Barbara Herman - The Moral Habitat

This book covers a great deal of territory. It begins with an investigation of a few understudied imperfect duties, which, somewhat surprisingly, tell us some important but generally unnoticed facts about what it is to be a moral agent. The second part of the book launches a substantial reinterpretation of Kants ethics as a system of duties, juridical and ethical, perfect and imperfect, that can incorporate what we learn from imperfect duties and do much more. This system of duties provides the structure for what I call a moral habitat: a made environment, created by and for free and equal persons living together. It is a dynamic system, with duties from different spheres shaping and being affected by each other. The last part of the book takes up some implications and applications of this moral habitat idea. From what would be involved, morally, in recognizing a human right to housing to some meta-ethical issues about objectivity and our responsibility for moral change, The Moral Habitat explores the resources of this holistic agent-centered Kantian view of morality.

To help traverse this much territory, Ive taken some liberties. Although Part where their lessons direct an inquiry about the nature and conditions of lived moral practice that I aim to show Kantian theory can address when interpreted as a habitat system of duties. If we lose some truisms about Kants ethics we gain a better way of understanding and assembling the normative pieces of Kantian theory, one that puts the deliberating and morally active person at the center of a generative moral enterprise. In order to lay out such a large idea, Ive had to forego some of the usual scholarly apparatus of addressing alternative readings and counter-arguments. It is also a holistic theory, whose parts cant properly be assessed independently. Theres a cost to asking a reader to suspend judgment while the pieces are put in place, which I accept, and ask for a certain measure of good will and trust as I stage this foray into Kants work. I think of the book as an essayin the sense of an attemptto introduce and defend the idea of a Kantian moral habitat. The last part of the book aims to be bold in a different way. If a moral theory is any good, it should help us address real problems that we face. So I put the moral habitat idea to work on a range of front-page examples, about homelessness and housing but also issues concerning refugees, reproductive rights, educationsubjects I know something about, but where I would hardly claim expertise. In a way this seems to me a virtue: very few of us are experts, and none of us are expert in all the things we need to think about. If I can show that even so theres productive thought to be had about these issues using the Kantian moral habitats program, that is strong evidence of its value.

Alongside these two ambitions of the moral habitat projectrehabilitating imperfect duties and reinterpreting and extending Kants normative thoughtis a third, concerning the fit of the ethical and the juridical, or the moral and the political. Historically, there have been a variety of ways in which the pairs have been connected. The (just) polis is sometimes seen as the necessary setting for virtue, sometimes as the very idea of virtue writ large. Law and morality have been taken to have a common root in natural law. In social contract theory, promising (as real or hypothetical consent) legitimates and is a condition of the states authority. Much less prominent in the Western tradition is the idea that the pairs are related as two parts of a common moral enterprise, together articulating and realizing a division of moral labor. That imbalance in theorizing strikes me as unfortunate, for our theory and our practice. Our moral lives take place in the terms of some political order or other, whose concepts enter into our understanding of what we do, on whatever principle, from whatever motive. And what we as individuals take to be right and wrong isnt just about a private space, constrained by law, from which we emerge from time to time to take a public action. How we care about and care for each other depends on what we value and on the resources were afforded by public institutions. The moral enterprise can be organized in different ways without either domain owning it. The heart of the moral habitat idea is an account of the moral in which its work is done by two cooperating parts, interconnected yet differently structured. In one we each separately do what we ought; in the other the same we, only now acting together, are tasked to do something that we cannot accomplish acting one by one. Its what Plato thought impossible, Marx thought unnecessary, and, I want to show, Kant thought essential if we are to realize an order of free and equal persons.

Does the moral habitat idea need Kant? Probably not. Or even, hopefully not. The focus on Kant is only partly explained by my own sense of mission to produce a textually accurate and sound version of his ethics. For the other part, the exposition of the moral habitat idea required a theoretical framework, though not just any one would support it. It is a notable result that the revised Kantian theory can succeed at this task, and further, that taking on the moral habitat idea extends the real-world application of its fundamental values and principles.

During the (too) many years Ive been working on different parts of this project, Ive collected many debts. For helpful discussion at the very beginning of the project I thank Henry Richardsons Moral Innovation Seminar at Georgetown University. For the kind of engaged critical discussion that keeps one going, Im greatly appreciative of the law and philosophy groups at NYU, UCLA, University of Toronto Law School, Queens University Law School, University of Chicago Law School, and University of Michigan Law School, and equally, for stimulating discussion at Princeton Universitys Center for Human Values, University of Londons Institute of Philosophy, and the philosophy departments at Amsterdam University, University of Antwerp, Columbia University, Cornell University, Stanford University, University of Kansas, University of Vermont, USC, and UCSD.