Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: Female Virtue Rewarded

“Everything in nature works according to laws” (Kant 170).

“Innocence is indeed a glorious thing, only, on the other hand, it is very sad that it cannot well maintain itself, and is easily seduced,” Kant writes in Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals (163), in 1875. For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women not too far in his past, indeed, Kant’s statement rang all too true: these (real) women and their fictional counterparts had to “maintain” their “innocence” even as men attempted to “seduce” them. Kant posits that “wisdom” “consists more in conduct than in knowledge”–reminding one of the conduct books popular at that time from which women learned how to be good women. Yet for Kant, wisdom/conduct “has need of science” (163). I argue that novels served as that “science” for women–female writers wrote fictional narratives that other women could consume, and practice in, as in a laboratory: character X is faced with Y; what would I hypothetically do when faced with Y? Readers could meditate on these and other hypotheses within the pages of the novel.

Early coming-of-age novels about women had gained popularity as a form of self-examination for women–even as they, during the enlightenment, were denounced as feminine, “unreasonable,” and frivolous. These novels served as proving grounds of the interior moral “value” of the female protagonist and simultaneously, of the female who was reading it. The 1740 novel Pamela in which the eponymous character, a servant, must maintain her innocence and resist the seduction (to put it nicely) attempts by her master, exemplifies this necessity for women of that time; as does the eighteenth century Frances Burney novel Evelina, the work of Anne Radcliffe, other Gothic novelists and Jane Austen, to name a prominent few.

“Sometimes,” Kant writes, “it happens that with the sharpest of self-examination we can find nothing beside the moral principle of duty which could have been powerful enough to move us to this or that action and to so great a sacrifice”–thus, some actions were deemed to be “moral” if they came from a principle of duty (for Kant). “Yet we cannot from this infer with certainty that it was not really some secret impulse of self-love, under the false appearance of duty, that was the actual determining cause of the will” (165). With this addition, it is thus essential to, when engaging the process of self-examination, always be checking for “some secret impulse of self-love,” making sure that “duty” is always the “cause of the will.”

I do think it likely that Kant includes women in this form of self-examination. Later in Metaphysics of Morals he writes, “Man and generally any rational being exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will, but in all his actions, whether they concern himself or other rational beings, must always be regarded at the same time as an end” (185). Given this, does Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals save room for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women–his contemporaries and those of his not-too-distant past? Women in the aforementioned novels–the title characters, anyway–out of the “moral principle of duty” attempted to preserve their “innocence” but were not always able to avoid wisdom–which also seemed a necessity for them to attract a husband, and thus survival, at that time. All this within that struggle against a man or men who “feels in himself a powerful counterpoise in his wants and inclinations, the entire satisfaction of which he sums up under the name of happiness” (163)–in other words, seeking to attain her as his “want,” “inclination,” for his “satisfaction” and “happiness.”

For Kant, “Since when the question is of moral worth, it is not with the actions which we see that we are concerned, but with those inward principles of them which we do not see.” Early novels, then, can be seen as an attempt to share these inward principles to preserve moral worth. “We cannot better serve the wishes of those who ridicule all morality as a mere chimera of human imagination overstepping itself from vanity, than by conceding to them that notions of duty must be drawn only from experience” (149). To that end, it is imperative to derive the notions of duty from things other than experience–perhaps from others’ experience, perhaps from fictional experiences in the novel. Early novels such as Evelina, Pamela, Pride & Prejudice, Mysteries of Udolpho, and more, allowed women to experience the metaphysic of morals without getting their hands, or dresses, dirty: “For the metaphysic of morals has to examine the idea and the principles of a possible pure will, and not the acts and conditions of human volition generally, which for the most part are drawn from psychology (149)” because instinct cannot be trusted (153).

For Kant, “to secure one’s own happiness is a duty … for discontent with one’s condition, under a pressure of many anxieties and amidst unsatisfied wants, might easily become a great temptation to transgression of duty” (157). “He should promote his happiness not from inclination but from duty, and by this would his conduct first acquire true moral worth.” For my part, I argue that duty–through willpower–occurs first, then the behavior becomes the new inclination–habit. One can refine one’s actions to come out of first duty, then make their duty into an inclination/habit, either through experience–conduct, willpower–on the proving grounds of life (in the exterior, “real” world), or one can practice on the proving grounds of the interior world, developing their mind and intuition. To preserve their innocence, women benefited from developing their morals in the interior realm. As the companionate marriage became more and more common, women had even more of a need to cultivate their interior sense of self, and morality, to assert their, as Kant would put it, “moral value.”

Kant asserts that to love one’s neighbor, even one’s enemy, as thyself derives from a sense of duty–and thus is more moral than to love one’s family or friends, which is due to inclination: “Duty is the necessity of acting from respect for the law” and is an “energy of will” (158). “Thus the moral worth of an action does not lie in the effect expected from it” (159). This is where metaphysics comes in–the desired result of the labor cannot be the motive. The motive has to be, for this to be a “moral” decision, to obey/fulfill the law–the duty to secure one’s, and others’, happiness out of duty not instinct or inclination. Given this “moral law” Kant is developing throughout Metaphysics of Morals–because “everything in nature works according to laws” (170)–it would be interesting to examine what Kant thought about the companionate marriage market, whose laws were governed by economics, attraction and other forces, which early novels helped men and women to navigate–men as “spectators,” competing against each other to explore and find out “whether true virtue is actually found anywhere in the world” (165) and women to present themselves as possessing that “virtue” within. The alternate title of Pamela, the novel that launched 1,000 ships, is, after all, Virtue Rewarded.

Works cited

Kant, Immanuel. “Critique of Pure Reason.” Basic Writings of Kant, edited by Allen W. Wood, Modern Library, 2001, pp. 3-41.

— Kant, Immanuel. “Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals.” Basic Writings of Kant, edited by Allen W. Wood, Modern Library, 2001, pp. 143-221.

— “What Is Enlightenment?” Basic Writings of Kant, edited by Allen W. Wood, Modern Library, 2001, pp. 135-141.