The Philosophical Quarterly Vol.  No.  ISSN – April  doi: ./j.-.._.x The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews BOOK REVIEWS Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: a Critical Guide. E  J T. (Cambridge UP, . Pp. ix + . Price £..) This collection of papers of papers about the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (GW) addresses both exegetical issues and the defensibility of Kant’s claims. Two contemporary strands of interpretation of Kant’s practical philosophy are discussed. Examining Kant’s lectures on ethics and anthropology, Kuehn distances himself from ‘virtue ethical’ interpretations (p. ) currently prevalent. He argues for a distinction between two senses of ‘maxim’, as ‘subjective principles of volition’ and as Lebensregeln, which maps onto a distinction between ‘good will’ and ‘good character’ (p. ). Again contrary to prevalent trends, Kuehn wants maxims to represent ‘a highly generalized form of willing’ (ibid.), but it is unclear how this squares with Kant’s examples, which are not ‘carefully cleansed of anything empirical’. A related stance, against ‘Humeans and Aristotelians alike’, is taken by Timmermann in his claim that when duty and inclination coincide, only action out of duty is moral (pp. –). He stresses the distinction between acting out of an interest in the effect of one’s action, and an interest in the action itself (p. ). Although he makes a good case for rejecting maxims of action from inclination when this concurs with duty, there may be other ways of presenting the defence. Indeed, in the very act of checking that an inclination concurs with duty, an instance of willing out of duty is manifest. The presence of motives of inclination operating within its constraints does not obviously tarnish this moral incentive. Nevertheless, Timmermann correctly rejects the notion that such an action could be described as ‘overdetermined’ (p. ). Another key interpretative issue is how ‘metaphysical’ GW is. Current antimetaphysical trends are questioned in an excellent paper by Flikschuh, which makes a convincing case against political interpretations of the Kingdom of Ends (p. ). She argues that the formula of the Kingdom of Ends involves ‘the idea of God as the independent unifying principle of a possible ethical union of dependent rational wills’ (p. ). She also reviews the different formulae of the Categorical Imperative, thereby addressing the problem of their equivalence. Her treatment of the Formula of Humanity (FH) is particularly lucid (pp. –). Flikschuh agrees with Sensen, whose paper sets out to dispel the standard idea that (FH) requires a dogmatic acceptance of the value of human beings (pp. –). Sensen argues that ‘in the requirement to universalize one’s maxim for every subject, one is thereby required to respect those over whom one universalizes’ (p. ). Flikschuh shows rather how the Formula of Universal Law, when considered together with the nature of rational agency, entails (FH). So although Kant ©  The Author The Philosophical Quarterly ©  The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly Published by Blackwell Publishing,  Garsington Road, Oxford  , UK, and  Main Street, Malden,  , USA BOOK REVIEWS  can say that the formulae are equivalent (GW ), this does not imply logical interderivability: each brings out different features of rational agency. A strongly metaphysical interpretation of Kant’s grounding of morality is proposed by Guyer, who argues that §III of GW relies ‘upon a claim about our real “noumenal” selves’ (p. ). Guyer’s interpretation of the analytical part of this third section is broadly in line with the bulk of the literature, although his understanding of the ‘third term’ required to ground the synthetic claim that the moral law is binding is curious: he takes it to be autonomy (p. ), rather than membership of an intelligible world. More convincingly, Guyer suggests that the analytical part of GW III extends further than generally thought, to GW . With his metaphysical interpretation of the synthetic second part of GW III, Guyer (p. ) wonders why our sensible nature (inclinations) lures us away from doing our duty. This question takes two possible forms: first, it could be that the ‘phenomenal self ’, although grounded in the noumenal self, acts in opposition to it. Here one might query Guyer’s use of ‘phenomenal self’. Kant is not committed to the inclusion of any such substances in the ontology of the world of appearances. Turning to causal properties of the self, Guyer claims that its empirical character is entirely derivable from its intelligible ground (pp. –), which makes Kant’s position implausible. But this derivability is not claimed by Kant, who would accept natural causal determinants (genetic, social) as contributing to the self’s empirical character. Even allowing for this, though, it is not clear how the empirical character could act in opposition to the intelligible one. The possibility of immoral action must therefore reside in ‘the noumenal will [choosing] ... in opposition to the moral law’ (p. ), the possibility of which constitutes the second part of the above question, as formulated by Schmid in  (p. ). Guyer makes the interesting suggestion that it is ultimately through the principle ‘ought implies can’ that Kant grounds our freedom. Since ‘ought implies can’ does not entail ‘ought implies does’, immoral action would thus be possible. Whether this satisfactorily addresses Schmid’s concern is an open question. Johnson (p. ) wants to make more of the notion of freedom as causality. Rather than substitute positive freedom for intelligible nature (rationality) as the key third term in GW III, he argues that it is our being causes that entails moral bindingness (p. ). Johnson notes that this involves relying on a concept of causation requiring that the types of causally related events are governed by a law (p. ), but this could be taken as a problem for his interpretation rather than for Kant. Johnson’s proposal involves a useful discussion of causality in rational agency (pp. –), but he does not provide an explanation for free action which is not universalizable. Such action must, on his reading, be caused by the agent; so how can it not fall under a universal law? This leaves Schmid’s question unanswered. So does Skorupski’s non-metaphysical interpretation of GW III. His identification of freedom with the ‘ability to act rationally’ (p. ) provides an interesting interpretation of Kant’s endeavours in GW III which avoids metaphysical commitments (p. ). While bringing out the importance of a non-instrumental conception of practical rationality (p. ), Skorupski does not thereby see that the instrumental conception is not merely agent-relative, but also defines what O’Neill called ©  The Author The Philosophical Quarterly ©  The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly  BOOK REVIEWS ‘principles of rational intending’. Without this extension beyond mere deductive logic, he judges Kant’s move from autonomy to impartiality (morality) to be a failure (pp. –). However, if being free is being ‘reason-responsive’, how is it that one also has the choice of acting freely (pp. –)? What is this second-order freedom to which Skorupski denies the name of freedom, since his compatibilist freedom does not involve the claim that ‘one could have acted otherwise’ (p. )? With Rauscher, the compatibilist interpretation takes on a Hegelian flavour: reason, identified with freedom, is now the bearer of a non-natural causal power (pp. , –) in a supra-personal sense (p. ). One has to ask whether the claim that the decision of the agent’s will is an effect of this supra-personal causal power is what Kant really could have meant, when he introduced the intelligible character through which ‘the subject ... is ... the cause of ... actions as appearances’ (CPR /). When Rauscher compares our agency to that of a chess-playing computer (p. ), he appears to fall foul of Kant’s criticism of the freedom of the mere turnspit. Rauscher’s interpretation has the merit of suggesting a novel way of reading the sensible/intelligible distinction in GW III (pp. –), and thereby proposing a more modest reading of Kant’s aims in that section (p. ). In so doing, Rauscher repeatedly stresses the incomprehensibility of the workings of the non-natural causality of reason. But we are nevertheless owed an account of what further determination reason could provide when in Rauscher’s natural world a practical judgement is ‘part of a causal chain in nature involving, say, electro-chemical processes among neurons’ (p. ). On the contrary, Kant’s psychological determinism is arguably conditional upon given individual empirical characters, leaving scope for the intelligible characters to determine them (CPR /). Moreover, why, when reason operates ‘alongside’, ‘in addition to’, the natural order (pp. –), does it not conflict with the latter? Does not this interpretation require a naturalization of reason? Aside from these contributions to standard interpretative issues, less discussed topics are a welcome inclusion likely to spark further debate in the literature. Thus Louden examines the role of examples in Kant’s GW, and Hills presents a thoughtprovoking discussion of Kant’s views on happiness and why we pursue it. Schneewind provides a detailed analysis of Kant’s rebuttal of rival proposals for a fundamental principle of morality, showing its merits in arguing against hedonistic egoism, Wolffian perfectionism and Crusius’ divine command theory. The quality of the papers, the diversity of topics, and the additional fact that the book is well edited, with a wealth of references in the footnotes, make it indispensable reading for Kant scholars, and commend it highly for all moral philosophers. Birkbeck College, University of London ©  The Author The Philosophical Quarterly ©  The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly C O