Hume and Kant on Our Duties to Others

NATURAL MOTIVES AND THE MOTIVE OF DUTY HUME AND KANT ON OUR DUTIES TO OTHERS

CHRISTINE M. KORSGAARD Harvard University Christine_Korsgaard@harvard.edu ABSTRACT. Hume and Kant disagree about the motives involved in the performance of our duties to others. Hume thinks that natural virtues such as benevolence are best performed from “natural” motives, but that there are no natural motives for the performance of the “artificial” virtues, such as justice and fidelity to promises, which are performed from a sense of duty. Kant thinks all duties should be done from the motive of duty. In this paper, I examine the roots of the disagreement. If by a natural motive Hume means an intention that can be described without using normative concepts, Kant would deny that any adult human motives are “natural,” for all involve the thought that something is a reason. But Hume also seems to imply that being motivated to benevolence and self-interest is “natural” in some way that being motivated to keep our agreements is not. I trace this difference to differences in the two philosophers’ conceptions of action. Hume’s conception of action does not allow for genuinely shared action, while Kant’s does. For Kant, being motivated to keep our agreements is just as natural as being motivated to do others good.

1. Introduction Hume and Kant notoriously disagree about the motives that are, or should be, involved in the practice of our duties to other people. Hume believes that a certain category of duties, those associated with what he calls the “natural virtues,” are generally practiced from what he calls “natural motives” (T 3.2.1,478; T 3.2.6,531).1 I am going to question this notion, but I will define it for now, as I think Hume does, as motives that we ordinarily have independently of morality. These motives do not involve moral thoughts, or desires whose content must be specified in terms of moral or normative concepts. So when we are moved by these desires, we are not trying to do...