Continental Philosophy

Kant – Morality and Freedom

Primary Source:

• Solomon, From Rationalism to Existentialism, pp. 25-38 (Handout)

Background:
From the Routledge Online Encyclopedia:

In his practical philosophy [which this reading talks about], Kant argues that human reason is an autonomous source of principles of conduct, immune from the blandishments of sensual inclination in both its determinations of value and its decisions to act, and indeed that human autonomy is the highest value and the limiting condition of all other values.

Traditionally, Kant has been seen as an ethical formalist, according to whom all judgments on the values of ends must be subordinated to the obligatory universality of a moral law derived from the very concept of rationality itself [that is, we ought to choose our actions based on moral rules that our reason dictates – this will become clear in the reading]. The larger argument of Kant's practical philosophy is that rationality itself is so valuable precisely because it is the means to freedom or autonomy. Kant expressed this in his classroom lectures on ethics, when he said that “the inherent value of the world, the [the greatest good], is freedom in accordance with a will which is not necessitated to action”, and even more clearly in lectures on natural right given in the autumn of 1784, the very time he was writing the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, where he said that “If only rational beings can be ends in themselves, that is not because they have reason, but because they have freedom. Reason is merely a means”. Kant makes the same point in the Groundwork when he says that the incomparable dignity of human beings derives from the fact that they are “free with regard to all laws of nature, obeying only those laws which” they make themselves.

Questions:

• What is ‘practical reason’ concerned with?
• What does Kant mean by ‘goodwill’, ‘duty’, and the ‘categorical imperative’? How are they employed in his ethical theory?
• What is the summum bonum and how does it appear to pose problems for Kantian ethics? What does Kant ‘postulate’ to solve these problems, and how is it a solution?

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