In the preceding chapter, we saw that anthropology for Kant is an empirical science with empirical subject matter. Not only is its method empirical, but the helps and hindrances that anthropology finds are empirical helps and hindrances. This anthropology will seem to raise problems for Kant's account of freedom if it is put to moral use, such that empirical helps and hindrances aid moral development. If anthropology were merely an empirical description of human beings or merely pointed out empirical influences on faculties like memory, it would not even appear to conflict with the asymmetrical account of the relation between nature and freedom outlined in Chapter 1. If Schleiermacher's criticism is to make contact with Kant's anthropology, that anthropology must be not only empirical but also morally relevant. Thus this chapter takes up the issue of the extent to which Kant's “pragmatic” anthropology is a moral anthropology.

Before showing that Kant's anthropology is moral, it is important to clear up a potential misconception about what moral anthropology involves. In particular, moral anthropology in Kant's mature moral theory is not the kind of anthropology needed to apply the categorical imperative to concrete human situations. That is, moral anthropology does not have the kind of role indicated by Kant's claim in the Groundwork that moral “laws require a power of judgment sharpened by experience … in order to distinguish in what cases they are applicable” (4:389).