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In the previous chapter, we considered Herman’s and Korsgaard’s attempts to escape from the Trilemma that the Particularist Challenge was shown to generate. Both aim to show that Kant’s principles of duty can admit of exceptions, and both hope to ac- complish this by reinterpreting Universality such that universal validity and defeasibil- ity come out as compatible. We found that these attempts are unsuccessful because they appeal to the wrong conceptions of defeasibility. The conceptions they appeal to, we said, are not fit for purpose: not fit for the purpose of accommodating the idea that our moral obligations vary with circumstances. In the present chapter, I will argue for a reinterpretation of Universality that, I think, is better suited for this task. In order to motivate this reinterpretation, let us first revisit Korsgaard’s anti-particularist argument. Recall how the argument proceeds:

1. Willing means determining yourself to be a cause, not being moved by the causal operations of incentives within you.

2. Determining yourself to be a cause means following an incentive on the condi- tion that doing so is representative of your practical identity.

3. Willing particularistically, if possible, would mean following an incentive in its full particularity, i.e.

a. as not “representative of any sort of type” of policy or standing commitment, b. or as “in no way […] further describable” (2009: 76).

4. Following an incentive in its full particularity means not making your following it conditional on whether doing so is representative of your practical identity. 5. Thus, it is impossible to will particularistically.

This argument aims to both refute particularism and to defend a Kantian brand of generalism – the brand that Universality is intended to capture. Let us consider how the argument is supposed to achieve the latter aim. In ch. 2, sect. 2.1, we noted, but

did not dwell on the fact, that Korsgaard offers two versions of the third premise. When fleshing out what it would mean to follow an incentive in its full particularity, she says, on the one hand, that it would mean following an incentive as not “repre- sentative of any sort of type” (of policy, say) and, on the other, that it would mean following it as “in no way ... further describable”. Focusing on the former (3a), we thought that she was making a point about the constitutive function of practical identities: since it is by adopting a practical identity that I constitute myself as a cer- tain kind of person, as a person who does certain kinds of things and abstains from doing others, such an identity has to consist of standing commitments that are robust across the board. Accordingly, to follow an incentive on the condition that it is rep- resentative of such an identity must be to follow it as an instance of a form of con- duct that we are committed to in this robust way. Let us call this the “standing- commitment thread” of her argument.135 There is another thread, however. For if we

focus on premise 3b, then Korsgaard’s main point seems to be a different one: if there was such a thing as particularistic willing, it would not be a conceptual state or activity136 because, just in virtue of drawing on concepts, we already connect the par-

ticular case before us to other cases. But if we followed incentives non-conceptually, then we could neither succeed nor fail to act in a way that is representative of our practical identity, because practical identities are essentially conceptual entities.137

After all, a practical identity is a “description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking” (Korsgaard 1996b: 101, my emphasis). Let us call this the “willing-is-conceptual thread” of Korsgaard’s argu- ment. Superficially, these two argumentative routes lead to the same conclusion, but we will see that the brands of Kantian generalism that they establish are very differ- ent.

The standing-commitment thread of the argument via premise 3a lends support to the view that willing is following incentives as instances of principles that hold for

135 _{For a reading of Korsgaard’s argument in the Sources along these standing-commitment lines see}

Stern 2015: 58.

136 _{We will briefly return to the question of whether willing is a state or an activity in connection with}

its temporal structure in sect. 3.2 below.

137 _{This is a rough outline of an argument that we will elaborate on in sect. 2.1 below, albeit in a slight-}

ly different form. Instead of asking what character a choice would have to have so that it be able to agree or disagree with a practical identity, we will ask a more general question, namely, what character a representation of an object would have to have so that it be able to agree or disagree with other representations of that object.

all cases or in all circumstances, and, relatedly, that good willing is willing in accordance with principles that really are universally valid in this sense. Since this is a claim about willing in general, a claim that extends to willing in accordance with principles of duty (e.g. ignoring an incentive to say something because it would be lying), it implies that the possibility of morally good willing rests on there being principles of duty that really do hold for all cases or in all circumstances. As such, the standing-commitment thread of the argument is a consideration in favour of what I will call the Case-Scope Reading of Universality – the reading that, despite all their attempts to tone it down, still figures as a benchmark in Herman’s and Korsgaard’s accounts and, ultimately, saddles them with the Trilemma.

Universality(CS): The features in virtue of which actions have their deontic statuses can be captured in principles of duty that hold for all cases or in all circumstances. In addition, Universality(CS) draws support from what Dancy calls the “subsumptive conception of rationality” (1993: 84). According to this conception, we achieve con- sistency in moral judgment by subsuming particular cases under general principles.138

Thus, to morally judge a particular case in a way that is consistent with one’s other moral judgments, and hence to judge rationally, is to base one’s moral judgment on an argument of the following form:

P1 All actions with features a, b, c, ... are impermissible.

P2 This action has features a, b c, ...

C Thus, this action is impermissible.

The subsumptive conception presupposes that there is a comprehensive set of true Case-Scope universal principles of duty because, without them, arguments of this form would not be formally valid.139

There is broad agreement that Kant subscribes to the subsumptive conception, and the textual evidence does indeed suggest as much. For not only does he define reason as the capacity to “cognize the particular in the universal” (CPR A300), he also identifies the will with practical reason on the grounds that “reason is required for

138 _{For a more detailed explanation of why this conception is tempting, see McDowell 1998: 57-65.} 139 _{The set has to be comprehensive in the sense that, for any true judgment about the deontic status}

of a given action, we must be able to construct such an argument. If the set was not comprehensive, then some such judgments could not be adopted on a rational basis.

the derivation of actions from laws” (G 4:412). In developing an alternative reading of Universality, we will have to be sensitive to the fact that this idea of deriving actions from laws lies at the heart of Kant’s account of what it is to act for a reason. What we will not deal with, in the present chapter, is the specifically Korsgaardian concern that animates the standing-commitment argument. This concern will be addressed in ch. 5.

What about the willing-is-conceptual thread of the argument via premise 3b? In what sense of “universally valid”, if any, does the claim that willing is a conceptual state or activity presuppose that the way in which features determine the deontic status of actions can be captured in universally valid principles? In other words, which brand of Kantian generalism does this claim support? This is the question that we will seek to answer in sect. 2. And although we will approach this question from within Kant’s texts rather than Korsgaard’s, we will discover some parallels between Kant’s reflections on concepts and universality, on the one hand, and the willing-is- conceptual thread of Korsgaard’s anti-particularist argument, on the other (especially, if we see Korsgaard’s talk of describability there as anticipating her arguments for the publicity of reasons that is inspired by Wittgenstein’s arguments for the publicity of meaning (Korsgaard 2009: 196-206 and 1996b: 139-40, 144)).