From Rationality to Morality: The Collective and Historical Development of Practical Reason in Kant’s Anthropological Writings

Kant’s “pragmatic anthropology” – an empirical study of moral philosophy – offers an account of our species’ evolution into humans proper, i.e., into beings that posses the faculty of reason thanks to which they are free: capable of setting ends independent of natural instinct and of determinate laws, and of making mature use of reason by setting their ends in accordance with the moral law (practical use of reason). This account has influenced many key ideas of contemporary political philosophy, such as public reason or deliberative rationality. My paper aims to examine how Kant’s pragmatic anthropology shows that our evolution into beings with moral capacities starts with our natural predisposition to develop capacities that will eventually make us moral, such as the capacity for rational deliberation in a social setting. Specifically, I argue that, in the light of Kant’s anthropological writings, our attainment of the status of moral agents whose actions are governed by the moral law is the final stage of a sophisticated process of the development of our species’ social and rational capacities – that the development of the moral capacities of our species depends on the prior (collective) development of our social and rational capacities. My paper consists of three parts. In the first part, I focus on the general role of reason in Kant’s systematic philosophy and contrast it with reason’s limited, initial use, portrayed by Kant in the “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History”. In it, Kant conjectures that the process of reason’s development in our species started with the discovery of possessing an (undeveloped) faculty of reason. Reason’s initial, experimental use for creating desires independent from our natural instinct marked our attainment of freedom of will: our capacity for acting rationally (in accordance with hypothetical imperatives). However, at this point we were not yet capable of acting morally (in accordance with the categorical imperative). The second part of my essay shows how the first use of reason in its capacity to act rationally awakened in us the propensity to evil and egoistic tendencies. The realisation that desires can be manipulated prompted humans to enter into the condition of sociality for egoistic purposes: so that we can inflict injustice onto others and use them to satisfy our own desires. This was due to a characteristic feature of our psychological makeup: “unsociable sociability”. Reason was then further developed as we gradually improved the rules governing our social order, which was supposed to minimise the evil in human nature and lead to an equal treatment of all members of the society. The gradual improvement of our socio-political order can be described as the transition from reason’s egoism to pluralism. This process is the focus on the third part of my essay, where I show how the gradual development of reason is, inter alia, the gradual development of just conditions of social co-existence. This mature use of reason, Kant claims, leads to the emergence of our moral capacities in individuals and the society as a whole.