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Freedom And Reason In Kant
Freedom and Reason in Kant Freedom and Reason in Kant Alice Furnari 24 /2/97 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. In the third section of the "Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals", Kant answers the problem of the possibility of the Categorical Imperative. Is the problem to be understood as if the Categorical Imperative is possible, or how it is possible? In the "Critics of Pure Reason", the problem regarding the synthetic a priori judgments concerns just the modality in which they can be applied. The fact that they are actually possible is proved by the synthetic a priori judgment contained in sciences as mathematics and physics which are trustworthy sciences. Metaphysics, however, is not a reliable science and, therefore, Kant suggests that we should look not only for the modality in which they can be applied, but also for their reliability. Similarly, the Metaphysics of Morals must prove the validity of the moral imperative. As Paton suggested, Kant tries to show not only how the Categorical Imperative is possible, but also that it is possible.[" Furthermore, we have not asserted the truth of this proposition, much less professed to have within our power a proof of it. We simply showed by developing the universally accepted concept of morality, that autonomy of the will is unavoidably bound up with it, or rather is its very foundation" par. 445]. The condition for the possibility of the Categorical Imperative is Freedom. The third section contains a demonstration of Freedom which Kant tries to derive by means of excluding at least other two ways. A first would be to assert that Freedom is experienced by us, that it is sensed, but this is not the truthful one, because experience would be the one of my personal freedom... This is ONLY a preview of the article. If you would like to view the entire document, you must subscribe to Academic Library. Please register below now!
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