[Articles] The Feeling of Respect as Kantian Moral Motivation: The Conflict between Intellectualism and Affectivism over the Frailty of Human Nature

The so-called inconsistency in Kant's concept of moral motivation has been debated since Lewis White Beck. This inconsistency consists in Kant's seemingly contradictory claims that the moral law itself is the moral incentive and that the feeling of respect is the sole moral incentive. According to traditional interpretations, intellectualism prioritizes the former, namely, the cognitive aspect of respect (the recognition of the moral law), while affectivism emphasizes the latter, the affective aspect of respect. This paper examines this debate by analyzing the intellectualist accounts of Andrew Reath and Henry E. Allison, as well as the affectivist interpretation advanced by Richard McCarty. I situate the fundamental point of disagreement between these two readings in whether they conceptually allow for the frailty of human nature, as articulated in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. With respect to cases in which agents fail to act morally because of the frailty of human nature, affectivism is better positioned conceptually to explain such failures than intellectualism, which faces textual difficulties in accounting for them. At the same time, drawing on Karl Ameriks's claim that the faculty of volition is irreducible to either the faculty of cognition or that of feeling, this paper shows that intellectualism tends to converge on a Socratic-Wolffian form of intellectualism that Kant sought to overcome, while affectivism cannot coherently ground its position in an appeal to human frailty.