Must Morality Crush Our Desires?

In this lecture, Reed Winegar investigates a central but often misunderstood dimension of Kant's ethics: moral psychology. Beginning with the concept of the good will and its unconditional value, Winegar traces how Kant distinguishes genuine respect for the moral law from mere outward compliance. He addresses Schiller's famous critique that Kantian ethics ignores human feeling, showing how Kant's own account is far more nuanced than critics suggest. Drawing on the Critique of Practical Reason, Winegar explains how Kant treats respect as a distinctive kind of feeling, one that combines a painful humiliation of self-conceit with a pleasant recognition of our rational autonomy. This "mixed feeling" structure, Winegar argues, also appears in Kant's theory of the sublime, where encounters with overwhelming magnitude or power produce both displeasure and an uplifting awareness of reason's independence from sensibility. In Kant's philosophy, the lecture shows, feeling, pleasure, and pain are deeply intertwined with the moral life.