Paul Abela at the Kant Workshop

Paul Abela argued in his paper ‘Knowledge, Action and the Kantian Priority of Judgement’ that Kant is a transcendental philosopher because he lays out the a priori contribution of the mind in representing Nature objectively. In doing so Kant cautions against the pitfalls of naïve empiricism. However, Abela argued that by adverting to the Axioms of Intuition and Anticipations of Perception, it can be seen that Kant is not antithetical to naturalism. This is because in these sections of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant is concerned to show how the a priori structure of judgement individuates intensive and extensive magnitudes, which are the very subject of the natural sciences.

One question that came up with relation to the foregoing was whether modern day naturalism can really be considered a form of empiricism. If not, then Kant’s criticisms of the latter leave naturalism untouched. Another related question was whether the subjectively individuated intensive/extensive magnitudes that Kant sees as the necessary objects of judgements, would have any place in a ‘hard’ naturalist reductionism.

Abela further argued that we should view the a priori demands of Kantian practical reason as compatible with our pursuit of happiness in the empirical world. He blamed the demarcation of the 20^th century moral philosophical landscape into the mutually exclusive domains of deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics, for the common misunderstanding that the issue of happiness is not relevant to Kantian moral deliberation. He argued that Kant is best seen as a moral theorist concerned with the establishment of the highest good, and that the Categorical Imperative has no meaning unless seen in the context of moral striving to actually achieve the latter.

However, it was unclear to me whether Abela was arguing that the highest good consisted in actually achieving empirical happiness, so that moral maxims be informed by the results of empirical research into what makes people happy, or that by all willing the moral law we become happy because we have achieved the highest good simply in virtue of such willing (this latter seems the more orthodox Kantian line).