The Moral Habitat

Barbara Herman is the Griffin Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at UCLA. She previously held appointments at the University of Southern California and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Practice of Moral Judgment (Harvard, 1993), and Moral Literacy (Harvard, 2007), and Kantian Commitments (Oxford, 2022), and was the editor of John Rawls's Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (Harvard, 2000).

Those who love philosophy books that present new, exciting, and complex theories have been given a gift in Barbara Herman’s The Moral Habitat. In my view, it is also a gift to Kant, since it develops a deeply Kantian account of deliberation as part of showing how perfect and imperfect duties can be seen as working together in a dynamic moral (eco)system of duties of right and of virtue. In the process of doing this, Herman develops a new, intriguing account of imperfect duties and replaces many of Kant’s bad examples with good ones, providing an ideal model for how to argue by example, whether one is Kantian or not.

• Introduction PART ONE: Three Imperfect Duties 1: Framing the Question (What We Can Learn From Imperfect Duties) 2: Gratitude A System of Duties 3: Giving Impermissibility and Wrongness 4: Due Care The Importance of Motive PART TWO: Kantian Resources 5: Making the Turn to Kant 6: The Kantian System of Duties 7: Kantian Imperfect Duties 8: Tracking Value and Extending Duties PART THREE: Living in the Moral Habitat 9: A Dynamic System 10: A Right to Housing 11: Incompleteness and Moral Change Conclusion: Method and Limits