Prof. Gabriele Gava (University of Turin)

Abstract

While the notion of moral belief in Kant has been widely discussed, an adequate clarification of his claim that moral belief is private is still lacking. Given that moral belief is based on the moral law, which is universally valid, one might wonder why it cannot be shared with others. Moreover, Kant stresses that moral belief is based on knowledge, where this is a further reason to describe it as not private, given that knowledge is considered a paradigmatic case of communicability. In this paper, I throw light on the private validity of moral belief by distinguishing between two senses in which moral belief is privately valid, which I call private validity as personal validity and private validity as irreducibly first-personal knowledge, respectively. This second sense of private validity shows that there is a kind of private knowledge that grounds moral belief, which partially explains why moral belief has private validity. This private knowledge concerns our dispositions. Claiming that this knowledge is possible might be taken to be in conflict with Kant so-called opacity thesis, namely, the claim that we cannot know what our dispositions are. I conclude by arguing that the passages where Kant presents the thesis only establish that our knowledge of our dispositions is empirical and that we cannot know whether our motivation is morally pure.