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.
Frankfurt, H.G., (2003). Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. In G. Watson, ed. Free Will, 2nd ed., New York: Oxford University Press, pp.322-336.
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Animal cruelty leads to violence against human beings. According to Animal Cruelty and Human Violence, of those arrested in Chicago for animal crimes, 65% had been arrested for battery against another person (1). An example of animal cruelty in the book is the scene with the water
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