CHAPTER II: Autonomy and the Moral Order

PRECIS: FROM SCIENTIST TO JUDGE: Crucial to understanding this chapter on Kant’s moral theory is to fully appreciate Kant’s theory of knowledge: more specifically, his famous “Epistemological restriction,” the restriction of knowledge to “appearances” or, said differently, to things considered as conforming to our scientific way of knowing nature. According to Kant, when we set out to know the world – i.e. seek theoretical knowledge about nature – we necessarily treat nature as a mechanism, as a causally closed system that is deterministic. In other words, when we adopt the theoretical or scientific attitude, we necessarily treat, handle, frame, or construe nature as a deterministic – “dead” – mechanism that we manipulate and control by physical means. If something is to be an “object of knowledge” for us, it must conform to our (scientific) forms of observation, manipulation, and description, and this is all that Kant means by his “restricting knowledge to appearances.” Simply put, to know we “objectify.”

Notice that the theoretical attitude of the scientist completely sets aside our normal, everyday dealings with people, whom we treat as, like ourselves, agents who must take responsibility of their actions. When Kant proclaims that he “found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for belief/faith” (A xxx), he seeks to legitimize another way of considering and treating a human being: namely, not as an object of knowledge (mechanism), but, in contrast, as a agent in a social world (moral subject). The fundamental question of Kant’s moral theory is whether this other attitude, the “practical” attitude, is legitimate, in its own domain, and compatible with the theoretical attitude.

The gist of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason is that the spontaneity discovered in his first critique – the fact that we actively legislate laws to our experience of nature – is also to be found in an agent’s “practical” perspective as being able to change the world – the fact that we actively legislated laws to our action. What role does reason play in our viewpoint upon ourselves as social agents (as opposed to natural objects). Freedom, understood as our not being determined to act by natural causes, is freedom of choice (Willkuer): we set out options and assess their merits. As such, freedom is a necessary presupposition of assuming an agent’s orientation in the world. Said differently, the “belief” or “faith – i.e. the presupposition – of freedom makes the agential perspective possible! It’s legitimate to assume that we are free because otherwise we could not adopt the outlook of an agent. Simply put, freedom is a practical presupposition.

1) The antinomy between freedom and determinism set the stage for Kant’s next revolution in philosophy. The first Critique had established that human experience resulted from the combination of the spontaneous activity of the mind with its intuitive (passive) faculties. The spontaneity of the intellect was underived from anything else and was not a self-evident truth or indubitable first principle – it was instead a self-producing, self-generating activity. In his second (1787) edition of the Critique, Kant had even gone so far as to claim in a footnote: “The synthetic unity of apperception is therefore that highest point, to which we must ascribe all employment of the understanding, even the whole of logic, and conformably therewith, transcendental philosophy. Indeed this faculty of apperception is the understanding itself” (Critique, B134note; p.154) [45]

a) Think of the “transcendental unity of apperception” (TUA) in the following way. What is to maintain a journal, to be the author of one’s own life? First and foremost, the author must take the totality of her life, the “manifold of intuition,” and re-collect it into a “unitary perspective upon the world.” “The I,” Kant writes, “must be able to attach itself to each of its representations.” This activity of owning up to one’s contents – the manifold of intuitions – is not, however, a simple collecting together of discrete units. The journalist cannot keep her representations together without combining them under certain rules in which she “authorizes” or actively takes up this or that representation as of one thing or another. Said differently, the author cannot “gather up” each her contents unless she is taking herself, her representations, as “directed to,” “referring to,” or “about” something that she is not, to objects in the world. The journalist does not passive “find” but actively “takes” herself to be before the world, and the unity of the I is located in this activity, this “spontaneity,” this “self-producing” or “self-generating” work. Simply put, the I is nothing more than this locus of “sense-making” responsibility: one does not passively find that sense is made of the world but actively makes sense of one’s experiences, just as the journalist takes up the response-ability of assessing what is before her in the world.

2) Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Ethics 1785; Critique of Practical Reason 1788; Metaphysics of Ethics 1797.

3) FREEDOM IS A PRACTICAL PRESUPPOSITION: Kant thought the key to answering these questions lay in the practical necessity for assuming that we are free. The independence of the normative from the factual in the theoretical sphere required that we assume that we were free in deliberating about the normative criteria for making judgments. What role then did this kind of spontaneity of the normative (its self-generating, non-derivative character) play in the practical sphere, where the results of our judgments are not merely other judgments but actions? [46]

a) Spontaneity = The independence of the normative from the factual in the theoretical sphere.

i) Spontaneity, then, is a term that is conceptually interdependent with the distinction between factual and normative matters. If one treats something, for example a person’s making a judgment, as a factual matter of how nature works, then the judgment is an event that is to be causally explained. A causal explanation is devoted to giving an account of what caused one to make a judgment, and this genetic explanation is a different matter than justifying the judgment. That someone has a judgment because of causal factors is different from the issue of whether one is right or wrong in one’s judgment. The term “spontaneity” marks Kant’s recognition that questions of justification are distinct from questions of causal genesis. Notice how common this distinction is when, say, we point out that someone holds a view because of social upbringing or, worse, indoctrination and then confront that person with the question of whether the belief is justified or not. We simply presuppose that he or she is able to engage in that deliberation and to freely assess the merits of the claim. One might well think that dogmatism – holding beliefs and refusing to justify them – as a dormant or incipient form of spontaneity, since what it is to have a belief is to be necessarily open to critical scrutiny and hence the demands of justification

b) Freedom,

i) Willkuer: freedom of choice or freedom from causal necessitation.

ii) Wille: will as the capacity to legislate maxims to oneself; self-determination (Selbst-bestimmung).

4) As physical, embodied beings in the world, we are governed by the strictly deterministic laws of nature. However, in spontaneously conceiving of ourselves as acting beings, we must think of ourselves as free [46]

5) MAXIM: Kant characterized the normative principle that the agent is acting on as a “maxim,” a subjective principle of action that the agent follows in her actions, and it is the character of acting according to maxims that expresses our spontaneity in the practical sphere, since an action fundamentally expresses the agent’s own doing something rather than her being pushed around by forces external to her [46]

a) Notice that we can always ask someone what she is doing, and what we get is a description of what she intends to do. The agent’s aim or goal spells out the maxim or the rule she is following. How? In responding, “I’m cutting onions because I’m making Beef Bourgogne,” the agent articulates a hypothetical imperative: “If one desires to make Beef Bourgogne, the she must cut onions.” Kant points out that we sometimes respond with a question stopper: “I am doing X because it’s the right thing to do.” This latter is called a categorical imperative because it enjoins action absolutely, regardless of what one wants.

6) INCORPORATION THESIS: Although any agent can have various desires and inclinations that she most certainly does not determine for herself and which can certainly operate as attractions or incentives to action, what it is that the agent is doing when she purposefully does anything is determined by what “maxim” she chooses to act upon, by what she subjectively understands herself to be doing (even if such understanding is only implicit). We therefore must think of ourselves as not merely being pushed around by natural laws (as we surely are in our physical embodied state) but instead of acting only according to our own representation of a rule or principle to ourselves. Or, to put it slightly differently, we must conceive of the laws that govern our actions as self-imposed laws, not laws ordained for us by anything from outside our own activities [47]

a) Having a desire is not enough for action; we must take up or legislate for ourselves that we will act in this or that fashion. We must incorporate or warranty – better, authorize – that particular desire under some rule or maxim of action.

7) Even though I must think of myself as free, however, why must I conclude that I really am free?

8) EPISTEMOLOGICAL RESTRICTION AS “MAKING ROOM FOR FAITH (GLAUBE)”: What I am as a thing-in-itself, however, cannot be given by such experience; and my thinking of myself as free is thus to think of myself as noumenally free, even though I cannot in principle provide any kind of theoretical proof that I really am free in that sense. Our own freedom is a presupposition that we must make about ourselves but which we cannot theoretically defend; it is a necessary condition for conceiving of ourselves as spontaneous beings, as not merely having a point of view of ourselves as physical beings in the world but as having a subjective point of view on the world. Thus, on practical grounds, we must presuppose a belief about ourselves that on theoretical grounds we cannot prove [47]

a) We can take ourselves in two different ways: first, as a natural object to be causally explained, and, second, as an agent whose actions are subject to justification. This is Kant’s famous duality – stark and unmediated – between NATURE and FREEDOM.

9) TRANSCENDENTAL FREEDOM: My desires and inclinations, my fears and needs, can exert a pull on me as a “sensuous” being, as Kant describes our embodied state. They cannot, however, determine for me how I am to evaluate those inclinations, and, to the extent that I think of myself as necessarily being able to deliberate about what it is I am going to do and to act in light of the conclusion of those deliberations, I must conceive of myself as directing myself to adopt this or that maxim for myself. Since the world does not cause me to adopt one maxim or another, it must be I myself who cause myself to adopt the maxim, and that form of causality, which must be spontaneous and self-originating, cannot be found in the physical world; it must be conceived, therefore, as Kant put it, as “transcendental freedom,” the kind of way in which an agent causes himself both to adopt a maxim and to act on it, that is itself a condition of the possibility of his conceiving of himself as an agent at all, and which cannot be therefore discovered in the appearing, experienced world. [47]

a) The key argument that Kant makes here is quite simple. It’s a “fact of reason” that I confront the world as an agent: I cannot refrain from thinking of myself as having to act in one way of another depending upon my choice. Freedom, transcendental freedom is, a “condition of the possibility of his conceiving of himself as an agent at all.” This is the “practical” argument that Kant makes, and he is eager to forestall any misunderstanding of this claim as a theoretical claim about nature. It is, instead, a practical claim about our agency. If we frame something as an object of knowledge, we treat it as a deterministic mechanism; we frame someone as a subject of action, we treat her as free and therein responsible for her choices.

b) For Kant, the basic structure of agency is elemental: I make something a reason for acting. One finds that one has – “passively acknowledges“ – needs, inclinations, desires, propensities, compulsions, routines, habits, etc. etc. Having such “pro-attitutes” – inclinations toward something – is where agency begins. Such inclinations do not determine what I will do. Simply put, having a desire is not the sufficient cause of action. Instead, what I will do is a matter of my taking myself in one way or another, as one who acts in this fashion or another – or as Kant says, adopts this or that maxim. I make something a reason by acting upon it. In this fashion, I legislate who I am in ordering my given inclinations under this or that maxim or rule.

10) It is that which Kant took to lead us inexorably to conclude that we must see ourselves as each causing himself to adopt and act on the maxim and not as beings caused by things outside of himself to do so [48]

a) This is how John Searle in Reason in Action puts it:

i) “There are several reasons operating on me, but only one of these is actually effective and I select which one will be effective. That is, as far as my awareness of my own actions is concerned, my various beliefs and desires don’t cause me to behave in a particular way. Rather, I select which desire I act on. I decide, in short, which of the many causes will effective. This suggests a fascinating hypothesis that will also come up in later chapters. If we think of the reason I act on as the reasons that are effective, then it emerges that where free rational action is concerned, all effective reasons are make effective by the agent, insofar as he chooses which ones he will act on” (Searle, 2001) (RA, 66).

ii) “The sense of freedom in voluntary acting is a sense that the causes of the action, though effective and real in the form of the reasons for the acting, are insufficient to determine that the action will cure. I can tell you why I am doing what I am now doing, but in telling you why, I am not trying to give a causally sufficient explanation of my behavior” (RA, 69).

iii) “The question, “Why did you do that?” does not ask: what causes where sufficient to determine your action: but rather it asks: what reason(s) did you, as a rational self act on? And the answer to that question explains not by showing how the act as a natural event was inevitable given the antecedent causes, but by showing how r rational self operated in the gap” (RA, 85).

iv) “A fourth feature of reasons for acting is that if the reason is taken as a reason for the performance of a free action, it cannot be taken by the agent as causally sufficient. If he thinks f himself as truly compelled, the he cannot think of himself as freely acting on a reason. In the case of human actions, because of the gap [between desire, on the one hand, and making that desire a reason for acting, on the other: C.L.], the reason can be god or adequate reason without providing causally sufficient conditions for the act. And, more important from the agent’s point of view, the reason just not be seen as causally sufficient. As I remarked in earlier chapters, the applicability of the concept of rationality in decision making presupposes free choice. Indeed, for rational agents free choice is both necessary and sufficient for the applicability of rationality. Free choice implies that the act is rationally assessable, and rational assessability implies free choice” (RA, 140-1).

v) “If by “cause” we imply “causally sufficient conditions,” then free actions are not caused by anything. That is what makes them free. To put this point more precisely: What makes an action free at the psychological level is that it does not have antecedently sufficient psychological causal conditions. The self performs the act, but it does not cause the act. Nothing fills the gap” (RA, 157).

11) That insight itself was enough to make Kant’s theory novel; but he proceeded to argue that from that conception of rational agency, we could also draw quite specific conclusions about what particular actions we ought to perform [48]

a) If freedom (F), then the moral law (ML): (F ® ML)

b) Conception of rational agency tied to moral law:

12) When we search for such criteria, we seek to form not merely subjective maxims but also, in Kant’s words, practical laws, states of more objective principles [48]

13) The most general objective practical laws that we formulate are imperatives, commands of a sort, such as, “if you wish to have any money for your old age, you must begin saving now,” or “those who care about their friends must be sympathetic in their treatment of their complaints” … we can always distinguish in principle between our subjective maxims … and the practical laws that we ought to be obeying … How, though, are to justify such practical laws themselves? [49]

14) Recognizing the authority and validity of hypothetical imperatives [or ‘subjective maxims’ from above] does not rule out Hume’s suspicion that reason could only be a slave to the passions [49]

15) THE CONSTITUTIVE AIM OR “ESSENTIAL GOAL” OF AGENCY IS FREEDOM: The question, as Kant so brilliantly saw, was to ask whether any practical law (or “imperative”) could be formulated that would be unconditionally binding on us, would be, in his terms, “categorical”. Such a law would be unconditionally binding on us only if there was either (1) some end that we were rationally required to have, such that we could say that all agents “rationally must” seek to accomplish that end; or (2) an imperative that was a genuine law that did not at the same time take its authority from its ability or necessity to promote any end whatsoever. [49]

16) INCORPORATION THESIS: However, for anything, even pleasure itself, to motivate an agent (as opposed to causing him) to act, it must first be incorporated into the agent’s maxim; the agent must make it a reason for him to act. However attractive a promise of pleasure may be, on its own it is only an “incentive”; it becomes a reason for acting only when the agent makes it (in this case the pursuit of pleasure) into a reason for him to act; and only in that way is the agent actually free, actually moving himself to action instead of being pushed around by forces external to him [50]

a) To be a reason for me, we must make it a reason by adopting it as our maxim.

17) THE KANTIAN PARADOX: Instead, the practical law’s own unconditional nature had to be linked to the one feature of our agency that was itself unconditional, namely, our freedom as “transcendental freedom,” that is, our ability to be the cause of our own actions. For it to be unconditionally binding on us, and for us to be able to be said to choose it unconditionally, we must freely be able to choose it while at the same time regarding it as something that, as it were, imposes itself on us. To put it in less Kantian terms: Kant saw that the categorical imperative would have to be a “calling,” something that made a claim on us independently of our own (“conditional”) situation in life, while at the same time being something to which each agent and that agent alone binds himself [51]

a) Transcendental freedom = our ability to be the cause of our own actions.

18) EXPERIENCE OF DUTY IS THE VIA COGNOSCENDI OF OUR FREEDOM: Such experience of duty is only possible for a being who is free, who can experience the dual pulls of what one wants to do and that of one’s obligation, of acting in a way that is unconditionally required of oneself. Thus our own “transcendental freedom” is the basis of our experience within our own self-conscious lives of moral duty itself [52]

a) Kant’s views on human freedom are perhaps most poignantly motivated by experiences of agony, of conflict, then, between an obligation, that directs action in one way, and desire, which leads action in another. It’s agony to be addicted and to know that such behavior hurts others and is, therefore, wrong. The experience is fundamental because one is poignantly aware of having to choose, not so much what course of action to take, but more essentially still, who one is that such a choice figures in one way or another. I think that Kant is right to think about such experiences as ones of self-authorization, of authoring or shaping oneself, so that who one is is a matter of who will make oneself out to be, whether addict or responsible member of a community.

19) FREEDOM ~= AUTONOMY: This implied, however, that moral duty be based on more than simply our freedom. Freedom consists in our ability to move ourselves to action rather than being pushed around by forces external to ourselves. Even the promise of pleasure can only move us to act when we let it, when we make “acting for the sake of pleasure” into our maxim and motivation. Such freedom is, however, still conditioned on something that is not itself elected by us (such as whether we find such-and-such pleasurable [52]

20) FREEDOM ~= AUTONOMY: Moral duty, however, as unconditionally binding on us, requires us to rise above even such things as the pursuit of pleasure or the desire for fame. It requires, that is, not just freedom but autonomy, self-determination, giving the practical law to oneself instead of having any element of it imposed on oneself from outside oneself; and all those threads come together, so Kant concluded, in the categorical imperative. Kant’s own statement of the requirements are both striking and decisive for the development of post-Kantian thought: “The will is therefore not merely subject to the law, but is so subject that it must be considered as also giving the law to itself and precisely on this account as first of all subject to the law (of which it can regard itself as instituting).” That is, we keep faith with the moral law, almost as if it were not chosen by us, all the while recognizing (however implicitly) ourselves as the author of that very law to which we are keeping faith. If something other than ourselves instituted the moral law, then the law could not be both unconditionally binding and compatible with our “transcendental freedom” [52]

21) Kant quite radically and controversially concluded that this capacity for “transcendental freedom” actually implies the categorical imperative, the moral law (and vice versa). Only a self-instituted law would be compatible with a conception of ourselves as “transcendentally free,” and only a self-instituted law that was binding on all such agents would be unconditionally binding on us. Moreover, it follows that, although we can never be fully obligated to accomplish what we have willed – since that always depends on matters of chance and thus on things that we cannot always determine for ourselves – we can always be held responsible for what we have willed to do, since choosing our maxims and binding ourselves to them remains forever within the domain of our own transcendental freedom [53]

a) KANT’S RECIPROCITY THESIS:

i) If transcendental freedom, then the moral law: (TF ® ML.

ii) If moral, then transcendental freedom: (ML ® TF.

22) FREEDOM SEEKS ITS OWN SELF-REALIZATION: Kant’s own answer to this problem turned out to be one of the most powerful and influential of his moral ideas: there is something about such beings that can act autonomously that is itself of “absolute worth,” which Kant calls the “dignity” (Wurde) of each such agent. Each agent who conceives of himself as such an autonomous being must think of himself as an end-in-himself, not as a means to anything else; he must conceive of himself as doing things for the sake of his own freedom, that is, for the sake of moving himself about in the world and not being pushed around by forces outside of himself. Since he could not even have a conception of himself (or of his self) as an agent unless he was ultimately concerned about such freedom, this capacity is of absolute value to him, and all other agents share an equal concern with the absolute value of that capacity in themselves. The one thing that would be required of all such agents who act on maxims that at least do not conflict with a universal practical law would therefore be to act on maxims that respect that capacity in each other, and this itself leads to a further specification of the categorical imperative, which Kant formulates as: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end. Kant further argued that the requirements to treat all agents as ends-in-themselves was enough to specify a whole set of moral duties. [53-4]

23) THE COPERNICAN TURN IN MORAL THEORY: Behind this lay therefore a powerful picture of the moral order that fully revolutionized how we were to think about ourselves. The moral order was not that of a created order in which each of us has his or her allotted role and to which we were obligated to conform; nor was it a natural order that determined what counted as happiness or perfection for each of us; it was instead, as Kant put [it], a “kingdom (Reich) of ends.” In such a “kingdom of ends,” each conceives of himself as legislating entirely for himself, and by virtue of legislating “universally” in a way that respects all others as ends-in-themselves, conceives of himself as also subject to the universal laws under which he brings himself and others. The moral order, that is, is an ideal, communally instituted order, not a natural or created order, and it is the reciprocity involved in each autonomous agent legislating for himself and others that is to be considered as that which “institutes” the law, not the individual agent considered apart from all others nor the community hypostatized into an existent whole of any sort. [54]

24) The problem, as so many of his later critics and adherents were to note, was the link between the rather formal demand to act only on principles required of all rational agents (called the “universalization” thesis) and the more substantive claim about the unconditional worth of all such agents. So much seemed to turn on that claim, and the nature of the move from the formal to the substantive, while overwhelmingly powerful in its appeal, was not entirely clear [54]

25) Kant’s conception of the social world rested on a key distinction in his practical philosophy between simply free choice (Willkur) and our more radically free (and potentially autonomous) capacity for willing (Wille) [55]

26) Our actions in the social order could only be regarded from the moral point of view as an expression of free choice, not free will; since there is no way that a public order could ever peer into men’s souls to discover whether they were acting out a sense of duty or a sense of personal advantage, the highest level of ethical life to which the public order could aspire would only be that of a harmonization of free choices under public law, not that of a community of virtuous individuals [55]

27) In making that distinction in that way, Kant thus argued for a basically liberal political and social system based on freedom [55]

28) KANTIAN REPUBLICANISM/LIBERALISM: The linchpin of that view was not, however, a conception of public order as a means of securing private advantage, but a conception of a rule of law as an end in itself, as something that we as members of the “kingdom of ends” are obligated to achieve. Kant argued that his revolutionary doctrine of freedom and autonomy committed us to a liberal social order not because it would make us happier but because it was a moral requirement of our own freedom itself [56]

29) MORALITY VERSUS LEGALITY: If the public order is a conception of freedom of choice under the rule of law, the private moral order, on the other hand, is a conception of virtue, of each autonomously willing the right maxim for the right reason. To be virtuous, one must have a certain disposition of character (a Gesinnung) to do one’s duty; to do the right thing from the wrong motive is not to be virtuous, since it means that one is being moved to act not by one’s rational commitments but by something extraneous to the commitments themselves (such as fear of being caught or by a desire to please others). One might obey the public law non-virtuously, that is, for the wrong reason (for example, our of fear of punishment), but one cannot be virtuous and obey the moral law our of any other motive than that of duty and respect for the moral law itself [57]

30) Two things were noteworthy in Kant’s conception of virtue. First, Kant tended to interpret the demands of having a virtuous character not so much in terms of one’s upbringing and cultivation of certain traits of character and personality (although he did not belittle those) but in terms of a very secular and radical reinterpretation of the Christian experience of conversion. To have the right “disposition” of character is something that can be itself chosen; one can change one’s moral orientation suddenly by an act of free will, and it thus does not depend on an active divine grace coming to one from without … Second, whereas in doctrines of public law and justice we are only obligated to restrain ourselves and others from interfering with each other’s rights, to be virtuous we must also positively promote and pursue the right ends … one should pursue one’s own moral perfection … and one should promote the happiness of others [57]

31) Kant’s own reflections on religion were closely linked to a problem he himself clearly saw at work in his moral philosophy: his philosophy of moral autonomy, as he had constructed it, was going to have trouble explaining just why any particular agent would be motivated by the demands of freedom and autonomy, given the strictures he had set on them [58]

32) PARADOX: The unconditional claim of the moral law on us – a law that we all individually and collectively institute – is just, as he put it, a “fact of reason,” something of which we are aware by virtue of being free, rational agents in the first place, and which, curiously, if we were not aware, would disqualify us from being agents at all. The “fact of reason” is another way of articulating the distinctively Kantian idea that reasons have a claim on us because we make them have a claim on us; in entertaining the principle of the moral law, we also necessarily submit ourselves to it. Furthermore, as a self-legislated “fact,” there can be no further derivation of it from any more fundamental metaphysical fact about the world, since it is the “fact” of our own radical, underived spontaneity itself (even if the “fact” that we are subject of moral rules is, in Kant’s language, a “synthetic a priori” proposition) [59]

33) PARADOX AS THE CRITICAL FOCUS OF KANT’S RECEPTION: The notion of the “fact of reason” thus boiled down to a restatement of the quasi-paradoxical formulation of the authority of the moral law itself, which seems to require a “lawless” agent to give laws to himself on the basis of laws that from one point of view seem to be prior to the legislation and from another point of view seem to be derivative from the legislation of it. The paradox arises from Kant’s demand that, if we are to impose a principle (a maxim, the moral law) on ourselves, then presumably we must have a reason to do so; but if there was an antecedent reason to adopt that principle, then that reason would not itself be self-imposed; yet for it to be binding on us, it had to be (or at least had to be “regarded” to be, as Kant ambiguously state) self-imposed. The “fact of reason,” as an expression of the “Kantian paradox,” thus is supposedly practically undeniable, not theoretically proven: we simply could not entertain a view of ourselves and still be free, practically acting agents. (This “Kantian paradox” plays a large role in the systems of propounded by Kant’s successors). [59-60]

34) The Kantian answer to the question – “what interest might we have in being moral agents?” – thus came down to the claim: there is and can be no interest, strictly conceived, in being moral agents. We simply are moral agents by virtue of being the kinds of rational creatures we are, and we simply do experience the call of moral duty on ourselves by virtue of being such agents. Whatever “interest” we can have in morality must itself be generated by the call of moral duty; it cannot in any way precede it. [60].

35) Although the demands of the moral law always override any personal claims to happiness, we cannot be expected to fully forgo our own happiness, so we must thereby construct a concept of the “highest good” that is “higher” than the merely moral good without in any way making the moral good subordinate to anything else [61]

36) We are unconditionally obligated to pursue this “highest good” in our actions, to strive to bring about a world in which the virtuous are as happy as they ought to be. Since this is only an ideal and can never be achieved in this world, but we must believe that it can be achieved, Kant concluded that we must therefore “postulate” two things: that there is an immortality of the soul (since actually bringing about the highest good would take an infinite amount of time), and that a God exists who will distribute happiness to the virtuous in the right proportions (since the union of virtue and happiness demands a harmony of nature and freedom, which human agents are on their own incapable of bring about). Both these are “postulates” in that, although their truth cannot be demonstrated, we find that by undertaking a commitment to the unconditional demands of the self-instituted moral law, we have committed ourselves to postulating such things in order to explain how those prior commitments would even be possible [61]

37) Whatever the value of Kant’s arguments for his postulates was, they clearly illustrated the way in which Kant’s moral general point had turned the conventional wisdom on its ear: religion does not give rise to morality so much as morality gives rise to religion [61]

38) Kant’s views on freedom and autonomy, though, drew out the commitments within that subordination of religion to reason in a more radical way than others had previously done, at the same time without explicitly jettisoning the appeal to religion itself [62]

39) Kant claimed that morality demands a “final end” of the world, which is supplied by religion … Kant’s reversal of the standard account of the relation of religion to morality threw into question the received versions of divine grace [62]

40) RADICAL EVIL VERSUS EVIL FOR THE SAKE OF EVIL: What then explained moral evil? In every human agent, there are at least two potential sources of motivation: there is the “fact of reason,” and there are the various incentives that come to us from our own embodied nature, from the fact that we all have our own particular projects in life, all of which can be summed up under the title of “self-love” … Kant called this “radical evil.” The evil person is he who subordinates the moral law of self-love, making his motive for obeying the moral law into a reason having to with his own personal advantage. It is not the people to evil for its own sake – they are not Milton’s Satan who wills, “Evil be thou my Good” … [63]

41) Whereas the political commonwealth is an Idea represented as the rule of law justified by a principle of freedom, the Idea of an ethical commonwealth would be represented (more or less symbolically) as a community ruled by God as the moral originator of the world [63]

42) With that deft move, Kant proposed not merely a new model of mind and world, and of moral obligation in general. He also proposed a radical, even decisive shift in European culture away from the dominion of traditional ecclesiastical authority to a religion that was non-coercive and which embodied the new, emerging ideals of freedom and autonomy itself [65]