Finitude & Dependency: Kant’s Conception of Moral Obligation

Abstract

The concept of moral obligation is central to Kant's ethics. According to the Anscombian reading of Kant's ethics, this concept is conceptually confused and, therefore, corrupts much, if not all, of what Kant has to say about ethics. This cri-tique of moral obligation forms the cornerstone of the Anscombian reading of Kant's ethics, which is why I need to address it directly. Accordingly, I devote this chapter to dealing with the classical source for this critique of moral obligation, Elizabeth Anscombe's " Modern Moral Philosophy " (1958). My main contention regarding Anscombe's critique of " moral obligation " is that she and Kant are work-ing with two very different understandings of moral obligation, and, therefore, Anscombe's criticism of the modern sense of " moral " obligation does not apply to Kant. More specifically, I argue that for Kant moral obligation is not some irreduc-ible, inexplicable metaethical concept, leftover from a divine command theory of ethics and robbed of its metaphysical underpinnings; instead, I argue, we should understand Kant's concept of moral obligation as his way of acknowledging how human beings—finite, imperfect beings that we are—experience the normative con-straints that an objective account of human goodness makes on us, namely, as some-thing with which, in some sense, we do not want to comply.