bereft of all contingencies. It should be noted that on Kant’s view it is not the task of ethics as the philosophy of morality to introduce normative principles of agency, but rather to highlight ways how to defend them. We all already know our duties by means of the natural light of reason:

It would be easy to show how common human reason […] knows very well how to distinguish in every case that comes up what is good and what is evil, what is in conformity with duty or contrary to duty, if, without in the least teaching it anything new, we only, as did Socrates, make it attentive to its own principle; and that there is, accordingly, no need of science and philosophy to know what one has to do in order to be honest and good, and even wise and virtuous. (GW, 4:404)

In the rest of this first part of the introduction, we say a bit more in broad strokes about the different dimensions of normativity in Kant.

Kant understands Morality to be the internal and reasonable direction of the will in the form of maxims (intent...