“An Erring Conscience is an Absurdity”: The Later Kant on Certainty, Moral Judgment and the Infallibility of Conscience
Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: This article explores Kant’s view, found in several passages in his late writings on moral philosophy, that the verdicts of conscience are infallible. We argue that Kant’s infallibility claim must be seen in the context of a major shift in Kant’s views on conscience that took place around 1790 and that has not yet been sufficiently appreciated in the literature. This shift led Kant to treat conscience as an exclusively second-order capacity which does not directly evaluate actions, but one’s first-order moral judgments and deliberation. On the basis of this novel interpretation, we develop a new defence of Kant’s infallibility claim that draws on Kant’s account of the characteristic features of specificallymoraljudgments.
Authors: Franz Knappik, Erasmus Mayr
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2921669424