Notice Board

The Department of Philosophy Colloquium Series presents:

"Judgment, Latitude, and Kant's Distinction Between Perfect and Imperfect Duties"

Speaker: Nicholas Dunn (Department of Philosophy)
Monday, October 6 | 12:30 - 2:00 p.m.
University Hall B716

Abstract: A common way of understanding Kant’s distinction between perfect and imperfect duties holds that the former admits of no room for judgment due to its inflexibility, while the latter does because of its latitude. Recent debates in Kant’s ethics have challenged this oversimplification, yet they have done so by conflating judgment and latitude. In this paper, I show that judgment and latitude are conceptually distinct notions and thus refer to structurally distinct moments in moral agency. To this end, I argue for two main claims: (i) since, unlike a perfect duty, the content of an imperfect duty does not contain an act-type description but only an end, agents have latitude in selecting the act-type to perform; (ii) both perfect and imperfect duties require judgment, and do so in the exact same way, as both require that an agent pick out an act-token that instantiates an act-type. Hence, differentiating between these two notions allows us to see both that there is a distinct, pre-judgmental, deliberative phase for imperfect duties, which is not present in the case of perfect duties, and the deep structural similarity between the two concerning the notion of judgment.