Can you know if you've acted from duty?

28 Dec, 2023

On reading Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, students often take away the message that you have to approach your own motives with a hermeneutic of suspicion, because your dutiful acts could always be hiding unprincipled motives. Uncontroversially, if you helped the poor child partly because you felt the pleasure of sympathy in helping, boom!, then you didn't act from the pure motive of duty and your action has "no moral worth" (leaving aside what that means). And it seems natural to many readers to further understand that, since we're all a soup of motives and, as Kant notes, prone to self-flattery, we could very well act with impure motives but think we're acting according to the motive of duty.

That sounds right to me (as a matter of interpretation), but I've received some pushback on it from some more Kantian colleagues. What did Kant think?

In "Theory and Practice," Kant addresses a very similar charge from a guy called Garve. Here's Garve:

[I]t is even inconceivable to me how any one can become aware of having detached himself altogether from his desire for happiness and hence aware of having performed his duty quite unselfishly. (8:284)¹

Kant accepts this:

I readily grant that no one can become aware with certainty of having performed his duty quite unselfishly; for that belongs to inner experience, and to this consciousness of his state of soul there would have to belong a perfectly clear representation of all the associated representations and considerations attached to the concept of duty by imagination, habit, and inclination ...; and, in general, the nonexistence of something (and so too of a covertly thought advantage) cannot be an object of experience. ... Perhaps no one has ever performed quite unselfishly ... the duty he cognizes and also reveres; perhaps no one will ever succeed in doing so, however hard he tries. (8:284-5)

This comes very close to being a complete concession of the disputed point -- but there is actually a bit of wiggle room. Note that the action whose purity of motive is in question is in the past. We know of our past acts by way of re-presentation in "inner experience" (or in the Critique "inner sense"). But inner experience is just like outer experience in that it can't confer certain knowledge. Inner sense and outer sense are both faculties of passive intuition that are affected by what they perceive; they do not create what they perceive. Thus our own inner world is transcendently ideal in the exact same way as the outer world (A34/B51, A38/B55). Except that we do have at least one faculty of active intuition, that is, the will (I think!). When we will an act we simultaneously create it by will. This puts the action of the will in a way outside the main argument of the Critique of Pure Reason -- we are acquainted with the objects of our willing in a different and more direct way than we are with the objects of our sensing.²

And here's the wiggle room. We know our past actions by inner sense, but (we might say) we know our present actions as they are ongoing by the will, as it were directly. It doesn't make sense to say that, as we act, we can be wrong about whether we act from the pure motive of duty. When we act we have a direct practical acquaintance with what we do, and we either act from the pure motive of duty or don't. If the idea of "knowledge" has application here we might think it is a distinctively practical knowledge³ that gets its license from the action of the will rather than any of our faculties of theoretical reasoning. Thinking of it this way, maybe you can know after all that your motives are pure, while you're acting, even if you'll never really know again.

So I am still not sure who is right on the interpretative question.