(LE) Kant

You will have noticed that Kant is challenging reading, and also that his criteria for actions to count as genuinely moral are pretty demanding. It is fair to ask how we are to apply such an austere argument to Lincoln, as apparently heteronomous and wily a political actor as can be imagined. Perhaps, as one critic has commented, Kant's morality is for angels only.

Though we may well find ourselves resisting Kant's rigid distinction between mixed and pure motives, we can nonetheless see the power in his concepts of respect and treating ourselves and others as ends. We might also find some echos of these lofty aspirations in some of Lincoln's moral ambition, his personal and national search for those "better angels of our nature."