Para una concepción performativa de la “formación moral” en la ética de Kant: autonomía, carácter y autocracia

The article addresses the question of moral formation in Kant’s ethics. To do so, it takes into account the growing importance that this issue has achieved in Anglo-American Kantian studies, and within its intention to “naturalize” elements of Kant’s ethics, in order to make it an attractive and satisfactory theory according to some current standards of philosophical, psychological, and action theory discussions. In this context, the article points out some philological and argumentative limitations inherent to the “Anglo-naturalist” program, which refer especially to the intention of converting Kant’s theses about moral autonomy, conscience, and law into components of a theory of moral formation or of the cultivation of personal autocracy. The article argues that a more adequate way of conceiving moral formation in Kant’s ethics, and one that is more in keeping with the available textual support, is not to describe autonomy as the result of a process of increasing abstraction, decentration, and autocracy (i.e., moral formation), but rather as the generative principle of all this: the article argues that in Kant’s texts one can find elements to reconstruct the postulate (“Grundsatz”) of autonomy in performative terms, thereby describing the conditions of possibility of all real deliberation. Having thus reconstructed the postulate of autonomy, it is possible, argues the author, to show that the moral formation of individuals is “sub-produced” by the real deliberations they carry out daily, together with their eventual efforts to abide by the rules of action that they create in such deliberations. What scholars today call “moral formation”, and what the article conceives as a residue of autonomy, constitutes what Kant called character.