310 NOTES TO PAGES 180–183
inspired action or practice can privilege, for instance, filial duty over a duty to
humanity in general. For the purposes of isolating instances of doing duty for
duty’s sake, Kant tends to use examples in which individuals act against their self-
interest or against the advantage of their kin or friends, but his point in doing so
is not to show that helping ‘one’s own’ is immoral, but that it is much easier to
determine that one has acted in a morally meritorious way if some sacrifice of
one’s own interests is involved. Moreover, as I showed in the last chapter, from
the perspective of moral psychology, Kant believes that the idea of loving human-
ity as a whole, i.e., a cosmopolitan ethos, generates only a very weak moral feel-
ing. It is much more likely, he argues, for people to think and to act morally in
local settings and with somewhat parochial interests and issues in mind. What is
crucial, Kant argues, is that one should participate in such local spheres of life
from a larger, humanitarian perspective; this, he contends, is not only possible and
realistic (from the standpoint of an accurate moral psychology), but also necessary
for any progressive ethical, social, and political development to occur.
9. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 290 (Book 18, chapter 11).
10. See Rousseau, Oeuvres compl`etes, Pl´eiade ed. (1964), 3:560.
11. See Istvan Hont, “The language of sociability and commerce: Samuel Pu-
fendorf and the theoretical foundations of the ‘Four-Stages Theory’ ”, in The Lan-
guages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 253–76; Christopher J. Berry, Social
Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press,
1997).
12. See Richard H. Popkin, “The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century
Racism” in Racism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (Cleveland:
Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973), 245–62; Nicholas Hudson,
“From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Cen-
tury Thought”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29, no. 3 (1996): 247–64; Robert
Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlighten-
ment Construction of Race”, in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Oxford: Blackwell,
2001); Pierre Pluchon, N`egres et juifs au XVIIIe si`ecle: Le racisme au si`ecle des
lumi´eres (Paris: Tallandier, 1984). More generally, see also the essays in Peter
Hulme and L. J. Jordanova, eds., The Enlightenment and Its Shadows (New York:
Routledge, 1990). For an extensive historical and philosophical argument that
the category of race is not only historically contingent, but both conceptually
confused and scientifically implausible as an account of human diversity, see K.
Anthony Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections”, The
Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 17, ed. Grethe B. Peterson (Salt Lake
City: University of Utah Press, 1996), 51–136. On the need for political theorists
to develop a critical theory of race in light of the importance of race in the histori-
cal development of modern philosophy, see Thomas McCarthy, “Political Philos-
ophy and the Problem of Race”, in Die
¨
Offentlichkeit der Vernunft und die Ver-
nunft der
¨
Offentlichkeit, ed. K. G¨unther and L. Wingert (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 2001).
13. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 47.
14. David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, rev. ed., ed. Eugene F.