ABSTRACT
The project of this essay is to point to a certain kind of incoherence in the attempt to
reconcile morality with naturalism, and then to discuss what we need if we are going
to avoid this incoherence.1 I will argue that morality, as it has been conceived in
modern Western philosophy, has a three-part structure, which I will call the structure
of the moral gap.2 I will focus on Kant, because I think he is the greatest and most
influential moral philosopher of the modern period. I will not be talking about his
work outside moral philosophy. In the Kantian structure, there is, first, the moral demand. I will stress the demand for impartiality, which is the demand to give oneself
the same weight in moral thinking that one gives to any other human being. There are,
second, our natural capacities which are unequal to the moral demand. They are
unequal because they give us the tendency to partiality, the tendency to give ourselves
more weight than morality allows. For example, they give us the tendency to desire
power and prestige, both of which require (if we are to have them) that others do not
have them or have them less than we do. The third part of this structure is a possible
holy being, whose functioning is not limited in the way ours is, and who is seen as the
source of the moral demand. Thus Kant says we should recognize our duties as God’s
commands.3
