State of Nature

This paper corrects a historical injustice that has been perpetrated against Kant for some time now. Mostly on good grounds, Kantian ethics has been accused of neglecting the role played by the emotions in moral deliberation and in morally informed action. However, the contemporary moral philosophers who have put forth such a claim tend to bypass textual sources, on the one hand, and to downplay the role played by the anthropological writings on Kant’s practical philosophy as a whole, on the other. Relying on highly relevant pre-critical texts in which Kant sketches future argumentative patterns and discusses the role of a negative emotion like shame on the improvement of the human species, I address a mistaken conclusion about Kantian ethics as a whole that is common in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. I also raise paradoxical conclusions that follow from Kant’s argument, once its implicit premises have been brought to light. I conclude that Kant did indeed think seriously about a so-called ‘shame-instinct’, however much his central ideas diverge from contemporary readings of the emotion, and fall short of fulfilling the ultimate target one can assume his insights would be drawing at