Kant on duties to, and duties regarding, oneself or others

Paul D. Eisenberg

pp. 275-280

in: Lewis White Beck (ed), Proceedings of the Third international Kant congress, Berlin, Springer, 1972

Abstract

There is, so far as I know, no passage in which Kant indicates explicitly (a) what he means by the phrases "a duty with regard to X" (Pflicht in Ansehung irgend einer Person) and " duty to X" (Pflicht gegen irgend eine Person), or (b) under precisely what conditions he will say of someone that a certain duty is owed to him or is, on the contrary, only in regard to him. Now, many philosophers of the past and of the present have meant by "aduties with regard to X" those duties the performance of which is of benefit primarily to X.¹ But it seems unlikely that Kant meant that by the phrase. For it is surely an empirical question (and so not one that it would be appropriate to consider, or indeed one that could be answered, in a metaphysic of morals) what being(s) benefit most from the performance of a certain (type of) duty; and yet (in the course of the Tugendlehre, for example) Kant frequently, and without any suggestion that he needs to argue for his view – much less that his view represents his answer to a strictly empirical question – describes this or that type of duty as one which is with regard to a person or group which he himself specifies.

Cited authors

Kant Immanuel