Me, My Will. and I: Kant's Republican Conception of Freedom of the Will and Freedom of the Agent (original) (raw)
Related papers
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 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.
The Routledge Handbook of Autonomy, 2022
Kant takes the idea of autonomy of the will to be his distinctive contribution to moral philosophy. However, this idea is more nuanced and complicated than one might think. In this chapter, I sketch the rough outlines of Kant's idea of autonomy of the will while also highlighting contentious exegetical issues that give rise to various possible interpretations. I tentatively defend four basic claims. First, autonomy primarily features in Kant's account of moral agency, as the condition of the possibility of moral obligation. Second, autonomy amounts to a metaphysical property as well as a normative principle and a psychological capacity. Third, although there is legitimate scholarly disagreement about whether or not autonomy involves self-legislation of the moral law, there is good reason to believe it underwrites an 'inside-out' (as opposed to 'outside-in') conception of the relationship between the will and moral requirements. Fourth, persons have dignity because their autonomy makes them members in the set of beings over whom the categorical imperative requires us to universalise our maxims, not because autonomy is an independently important property.
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.