Kantian ethics made morality rational and shorn of embodied form, displacing Aristotelian ethics

Evidence

Cultural critic Jeff ry Minson has argued persuasively that one way in which the legacy of humanist ethics, particularly in its Kantian formulation, has continued to be important to post..Enlightenment thought is in the relative lack of attention given to the morphology of moral actions, that is, to their precise shape and form (Minson 1993). Minson argues that this legacy is traceable at least as far back as Kant, for whom morality proper was primarily a rational matter that entailed the exercise of the faculty of reason, shorn of the specifi context (of social virtues, habit, character formation, and so on) in which the act unfolded. The Kantian legacy, I would add, becomes particu.. larly important in light of the tradition of Aristotelian ethics it displaces-a tradition in which morality was both realized through, and manifest in, out.. ward behavioral forms. Against this tradition, Kant argued that a moral act could be moral only to the extent that it was not a result of habituated virtue but a product of the critical faculty of reason. The latter requires that one act morally in spite of one’s inclinations, habits, and disposition. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 191

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in habit, embodied practice, and Islamic revival scholarship; also ties to Bourdieu’s habitus which Mahmood criticizes here. — connects to: Kantian disinterested aesthetic pleasure descends from magical fetish worship — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 250; Aristotelian hexis and Kantian imagination prefigure the Aufhebung structure — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1007; Under capitalism the Aristotelian four causes must be refracted through class and commodity structure — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 752 (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Distinguishes the Kantian rational-morality inheritance from the Aristotelian embodied-practice tradition it displaced.