The role of taste in morality: From Kant to Schiller to Emerson (Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Ralph Waldo Emerson)

I argue that Kantian ethics needs to be supplemented with a conception of moral judgment modeled on judgments of taste. In the first part of the thesis, I compare Kant's account of determinative judgments of duty to his account of reflective judgments of taste and consider his reasons for barring the latter from ethics. In the second part, I reconstruct Schiller's claim that aesthetic evaluations are needed for the proper cultivation of virtue and Emerson's claim that an aesthetic ideal is needed for guiding permissible choices. In the third part, I adapt Kantian arguments for the thesis that reflective judgments of taste are free and universal to support Schiller's and Emerson's claims about moral judgments.; Kant divides all judgments into two basic forms: determinative and reflective. Judgments of duty are determinative because they begin with a universal principle and apply it to a particular case; judgments of taste are reflective because they start with a particular case and move to a universal claim of beauty. Since Kant bars reflective judgments from moral deliberation, his theory has been faulted for denying that dispositions of character can have a worth other than that derived from principles of duty, and for denying that agents can make moral judgments independently of principles of duty. These objections can be met by supplementing Kantian ethics with a conception of reflective moral judgments, because reflective judgments enable agents to construct ideals of conduct on a case-by case basis without having to appeal to determinate principles.