Kants Ethics of Virtue

Kantian Virtue and Virtue Ethics. Two Aspects of Kant's Doctrine of Virtue. The Priority of the Right in Kant's Ethics. Stephen Michael Holland - - Nursing Philosophy 13 4: Kant's Commitment to Metaphysics of Morals.

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Nandi Theunissen - - European Journal of Philosophy 24 1: Gao Guoxi - - Frontiers of Philosophy in China 5 2: Kant's Conception of Virtue. Lara Denis - - In Paul Guyer ed. Michael Slote - - Utilitas 16 1: But this can invite misunderstandings. I may respect you as a rebounder but not a scorer, or as a researcher but not as a teacher. When I respect you in this way, I am positively appraising you in light of some achievement or virtue you possess relative to some standard of success.

If this were the sort of respect Kant is counseling then clearly it may vary from person to person and is surely not what treating something as an end-in-itself requires. For instance, it does not seem to prevent me from regarding rationality as an achievement and respecting one person as a rational agent in this sense, but not another. And Kant is not telling us to ignore differences, to pretend that we are blind to them on mindless egalitarian grounds.

I may respect you because you are a student, a Dean, a doctor or a mother. In such cases of respecting you because of who or what you are, I am giving the proper regard to a certain fact about you, your being a Dean for instance. This sort of respect, unlike appraisal respect, is not a matter of degree based on your having measured up to some standard of assessment.

We are to respect human beings simply because they are persons and this requires a certain sort of regard. We are not called on to respect them insofar as they have met some standard of evaluation appropriate to persons. And, crucially for Kant, persons cannot lose their humanity by their misdeeds — even the most vicious persons, Kant thought, deserve basic respect as persons with humanity. Although Kant does not state this as an imperative, as he does in the other formulations, it is easy enough to put it in that form: Act so that through your maxims you could be a legislator of universal laws.

This sounds very similar to the first formulation. However, in this case we focus on our status as universal law givers rather than universal law followers. This is of course the source of the very dignity of humanity Kant speaks of in the second formulation. A rational will that is merely bound by universal laws could act accordingly from natural and non-moral motives, such as self-interest.

But in order to be a legislator of universal laws, such contingent motives, motives that rational agents such as ourselves may or may not have, must be set aside. Hence, we are required, according to this formulation, to conform our behavior to principles that express this autonomy of the rational will — its status as a source of the very universal laws that obligate it.

The Autonomy Formula presumably does this by putting on display the source of our dignity and worth, our status as free rational agents who are the source of the authority behind the very moral laws that bind us. This formulation has gained favor among Kantians in recent years see Rawls, ; Hill, Many see it as introducing more of a social dimension to Kantian morality. The intuitive idea behind this formulation is that our fundamental moral obligation is to act only on principles which could earn acceptance by a community of fully rational agents each of whom have an equal share in legislating these principles for their community.

Kant claimed that all of these CI formulas were equivalent. Unfortunately, he does not say in what sense. Thus, his claim that the formulations are equivalent could be interpreted in a number of ways. There are remaining doubts some commentators have, however, about whether this strategy can capture the full meaning of the Humanity Formula or explain all of the duties that Kant claims to derive from it Wood , ; Cureton Perhaps, then, if the formulas are not equivalent in meaning, they are nevertheless logically interderivable and hence equivalent in this sense. That would have the consequence that the CI is a logical truth, and Kant insists that it is not or at least that it is not analytic.

Since the CI formulas are not logical truths, then, it is possible that they could be logically interderivable. However, despite his claim that each contains the others within it, what we find in the Groundwork seems best interpreted as a derivation of each successive formula from the immediately preceding formula. There are, nonetheless, a few places in which it seems that Kant is trying to work in the opposite direction.

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One is found in his discussion of the Humanity Formula. If something is absolutely valuable, then we must act only on maxims that can be universal laws. But he postulates humanity is absolutely valuable. Thus , we must act only on maxims that can be universal laws. This we think anomolous discussion may well get at some deep sense in which Kant thought the formulations were equivalent. Nonetheless, this derivation of the universal law formulation from the Humanity Formulation seems to require a substantive, synthetic claim, namely, that humanity is indeed absolutely valuable. The most straightforward interpretation of the claim that the formulas are equivalent is as the claim that following or applying each formula would generate all and only the same duties Allison This seems to be supported by the fact that Kant used the same examples through the Law of Nature Formula and the Humanity Formula.

In other words, respect for humanity as an end in itself could never lead you to act on maxims that would generate a contradiction when universalized, and vice versa. The subjective differences between formulas are presumably differences that appeal in different ways to various conceptions of what morality demands of us.

But this difference in meaning is compatible with there being no practical difference, in the sense that conformity to one formulation cannot lead one to violate another formulation. Most readers interpret Kant as holding that autonomy is a property of rational wills or agents. It contains first and foremost the idea of laws made and laid down by oneself, and, in virtue of this, laws that have decisive authority over oneself.

Consider how political freedom in liberal theories is thought to be related to legitimate political authority: A state is free when its citizens are bound only by laws in some sense of their own making — created and put into effect, say, by vote or by elected representatives. The laws of that state then express the will of the citizens who are bound by them.

An autonomous state is thus one in which the authority of its laws is in the will of the people in that state, rather than in the will of a people external to that state, as when one state imposes laws on another during occupation or colonization. In the latter case, the laws have no legitimate authority over those citizens. In a similar fashion, we may think of a person as free when bound only by her own will and not by the will of another. Her actions then express her own will and not the will of someone or something else.

The authority of the principles binding her will is then also not external to her will. It comes from the fact that she willed them. So autonomy, when applied to an individual, ensures that the source of the authority of the principles that bind her is in her own will.

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For a contrasting interpretation of autonomy that emphasizes the intrinsic value of freedom of choice and the instrumental role of reason in preserving that value, see Guyer This is, firstly, the concept of a will that does not operate through the influence of factors outside of this responsiveness to apparent reasons. For a will to be free is thus for it to be physically and psychologically unforced in its operation. Hence, behaviors that are performed because of obsessions or thought disorders are not free in this negative sense. But also, for Kant, a will that operates by being determined through the operation of natural laws, such as those of biology or psychology, cannot be thought of as operating by responding to reasons.

Hence, determination by natural laws is conceptually incompatible with being free in a negative sense. Indeed, Kant goes out of his way in his most famous work, the Critique of Pure Reason , to argue that we have no rational basis for believing our wills to be free. Of such things, he insists, we can have no knowledge. For much the same reason, Kant is not claiming that a rational will cannot operate without feeling free.

Although there is, according to Kant, no rational basis for the belief that the natural world is or is not arranged according to some purpose by a Designer, the actual practices of science often require looking for the purpose of this or that chemical, organ, creature, environment, and so on. Thus, one engages in these natural sciences by searching for purposes in nature. Yet when an evolutionary biologist, for instance, looks for the purpose of some organ in some creature, she does not after all thereby believe that the creature was designed that way, for instance, by a Deity.

Practicing biology involves searching for the purposes of the parts of living organisms. Kant says that a will that cannot exercise itself except under the Idea of its freedom is free from a practical point of view im practischer Absicht. In saying such wills are free from a practical point of view, he is saying that in engaging in practical endeavors — trying to decide what to do, what to hold oneself and others responsible for, and so on — one is justified in holding oneself to all of the principles to which one would be justified in holding wills that are autonomous free wills.

Kantian Virtue and “Virtue Ethics”

Thus, once we have established the set of prescriptions, rules, laws and directives that would bind an autonomous free will, we then hold ourselves to this very same of set prescriptions, rules, laws and directives. And one is justified in this because rational agency can only operate by seeking to be the first cause of its actions, and these are the prescriptions, and so on, of being a first cause of action. Therefore, rational agents are free in a negative sense insofar as any practical matter is at issue.

Crucially, rational wills that are negatively free must be autonomous, or so Kant argues. This is because the will is a kind of cause—willing causes action. Kant took from Hume the idea that causation implies universal regularities: These laws, which Kant thought were universal too, govern the movements of my body, the workings of my brain and nervous system and the operation of my environment and its effects on me as a material being.

But they cannot be the laws governing the operation of my will; that, Kant already argued, is inconsistent with the freedom of my will in a negative sense. So, the will operates according to a universal law, though not one authored by nature, but one of which I am the origin or author. Thus, Kant argues, a rational will, insofar as it is rational, is a will conforming itself to those laws valid for any rational will. Addressed to imperfectly rational wills, such as our own, this becomes an imperative: Kant appeared not to recognize the gap between the law of an autonomous rational will and the CI, but he was apparently unsatisfied with the argument establishing the CI in Groundwork III for another reason, namely, the fact that it does not prove that we really are free.

Hence, while in the Groundwork Kant relies on a dubious argument for our autonomy to establish that we are bound by the moral law, in the second Critique , he argues from the bold assertion of our being bound by the moral law to our autonomy. One strategy favored recently has been to turn back to the arguments of Groundwork II for help. Kant himself repeatedly claimed that these arguments are merely analytic but that they do not establish that there is anything that answers to the concepts he analyzes.

Kant clearly takes himself to have established that rational agents such as ourselves must take the means to our ends, since this is analytic of rational agency. But there is a chasm between this analytic claim and the supposed synthetic conclusion that rational agency also requires conforming to a further, non-desire based, principle of practical reason such as the CI.

Nevertheless, some see arguments in Groundwork II that establish just this. If this assumption is true, then if one can on independent grounds prove that there is something which is an end in itself, one will have an argument for a categorical imperative. One such strategy, favored by Korsgaard and Wood relies on the apparent argument Kant gives that humanity is an end in itself. Guyer, by contrast, sees an argument for freedom as an end in itself Guyer Both strategies have faced textual and philosophical hurdles.

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The core idea is that Kant believed that all moral theories prior to his own went astray because they portrayed fundamental moral principles as appealing to the existing interests of those bound by them. This in turn apparently implies that our wills are necessarily aimed at what is rational and reasonable. To will something, on this picture, is to govern oneself in accordance with reason. Often, however, we fail to effectively so govern ourselves because we are imperfect rational beings who are caused to act by our non—rational desires and inclinations.

The result, at least on one version of this interpretation Wolff , is that we either act rationally and reasonably and so autonomously or we are merely caused to behave in certain ways by non—rational forces acting on us and so heteronomously. This is, however, an implausible view. It implies that all irrational acts, and hence all immoral acts, are not willed and therefore not free. However, several prominent commentators nonetheless think that there is some truth in it Engstrom ; Reath ; Korsgaard , , In particular, when we act immorally, we are either weak—willed or we are misusing our practical reason by willing badly.

We do not have the capacity to aim to act on an immoral maxim because the will is identified with practical reason, so when we will to perform an immoral act, we implicitly but mistakenly take our underlying policy to be required by reason. Our choice is nonetheless free and attributable to us because our will was involved in leading us to take the act to be rational and reasonable. It remains to be seen whether, on this complicated interpretation of Kant, it sufficiently allows for the possibility that one can knowingly and willingly do wrong if the will is practical reason and practical reason is, in part, the moral law.

Thus, rather than treating admirable character traits as more basic than the notions of right and wrong conduct, Kant takes virtues to be explicable only in terms of a prior account of moral or dutiful behavior. He does not try to make out what shape a good character has and then draw conclusions about how we ought to act on that basis. He sets out the principles of moral conduct based on his philosophical account of rational agency, and then on that basis defines virtue as a kind of strength and resolve to act on those principles despite temptations to the contrary.

Moreover, the disposition is to overcome obstacles to moral behavior that Kant thought were ineradicable features of human nature. Thus, virtue appears to be much more like what Aristotle would have thought of as a lesser trait, viz. Third, in viewing virtue as a trait grounded in moral principles, and vice as principled transgression of moral law, Kant thought of himself as thoroughly rejecting what he took to be the Aristotelian view that virtue is a mean between two vices.

The Aristotelian view, he claimed, assumes that virtue typically differs from vice only in terms of degree rather than in terms of the different principles each involves MM 6: They differ in that the prodigal person acts on the principle of acquiring means with the sole intention of enjoyment, while the avaricious person acts on the principle of acquiring means with the sole intention of possessing them.

Fourth, in classical views the distinction between moral and non-moral virtues is not particularly significant. A virtue is some sort of excellence of the soul, but one finds classical theorists treating wit and friendliness alongside courage and justice. Since Kant holds moral virtue to be a trait grounded in moral principle, the boundary between non-moral and moral virtues could not be more sharp. Even so, Kant shows a remarkable interest in non-moral virtues; indeed, much of Anthropology is given over to discussing the nature and sources of a variety of character traits, both moral and non-moral.

Fifth, virtue cannot be a trait of divine beings, if there are such, since it is the power to overcome obstacles that would not be present in them.

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This is not to say that to be virtuous is to be the victor in a constant and permanent war with ineradicable evil impulses or temptations. Should all of our desires and interests be trained ever so carefully to comport with what morality actually requires of us, this would not change in the least the fact that morality is still duty for us. For should this come to pass, it would not change the fact that each and every desire and interest could have run contrary to the moral law.

And it is the fact that they can conflict with moral law, not the fact that they actually do conflict with it, that makes duty a constraint, and hence is virtue essentially a trait concerned with constraint. For instance, he holds that the lack of virtue is compatible with possessing a good will G 6: That one acts from duty, even repeatedly and reliably can thus be quite compatible with an absence of the moral strength to overcome contrary interests and desires. Someone with a good will, who is genuinely committed to duty for its own sake, might simply fail to encounter any significant temptation that would reveal the lack of strength to follow through with that commitment.

Among the virtues Kant discusses are those of self-respect, honesty, thrift, self-improvement, beneficence, gratitude, sociability, and forgiveness. Kant also distinguishes vice, which is a steadfast commitment to immorality, from particular vices, which involve refusing to adopt specific moral ends or committing to act against those ends. Although Kant gives several examples in the Groundwork that illustrate this principle, he goes on to describe in later writings, especially in The Metaphysics of Morals , a complicated normative ethical theory for interpreting and applying the CI to human persons in the natural world.

His framework includes various levels, distinctions and application procedures. Kant, in particular, describes two subsidiary principles that are supposed to capture different aspects of the CI. These principles, in turn, justify more specific duties of right and of ethics and virtue. For example, Kant claims that the duty not to steal the property of another person is narrow and perfect because it precisely defines a kind of act that is forbidden.

The duty of beneficence, on the other hand, is characterized as wide and imperfect because it does not specify exactly how much assistance we must provide to others. Even with a system of moral duties in place, Kant admits that judgment is often required to determine how these duties apply to particular circumstances. It denies, in other words, the central claim of teleological moral views. For instance, act consequentialism is one sort of teleological theory. It asserts that the right action is that action of all the alternatives available to the agent that has the best overall outcome.

Here, the goodness of the outcome determines the rightness of an action. Another sort of teleological theory might focus instead on character traits. In this case, it is the goodness of the character of the person who does or would perform it that determines the rightness of an action. In both cases, as it were, the source or ground of rightness is goodness.

Rightness, on the standard reading of Kant, is not grounded in the value of outcomes or character. There are several reasons why readers have thought that Kant denies the teleological thesis. First, he makes a plethora of statements about outcomes and character traits that appear to imply an outright rejection of both forms of teleology.

This appears to say that moral rightness is not a function of the value of intended or actual outcomes. These certainly appear to be the words of someone who rejects the idea that what makes actions right is primarily their relationship to what good may come of those actions, someone who rejects outright the act consequentialist form of teleology. Moreover, Kant begins the Groundwork by noting that character traits such as the traditional virtues of courage, resolution, moderation, self-control, or a sympathetic cast of mind possess no unconditional moral worth, G 4: If the moral rightness of an action is grounded in the value of the character traits of the person who performs or would perform it then it seems Kant thinks that it would be grounded in something of only conditional value.

This certainly would not comport well with the virtue ethics form of teleology. Perhaps the first philosopher to suggest a teleological reading of Kant was John Stuart Mill. In the first chapter of his Utilitarianism , Mill implies that the Universal Law formulation of the Categorical Imperative could only sensibly be interpreted as a test of the consequences of universal adoption of a maxim. And because they are universal, Hare argued, they forbid making exceptions.

Indeed, Cummiskey argues that they must be: Respect for the value of humanity entails treating the interests of each as counting for one and one only, and hence for always acting to produce the best overall outcome. Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

When someone acts, it is according to a rule, or maxim. For Kant, an act is only permissible if one is willing for the maxim that allows the action to be a universal law by which everyone acts. A contradiction in conception happens when, if a maxim were to be universalized, it ceases to make sense because the " The maxim is not moral because it is logically impossible to universalize—we could not conceive of a world where this maxim was universalized. This does not mean a logical contradiction, but that universalizing the maxim leads to a state of affairs that no rational being would desire.

For example, Driver argues that the maxim 'I will not give to charity' produces a contradiction in the will when universalized because a world where no one gives to charity would be undesirable for the person who acts by that maxim. Kant believed that morality is the objective law of reason: He thus believed that a perfectly rational being must also be perfectly moral because a perfectly rational being subjectively finds it necessary to do what is rationally necessary.

Because humans are not perfectly rational they partly act by instinct , Kant believed that humans must conform their subjective will with objective rational laws, which he called conformity obligation. Just as physical laws exist prior to physical beings, rational laws morality exist prior to rational beings.

Therefore, according to Kant, rational morality is universal and cannot change depending on circumstance. Kant's second formulation of the Categorical Imperative is to treat humanity as an end in itself:. Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.

Virtue Ethics

Kant argued that rational beings can never be treated merely as means to ends; they must always also be treated as ends themselves, requiring that their own reasoned motives must be equally respected. This derives from Kant's claim that reason motivates morality: A rational being cannot rationally consent to be used merely as a means to an end, so they must always be treated as an end. Because all rational agents rationally will themselves to be an end and never merely a means, it is morally obligatory that they are treated as such. Kant's Formula of Autonomy expresses the idea that an agent is obliged to follow the Categorical Imperative because of their rational will, rather than any outside influence.

Kant believed that any moral law motivated by the desire to fulfill some other interest would deny the Categorical Imperative, leading him to argue that the moral law must only arise from a rational will. A rational being must always regard himself as giving laws either as member or as sovereign in a kingdom of ends which is rendered possible by the freedom of will. This formulation requires that actions be considered as if their maxim is to provide a law for a hypothetical Kingdom of Ends.

Accordingly, people have an obligation to act upon principles that a community of rational agents would accept as laws. The first is the Lutheran sect Pietism, to which Kant's parents subscribed. Pietism emphasised honesty and moral living over doctrinal belief , more concerned with feeling than rationality. Kant believed that rationality is required, but that it should be concerned with morality and good will. Second is the political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose work, The Social Contract , influenced Kant's view on the fundamental worth of human beings.

Pojman also cites contemporary ethical debates as influential to the development of Kant's ethics. Kant favoured rationalism over empiricism, which meant he viewed morality as a form of knowledge, rather than something based on human desire. Natural law the belief that the moral law is determined by nature and intuitionism the belief that humans have intuitive awareness of objective moral truths were, according to Pojman, also influential for Kant. Rejecting any form of coercion or manipulation, Habermas believes that agreement between the parties is crucial for a moral decision to be reached.

It also formulates a rule by which ethical actions can be determined and proposes that ethical actions should be universalisable, in a similar way to Kant's ethics. Habermas argues that his ethical theory is an improvement on Kant's ethics. Kant distinguished between the phenomena world, which can be sensed and experienced by humans, and the noumena , or spiritual world, which is inaccessible to humans.

This dichotomy was necessary for Kant because it could explain the autonomy of a human agent: For Habermas, morality arises from discourse, which is made necessary by their rationality and needs, rather than their freedom. The social contract theory of political philosopher John Rawls , developed in his work A Theory of Justice , was influenced by Kant's ethics. To achieve this fairness, he proposed a hypothetical moment prior to the existence of a society, at which the society is ordered: This should take place from behind a veil of ignorance , where no one knows what their own position in society will be, preventing people from being biased by their own interests and ensuring a fair result.

Rawls dismissed much of Kant's dualism, arguing that the structure of Kantian ethics, once reformulated, is clearer without it—he described this as one of the goals of A Theory of Justice. He proposed that, while Kant presented human freedom as critical to the moral law, Sade further argued that human freedom is only fully realised through the maxim of jouissance.

O'Neill argues that a successful Kantian account of social justice must not rely on any unwarranted idealizations or assumption. She notes that philosophers have previously charged Kant with idealizing humans as autonomous beings, without any social context or life goals, though maintains that Kant's ethics can be read without such an idealization. Conceiving of reason as a tool to make decisions with means that the only thing able to restrain the principles we adopt is that they could be adopted by all.

If we cannot will that everyone adopts a certain principle, then we cannot give them reasons to adopt it. To use reason, and to reason with other people, we must reject those principles that cannot be universally adopted. In this way, O'Neill reached Kant's formulation of universalisability without adopting an idealistic view of human autonomy. From this model of Kantian ethics, O'Neill begins to develop a theory of justice.

She argues that the rejection of certain principles, such as deception and coercion, provides a starting point for basic conceptions of justice, which she argues are more determinate for human beings that the more abstract principles of equality or liberty. Nevertheless, she concedes that these principles may seem to be excessively demanding: In his paper The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories , philosopher Michael Stocker challenges Kantian ethics and all modern ethical theories by arguing that actions from duty lack certain moral value.

He gives the example of Smith, who visits his friend in hospital out of duty, rather than because of the friendship; he argues that this visit seems morally lacking because it is motivated by the wrong thing. After presenting a number of reasons that we might find acting out of duty objectionable, she argues that these problems only arise when people misconstrue what their duty is.

Acting out of duty is not intrinsically wrong, but immoral consequences can occur when people misunderstand what they are duty-bound to do. Duty need not be seen as cold and impersonal: She argues that, seen this way, duty neither reveals a deficiency in one's natural inclinations to act, nor undermines the motives and feelings that are essential to friendship. For Baron, being governed by duty does not mean that duty is always the primary motivation to act; rather, it entails that considerations of duty are always action-guiding. A responsible moral agent should take an interest in moral questions, such as questions of character.

These should guide moral agents to act from duty.

Hegel presented two main criticisms of Kantian ethics. He first argued that Kantian ethics provides no specific information about what people should do because Kant's moral law is solely a principle of non-contradiction. To illustrate this point, Hegel and his followers have presented a number of cases in which the Formula of Universal Law either provides no meaningful answer or gives an obviously wrong answer.

Hegel used Kant's example of being trusted with another man's money to argue that Kant's Formula of Universal Law cannot determine whether a social system of property is a morally good thing, because either answer can entail contradictions. He also used the example of helping the poor: For Hegel, it is unnatural for humans to suppress their desire and subordinate it to reason.

This means that, by not addressing the tension between self-interest and morality, Kant's ethics cannot give humans any reason to be moral. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer criticised Kant's belief that ethics should concern what ought to be done, insisting that the scope of ethics should be to attempt to explain and interpret what actually happens.

Whereas Kant presented an idealized version of what ought to be done in a perfect world, Schopenhauer argued that ethics should instead be practical and arrive at conclusions that could work in the real world, capable of being presented as a solution to the world's problems. Because he believed that virtue cannot be taught—a person is either virtuous or is not—he cast the proper place of morality as restraining and guiding people's behavior, rather than presenting unattainable universal laws. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche criticised all contemporary moral systems, with a special focus on Christian and Kantian ethics.

He argued that all modern ethical systems share two problematic characteristics: Although Nietzsche's primary objection is not that metaphysical claims about humanity are untenable he also objected to ethical theories that do not make such claims , his two main targets—Kantianism and Christianity—do make metaphysical claims, which therefore feature prominently in Nietzsche's criticism. Nietzsche rejected fundamental components of Kant's ethics, particularly his argument that morality, God, and immorality, can be shown through reason. Nietzsche cast suspicion on the use of moral intuition, which Kant used as the foundation of his morality, arguing that it has no normative force in ethics.

He further attempted to undermine key concepts in Kant's moral psychology, such as the will and pure reason. Like Kant, Nietzsche developed a concept of autonomy; however, he rejected Kant's idea that valuing our own autonomy requires us to respect the autonomy of others. Under the Kantian model, reason is a fundamentally different motive to desire because it has the capacity to stand back from a situation and make an independent decision.

Nietzsche conceives of the self as a social structure of all our different drives and motivations; thus, when it seems that our intellect has made a decision against our drives, it is actually just an alternative drive taking dominance over another. This is in direct contrast with Kant's view of the intellect as opposed to instinct; instead, it is just another instinct. There is thus no self-capable of standing back and making a decision; the decision the self-makes is simply determined by the strongest drive. For an individual to create values of their own, which is a key idea in Nietzsche's philosophy, they must be able to conceive of themselves as a unified agent.

Even if the agent is influenced by their drives, he must regard them as his own, which undermines Nietzsche's conception of autonomy.