Practical judgment as reflective judgment: On moral salience and Kantian particularist universalism

Abstract

Moral particularists and generalists alike have struggled over how to incorporate the role of moral salience in ethical reasoning. In this paper, I point to neglected resources in Kant to account for the role of moral salience in maxim formation: Kant's theory of reflective judgment. Kant tasks reflective judgment with picking out salient empirical particulars for formation into maxims, associating it with purposiveness, or intentional activity (action on ends). The unexpected resources in Kantian reflective judgment suggest the possibility of a particularist universalism, where recalcitrant particulars directly inform, and in some cases revise, moral principles. Such an account improves on particularist accounts of moral salience and moral perception: rather than deriving moral sensitivity solely from an agent's upbringing or cultural resources, the reflective dimension is situated alongside the universalist dimension of moral principles typically identified with Kantian ethics, allowing for a critical approach both to moral universals and to the reception of moral particulars.

Reflections of Reason: Kant on Practical Judgement

“…Longuenesse 2005, cited in n. 11). For an interesting and recent account of a further way that reflective judging plays a role in practical judgement (including both picking out salient particulars for maxim formation and helping revise moral principles), see Bremner (2022). Relatedly, it seems likely that reflection plays a role in the formation of moral rules – including Herman’s ‘rules of moral salience’, which help us pick out features of a situation that require moral attention.…”

What is a black radical Kantianism without Du Bois? On method, principle, and abolition democracy

“…But BRK aims to create full justice by overturning relations of external freedom that constitute a condition of structural domination for propertyless laborers, one which persists after “core” rights are met. The upshot is, as Sabina Vaccarino Bremner argues, “the relation between universal and particular can be understood as a two‐way dependence rather than as mere application” (2023, p. 600). The determination of the content of a practical political principle must be linked with a context‐sensitive assessment of dependent social relations fostered by the state and the economy 10 .…”

“…8 8 For an excellent account of the debate about moral salience between Herman and O'Neill, see Vaccarino Bremner (2023). …”

Relativizing the A Priori By Way of Reflective Judgement

“…Where Kant imbued a priori status to Newtonian mechanics, seemingly enshrining it as eternally true, the supersession of classical mechanics by relativity theory demonstrated the dispensability of the Newtonian frameworkand with it, the deficient nature of Kantian knowledge as structured by universal and fixed forms of human cognition. Yet one view in contemporary philosophy of science contends that a certain formulation of the Kantian a priori can be retained (Reichenbach 1920;Richardson 1998;Friedman 2001;Ryckman 2005;Massimi 2011;French and Massimi 2013;Heis 2013). Following the neo-Kantian tradition of the early twentieth century, adherents have claimed that remnants of the Kantian a priori can be salvaged by contextualizing, or relativizing, the a priori to historically situated domains of knowledge or scientific paradigms.…”

“…Indeed, building on Cassirer (1923), Ryckman (2005) has claimed that the constitutive principles of relativity theory should themselves be understood as regulative. Ryckman argues that Einstein accorded a constitutive role to spacetime as the background presupposition enabling the laws of general relativity, but only as a heuristic placeholder for a further regulative 'idea of reason', general covariance, which could not yet be realized within the governing terms of the theory.…”