How can I teach Kant–without too much Kant?

Have you looked at Rawls’s lectures on Kant in his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy? They are, I think, admirably clear and useful. But, they might still be too long and I’m not sure, off the top of my head, how easy to cut down they might be.

I’m not sure I can help with the Kant issue. I’ve had the same problem myself.

However, when it comes to Mill, you may want to try starting with Bentham. I’ve found he’s generally much clearer to undergrads, and he also serves as a useful foil for Mill (e.g., Mill’s qualitative account of pleasure serves as a contrast to Bentham’s quantitative account).

I have found Kant’s “An answer to the question: What is Enlightenment?” a great piece to use in my undergrad courses. And if you add to that chapter 2 of Onora O’Neill’s Constructions of Reason, you can cover some interesting issues pertaining to the private and public use of reason, civil disobedience, etc.

Cheers,
Colin

I’m glad Colin mentioned Onora O’Neill, for I think she’s typically a reliable guide to most-things-Kantian. In fact, a short introduction that is at the same time very good is her contribution, “Kantian ethics,” in Peter Singer, ed., A Companion to Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993 ed.), pp. 175-185.

You might also want to look at several papers available at Allen Wood’s website (in lieu of reading his books) at Stanford: http://www.stanford.edu/~allenw/recentpapers.htm (great stuff!)

By the way, in the volume above is an excellent piece by C.A.J. (Tony) Coady, “Politics and the Problem of Dirty Hands” which I think would fit nicely in any basic course on political ethics.

Get a copy of the chapter on Kant’s ethics in Mark Timmons undergraduate textbook Moral Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). It’s a sensitive, advanced introductory chapter. It gives students a good sense of what Kant is up to, as it covers the system of duties outlined in The Metaphysics of Morals. It prevents them from coming away thinking Kant is a cartoon with silly ideas. They get a much better of sense of Kant’s moral system as a whole than they would with just the Groundwork.

Even if you weren’t to assign it as reading, I would use it as the basis for lecture notes.

I also have this problem. I teach a seminar on the philosophy of punishment and have yet to find an undergraduate appropriate treatment of deontology. You might look at Thomas Hill’s Tanner lectures. He develops his own version of Kant’s argument in the Groundwork: http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/Hill97.pdf

I have what might be the same problem, in that I always teach the Grounding when it comes time to talk about Kant. But, having thought about this a bit over the weekend, I wonder whether it really is such a huge problem to ask the students to read it and then to have them learn a good deal more from your lecture than they get directly from the Grounding. I know that I want students to read Kant and appreciate it, but I also have the sense - at this point - that it likely isn’t going to work out that way for most undergraduates. So, as long as your lectures go well and they understand what you want them to understand, maybe it’s really not an issue that requires you to assign something that wasn’t written by Kant to help them with Kant.

Sorry, I’m a bit late to this conversation. I’m a graduate student currently working on a dissertation on Kant and Rawls. For what it’s worth, if what you’re interested in is Kant’s political philosophy, I think the Groundwork is the wrong book. I think that the best place to look for this is in the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals, the Rechtslehre. The notion of freedom here (as nonsubordination, freedom of one’s will from domination by the will of another) originates in the Groundwork, and particularly in the discussion of the Kingdom of Ends. But Kant’s distinctive notions of rights and the role of public institutions are really only found in the Rechtslehre. I have found Arthur Ripstein’s work especially valuable in coming to understand these things, and two papers in particular: Authority and Coercion, and Private Order and Public Justice: Kant and Rawls. I hope this is helpful, and good luck.

Have you read Karl Reinhold’s Letters on Kantian Philosophy? I think Reinhold has a nice grasp of the practical side of Kant’s first critique (which, by the way, also has some great and simple discussion of ethics throughout). I don’t think there’s a simple substitution for Groundwork though, but I find it better to locate it in the overall context of Kant’s project.

I’ve used the Groundwork successfully in several introductory ethics courses, and I think the key is using the right translation. Paton is faithful but very tough. I use Allen Wood’s translation (Yale UP), which is much more readable. It sounds like English to the mind’s ear rather than like Anglicized German.

But I agree with Pete Murray that a course on strictly political philosophy is better off avoiding the Groundwork entirely and spending some time with Part I of the Rechtslehre and Perpetual Peace. Yes, Kant isn’t explicitly deontological in these works, but that’s because his political philosophy has a healthy dose of teleology flowing through it.

Good luck!