A Lawful Freedom: Kant's Practical Refutation of Noumenal Chance (original) (raw)
Related papers
Freedom Immediately after Kant
European Journal of Philosophy, 2019
Kant's effort to defend the coexistence of transcendental freedom and natural necessity is one of the crowning achievements of the first Critique. Yet by identifying the will with practical reason in his moral philosophy, he lent support to the view that the moral law is the causal law of a free will-the result of which, as Reinhold argued, left immoral action impossible. However, Reinhold's attempt to separate the will from practical reason generated difficulties of its own, which Maimon was quick to point out. By identifying freedom with indifferent choice, Maimon argued, Reinhold had no resources to explain why a free will acts at all. My aim in this article is to show how Fichte's theory of freedom seeks to reconcile these two commitments: The key lies in what I call Fichte's Genetic Model, according to which indifferent choice is the original condition of the will, but a condition we must actively overcome.
Bolstering the Keystone: Kant on the Incomprehensibility of Freedom
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 2020
In this paper, I give an explanation and defense of Kant's claim that we cannot comprehend how freedom is possible. I suggest that this is a significant point that has been underappreciated in the secondary literature. My conclusion has a variety of implications both for Kant scholars and for those interested in Kantian ideas more generally. Most notably, if Kant is right that there are principled reasons why freedom is beyond our comprehension, then this would lift an undesirable explanatory burden off the shoulders of his ethical and metaethical views. It would be a boon for Kantians if they could ground their lofty claims about the unique, elevated status of rational agency without committing to an implausible view of libertarian freedom. On the negative side, there are certain debates concerning moral motivation and transcendental idealism that might have to change in response to Kant's claims about the incomprehensibility of freedom.
Cambridge University Press, 2023
Kant's early critics maintained that his theory of freedom faces a dilemma: either it reduces the will's activity to strict necessity by making it subject to the causality of the moral law, or it reduces the will's activity to blind chance by liberating it from rules of any kind. This Element offers a new interpretation of Kant's theory against the backdrop of this controversy. It argues that Kant was a consistent proponent of the claim that the moral law is the causal law of a free will, and that the supposed ability of free will to choose indifferently between options is an empty concept. Freedom, for Kant, is a power to initiate action from oneself, and the only way to exercise this power is through the law of one's own will, the moral law. Immoral action is not thereby rendered impossible, but it also does not express a genuine ability.
Freedom on This and the Other Side of Kant Unabridged August 2019
represent a tendency to trace the "archaeology" of the notion of freedom either to G.W.F. Hegel's Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts 4 or to Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty. 5 " Without claiming to be an exhaustive investigation of the discussion of freedom since or prior to Immanuel Kant, this paper proposes, however, that the meaning of freedom since Kant has for all intents and purposes overlooked the tradition of autonomous freedom prior to Kant that stems from Pico della Mirandola and influenced Leibniz, Sulzer, and Tetens-all of whom shaped Kant's understanding of freedom. 1 Many thanks to James Cochrane for the careful reading and helpful suggestions for improving an earlier draft of this paper! All errors, of course, are my mistakes.
An Asymmetrical Approach to Kant's Theory of Freedom (forthcoming)
Asymmetry theories about free will and moral responsibility are a recent development in the long history of the free will debate. Kant commentators have not yet explored the possibility of an asymmetrical reconstruction of Kant's theory of freedom, and that is my goal in this paper. Asymmetry theorists hold that the standards that must be met to count agents as free and morally responsible are different in the context of the positive reactive attitudes and their attendant practices, such as praise and reward, than they are in the context of the negative reactive attitudes and practices including blame and punishment. The most-discussed asymmetry theory, developed by Susan Wolf and Dana Nelkin, posits an ontological asymmetry: people can be blameworthy only if they had alternative possibilities, but can be praiseworthy even if they did not have alternative possibilities. I have argued that even if we do not posit such an ontological asymmetry, we should acknowledge an epistemic and justificatory asymmetry—even if the ontological requirement agents must satisfy to be blameworthy is the same as the one they must satisfy to be praiseworthy, we must have better reasons for believing that the ontological requirement is satisfied to legitimately treat agents as morally responsible in the context of the negative reactive attitudes than we must have in the context of the positive reactive attitudes. This is because it is intuitive to think that people deserve the benefit of the doubt, and that there is a hazard of injustice in getting things wrong in connection with blame which does not exist in connection with praise, or at least does not exist in the same way or to the same degree. I will not propose a reconstruction of Kant's theory of freedom that posits an ontological asymmetry, since Kant is consistent about the ontology of transcendental freedom throughout his texts. But given the dramatic shifts in Kant's epistemology of transcendental freedom and the inconsistencies they inflict upon commentators, I think a reconstruction which posits a justificatory asymmetry should be of interest. The reconstruction I want to propose is meant to be revisionary: I think that while Kant got a great deal right about the building blocks of his theory of freedom, he never fits them together in a stable way in his own texts. So this reconstruction does not describe the theory of freedom I think he actually held himself, but rather the one I think he ought to have held, and one which can be defended in contemporary discussions about free will.
Kant and the Categories of Freedom
In this paper I provide an account of Kant's categories of freedom, explaining how they fit together and what role they are supposed to play. My interpretation places particular emphasis on the structural features that the table of the categories of freedom shares with the table of judgements and the table of categories laid out by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. In this way we can identify two interpretative constraints, namely (i) that the categories falling under each heading must form a synthetic unity whereby the third one derives from the combination of the other two. and (ii) that the first two categories falling under each heading must be morally undetermined and sensibly conditioned, while the third category is sensibly unconditioned and determined only by the moral law.
Kant’s Metaphysics of Freedom (1775-1782): Theoretical and Practical Perspectives
Kant’s Lectures on Metaphysics. A Critical Guide, ed. Courtney Fugate, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 179-193., 2018
Kant’s lectures on metaphysics are an important source when we want to understand the development and the sources of his thinking. Among the surviving lectures those from the mid-1770s and from 1782/83 stand out. They document not only Kant’s endeavours to redefine the contents and the methods of previous metaphyiscs as part of a critique of pure reason. Eventually, they also testify to the close connection between his published writings and his lectures in the shape they were passed on to us. This is also true of Kant’s remarks on the concept of freedom. While the transcripts are an indispensable source for our knowledge of Kant’s thoughts on the concept of freedom in the 1770s because he did not publish anything relevant during this period of time, the Metaphysics Mrongovius does not include anything important that we cannot also look up in the "Critique of Pure Reason".