Freedom and Reason In Kant

Freedom and Reason in Kant

Morality, Kant says, cannot be regarded as a set of rules which prescribe

the means necessary to the achievement of a given end; its rules must be obeyed

without consideration of the consequences that will follow from doing so or not.

A principle that presupposes a desired object as the determinant of the will

cannot give rise to a moral law; that is, the morality of an act of will cannot

be determined by the matter or content of the will for when the will is

materially determined the question of its morality does not arise.

This consideration leads Kant to one of his most important theses. If the

moral character of willing is not determined by the content of what is willed,

it must be determined by the form:" If a rational being can think of his maxims

as universal laws, he can do so only by considering them as principles which

contain the determining ground of the will because of their form and not because

of their matter". Therefore, the morality of a maxim is determined by its

functioning as a universal law, applicable as a general rule to every rational

agent. Since a moral will must be so in virtue of its form alone, the will must

be capable of a purely formal determination; that is, it must be possible for a

man to act in a certain way for the sole reason that willing in this way is

prescribed by a universal law, no matter what the empirical results will be.

A will to which moral considerations apply must be, in the strictest sense,

a free will, one that can function independently of the laws of natural

causality. The concept of morality, therefore, has to be explained in terms of a

universal moral law, and the ability to will in obedience to such a law leads us

to postulate the freedom. The freedom which Kant is talking about, is not only a

negative freedom consisting in the absence of constraint by empirical causes, it

is also a positive freedom which consists in the ability to make acts of will in

accordance with the moral law, for no other reason than that they are in

accordance with it. Freedom, in this sense, corresponds to Autonomy of the will

and its absence ( any situation in which the will is determined by external

causes ) is called Heteronomy. In obeying the moral law for the sake of the law

alone, the will is autonomous because it is obeying a law which it imposes on

itself.

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...e person, as Reason, as belonging to the

intellectual world, is not affected by the laws of Determinism: he is free. This

is Kant's proof of Freedom. Is it satisfactory?

Later on, in the "Critics of Practical Reason", Kant does not attempt to

deduce synthetically Morality from Freedom, as he tried to do in the Grounding

by stating that Freedom was the necessary condition for Morality, but he assumes

the moral law as a "fact of the reason" from which he infers Freedom. There have

been critics blaming Kant of a sort of vicious circle, because he seemed to

demonstrate Freedom by means of deduction from Morality and then to show the

possibility of the Categorical Imperative deducing it from Freedom. Kant answers

that there is no vicious circle because in the ontological order Freedom is the

condition for Morality ( it is not possible to follow the duty for the duty if

you are not free), but in the order of our knowledge, the moral law is the

requirement for Freedom ( we would not consider ourselves free, if we did not

think of ourselves as subject to the moral law). Freedom is the ratio essendi of

the moral law, but the moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of Freedom.