Towards a “halfway plausible theory of ethics”: judgement in Arendt’s critique of Kant’s moral philosophy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite being indebted to Kant’s aesthetics and what she saw as its hidden political philosophy, Hannah Arendt was quite critical of his ethics. When her objections to Kant’s moral philosophy are discussed, the focus is usually on her claim that it is centred on the self and lacks concern for others and the world. But Arendt also claims that Kant does not think there is room for judgement in the moral sphere – and appears to share this view herself. In this paper, I focus on this aspect of her critique, which has been neglected by commentators. Given Arendt’s turn to Kant’s third Critique and her insights into its conception of judgement, I argue that she ought not to have excluded judgement from the realm of morality. Further evidence for this is suggested by her remarks on the trial of Eichmann, where she seems to want to allow a place for judgement in moral reasoning. I conclude by showing that not only did Arendt wrestle with the question of the relationship between morality and judgement, but that her innovative reading of Kant’s theory of reflective judgement should have led her to afford it a prominent role in the practical domain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".