Philosophy 433
History of
Ethics
Darwall
Winter
2008
KANT
III
I
Empiricist Freedom. Recall
the passage from p. 30 of Kant's
Critique (reproduced on p. 3 of Kant III).
What is going on in this passage?
Kant begins
by considering someone who says that he has an irresistible lust for
something when
it is present. Kant then remarks that
such a person would probably agree that he would control his lust if "a
gallows were erected on which he would be hanged immediately after
gratifying
his lust."
Now what
lesson are we supposed to draw from this?
Although Kant doesn't mention it, some move of this sort is
often made
by empiricist compatibilists to argue that, even if, without the
presence of
the gallows, a person's satisfying his lust is caused by this having
been his
strongest desire, that doesn't show he didn't act freely.
While it is true that a person cannot have
acted freely unless he could have acted otherwise, it is often asserted
by
empiricist compatibilists that in order
for that to have been
true it is
sufficient that the person would have acted otherwise, if had chosen to
do so,
or if his strongest desire would have been to act otherwise. So even though the person's act is caused by
his strongest desire when he acts on his lust, his act is nonetheless
free, he
could have done otherwise, if it was true of him that if a gallows . .
., then
he would have wanted most not to satisfy his lust to avoid the gallows,
and,
consequently, would not have done so.
There is
something to this response. It seems to
go some distance toward showing that the person didn't have to satisfy
his
lust. There are circumstances, after
all, in which he would have "controlled" it.
But even
so, it may also seem ultimately unsatisfying in explaining our sense
that a
person is free when she acts. How can it
help to explain the freedom of the act in the present situation to note
that if
the circumstances had been different, some other act would have
occurred?
II
Moral Freedom (Autonomy). Kant
goes on: "But ask him whether . . . under
a
plausible pretext."
Note how he
describes the response: "Whether he
would or not he perhaps will not venture to say;
but that it
would be possible for him he would certainly admit without hesitation. He judges, therefore, that he can do
something because he knows that he ought, and he recognizes that he is
free--a
fact that without the moral law, would have
remained
unknown to him."
There are several things to notice about this:
A.
First, Kant explicitly detaches the thought that one is free not
to give
the false deposition from any thought about how one will in fact act,
either in
the actual circumstance, or in some altered circumstance.
In this way, his response differs from his
remark about the lust case. The point
must be that whether a person is free to reject the false deposition,
whether
it is possible for him not to give it in the relevant sense, is
independent of
what he will do (and perhaps of what
he would do in some
altered
circumstance).
B. Second, Kant argues that what
forms the basis
for the thought that one is free is simply the thought that one ought
not to
give the deposition. How can this
be? Suppose one thought it impossible to
avoid giving the false deposition. Could
one then think that, nonetheless, one ought not to do so?
Of course, one might think it terrible that
one is doing so. But if rejecting the
deposition is literally impossible, then it is not a practical
alternative; it
is not an action open to one. But if it
is not an option, then in what sense can it be something one ought to
do? It seems it cannot.
So if one ought not to give the false
deposition then it must be an action open to one; it must, in the
relevant
sense, be possible for one not to do it.
As Kant puts it, "he judges, therefore, that he can do something
because he knows that he ought."
C. In thinking the idea of a law
that binds one
as an agent, therefore, one is led to the thought that one is free, "a
fact which, without the moral law, would have remained unknown to
[one]." A practical law which confronts
one in
thinking about what to do (in practical thinking) entails practical
freedom. One can think one is bound by
such a law only if one regards oneself as free.
Although Kant does not explicitly add it, it is implicit in his thought that, not only is it possible for one to reject the false deposition, it is likewise possible for one to reject it for the very reason that one ought to. Again, that one will reject it for this reason, that this will be one's strongest desire, may or may not be true. But whether one will is irrelevant to whether one can.
Here we get
the Critique's version of the doctrine I earlier discussed from the Groundwork. In the latter Kant argues that an agent
cannot act but under the idea of freedom.
To deliberate about what to do, about what reasons exist for
doing one
thing rather than another, one must think as if one can do whatever one
thinks
one has good and sufficient reason to do and as if one can do this
precisely
for the good and sufficient reason one takes oneself to have. Of course, we all have had the depressing
experience of deliberating about what to do in the belief, perhaps even
the knowledge, that we will not end up
doing what we think we
should. But that is not the same thing as
thinking that we cannot do what we think we should.
There are
actually two points here:
A. First, if we think it impossible
to do
something, we can hardly coherently think that this is, nonetheless,
something
we should do. An act can be something we
should do only if it is an alternative that is open to us, something we
can do.
B. Second, in deliberating we seek
reasons to
act. This thinking is practical in the
sense
that it naturally concludes in an intention, in a commitment to action. But it is also practical reasoning in the
sense that, if the resultant intention results from deliberation, we
will have some
reasons for so intending. In the context
of deliberation, therefore, the thought that one ought (all things
considered)
to do something seems to entail the thought, not only that one can so
act, but,
as
well, that one can for the very reasons that one ought
Now as I
have noted before, Kant is a compatibilist about freedom.
He thinks that insofar as our actions are
part of a world we can experience, we must experience them as taking
place in accordance
with causal laws. At the same time,
however,
in seeing ourselves to be bound by practical laws, we must see our
actions as
free.
But if Kant
is a compatibilist, he is a compatibilist of a very different sort than
the empiricist
compatibilist I referred to above. Hume,
for example, takes our freedom to consist simply in the fact that our
actions
are caused by our beliefs and desires, by our character, as he puts it. The causal chain resulting in our actions
goes through us, and we can see this by seeing that if our character
had been
different, if we had believed or desired differently, then we would
have acted
differently.
Note that
this compatibility is entirely effected
from an
observer's point of view. That the order
of nature went in the precise path it did doesn't mean that if we had
been
different that our actions would not have been different.
Thus our nature, our beliefs and desires, is
what determines our actions and, Hume asks, what more can we have in
mind in
thinking of ourselves as free?
Kant's
response is that the sort of freedom we take ourselves to have is
nothing we
can grasp from an observer's standpoint.
Rather, it is as agents who deliberate, thinking about reasons
to act,
that we must think of ourselves as free.
And this thought is independent of any thought we might have
from an
observer's point of view in predicting or retrodicting what we, or
anyone else,
will or did actually do. For this reason
we might aptly call his position a compatibilism of practical
reason.
Note also some further features of the case:
(a) the reason one presupposes one can act on is not outcome-based, it does not derive from the value of an outcome considered independently of how it is brought about. It comes from the mere thought that it would be wrong to betray the patriot by giving the false deposition.
(b) In this way the kind of freedom one takes oneself to have is autonomy; one presupposes one can act in accordance with a law that applies to one as a will, not as instrumentally useful (in bringing about a valuable state), but just in virtue of what it is to be one will in the company of others (in certain circumstances, say, where we are mutually dependent and mutually vulnerable).
(c)
Note finally, the consequence: we must take ourselves to have a kind of
freedom
that is structurally disanalogous to any we have in theoretical
reasoning. We must presuppose autonomy of
the will.
III
Freedom from moral obligation.
In the Critique, then, if not in the Groundwork,
Kant takes it that the moral law is something that is unavoidably part
of the
practical thinking of any agent who is capable of acting on principles. And that this "fact of reason," as
he calls it, is the only way through which we come to know of our own
freedom.
"It is
therefore the moral law, of which we become immediately conscious as
soon as we
construct maxims for the will, which first presents itself to us; and,
since
reason exhibits it as a ground of determination which is completely
independent
of and not to be outweighed by any sensuous condition, it is the moral
law
which leads directly to the concept of freedom." (29)
"The
consciousness of this fundamental law may be called a fact of reason,
since one
cannot ferret it out from antecedent data of reason, such as the
consciousness
of freedom (for this is not antecedently given) . . .
"
IV
From autonomy to the CI (Fundamental Law of
Practical
Reason) Suppose we begin with the
assumption that we are free, in the sense that we can determine the
will
through reasons. Can we then deduce the
Categorical Imperative, the Fundamental Law of Practical Reason? How might this go? This
is what Kant calls Problem II on p.
5:29:
"Supposing
that a will is free, find the law which alone is competent to determine
it necessarily.
“
Since the
material of the practical law, i.e., an object of the maxim, cannot be
given except
empirically, and since a free will must be independent of all empirical
conditions (i.e., those belonging to the world of sense) and yet be
determinable, a free will must find its ground of determination in the
law, but
independently of the material of the law.
But besides the latter there is nothing in a law except the
legislative
form. Therefore, the legislative form,
in so far as it is contained in the maxim, is the only thing which can
constitute
a determining ground of the [free] will."
How is this
reasoning supposed to work? Consider the
very idea of an agent acting for [what she regards to be] reasons. Now, while an agent may of course take her
desires to provide her with reasons, her being moved by a desire is not
the
very same thing as her being moved by [what she regards to be] a reason. Think back to our heroin addict.
Suppose she regards her addiction as a
compulsion she is in the grip of, as something which gives her no
reason to
take heroin. Here she has a strong
desire for heroin, but, as she judges it, no reason to take it. She will take it for a reason, she will have
some reason
for taking it, only if
there is
something she can regard as a reason to take it.
But, as we
have noted before, this seems to commit her to a universal proposition. Can she coherently think that a feature of
the situation provides her with a reason to do something, but would not
for
someone "relevantly like her" in a situation "relevantly like hers." It seems she cannot. She
must be prepared to think that it is
because she is an agent (of some relevant kind) in a situation of some
relevant
kind that she should so act. That is, she
must think there to be some universal law which applies to her in this
situation that recommends her so acting.
For her to act for reasons,
therefore is for
her to be committed to willing her action as an instance of some
(universal)
law.
Kant
assumes that, since no desire for any object is necessarily part of
rational agency,
willing an action as an instance of a law applying to all agents cannot
be
identical with determining the will through the desire for some object. But what alternative is there?
Kant seems to think that the only alternative
is the agent's determining her will by a particular maxim being
conditional on
the agent's being prepared to will her maxim as universal law.
The
picture, then, is this. An agent is
inclined toward adopting particular maxims by his particular,
contingent
psychological makeup. Perhaps he desires
the welfare of others. In this case he
is moved to adopt maxims that seem likeliest to promote this. Or perhaps, like Kant's self-interested homo economicus of 5:23f, he desires only to increase
his
property, and so is moved to adopt a maxim:
"I will increase my property by every safe means."
Now, just by having these maxims, so
conceived, an agent is not yet acting for reasons.
To do that she has to regard her maxim as
rooted in universal law, and she must will
her acting
on the maxim as prescribed by such a law.
Now, being
moved to adopt, and be guided by, a maxim by a desire for some
object--whether
for the welfare of others, or for the increase of one's property, or
for some other
thing--is not the same thing as being moved to determine the will by a maxim because this is
prescribed somehow by universal law that applies to one
independently of the
value of outcomes. An agent can be
doing the latter only if she is prepared to will her maxim as universal
law. Thus Kant concludes what he calls,
in the Groundwork, the Categorical Imperative:
Act only on
maxims that you can at the same time will to be a universal law.
The
argument seems to depend on the assumption that the only alternative to
acting
on the CI is acting from a desire. Is
this so? What if my
motivation is not a desire that my interest be promoted (by me or
someone
else), but rather my acceptance of an egoistic norm of action. Will the norm pass the CI test?
On the one hand, since I am not following this
maxim in order that my interest be promoted, we will not necessarily
get a contradiction
in the will between a private end (my own interest) and what I will
when I will
that everyone do what is in their interest (supposing this is not in my
interest). On the other hand, the
principle itself tells
me only to will what is in my interest, so if it is not in my interest
that
everyone act on this maxim, then my maxim
tells me not
to will its universalization.
Suppose that, for this reason, my maxim fails the test. Why might it not still be a practical law, nonetheless? I certainly seem to be able to treat it as a practical law.
Kant
doesn’t deal with this question in the Critique in a way that
he does,
at least implicitly, in the Groundwork.
There the idea seems to be that the alternative we are
supposing, that a
principle might simply be a practical law, quite independently of
whether a
free agent could legislate or will it, is unacceptable because it
implies
heteronomy and is inconsistent with autonomy, “the property the will
has of
being a law to itself.” (GR440)
Now there is a weak sense in which the very idea
of
practical law presupposes autonomy, since, by their very nature,
practical laws
bind any rational agent, that is, any being with a will.
So it is the will itself that is the ground
of obligation. Nothing our norm-egoist
thinks,
however, need be inconsistent with that.
He accepts egoism as a norm that binds all rational agents (all
wills). But it is clear that Kant has in
mind
something stronger by autonomy, namely that the will is a law to
itself, in the
sense that following the practical law (the law to which any will is
subject)
can consist in nothing more than the exercise of the capacities that
are intrinsic
to will . And here Kant’s idea that, from this perspective,
nothing is given
to will—either empirically (through desire) or a priori (by some kind
of
rational intuition).
Free agency is a formal rather than a material or
substantive capacity.
Access to the practical law can only come through the exercise of free will, and this requires that practical law must be capable of being legislated by each will. Hence the CI test: “Act only on maxims you could will as universal law.”
What could
vindicate this assumption? Here’s a
possibility. Go back to the “fact of
reason.” We noted there that the law one
takes oneself to be bound by applies to one independently of any
desire, and of
the value of any outcome that it might take some particular desire (or
pleasure) to appreciate. One takes it
that one can comply with the law because one thinks one ought. But notice also that one takes that one is responsible
for complying with the law, that it would be culpable for one
not
to. But to be culpable for complying
with the law, one must be able to grasp the law. This
apparently rules out the possibility that
there might be norms that simply apply to one that one might not grasp. Any law that binds one in this sense, must be a law that one can grasp through
the very
capacity that makes one subject to it.
This means that the law must somehow be “built into” the will. The CI is Kant’s proposal for how it is.