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A Practical Account of Kantian Freedom

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The Palgrave Kant Handbook

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Abstract

Altman examines and evaluates competing interpretations of Kant’s theory of freedom and concludes that the only way for us to be free as noumena and causally determined as phenomena is to conceive of our actions in two different ways, either from the practical standpoint or the theoretical standpoint. That is, we can commit ourselves to causal determinism with regard to objective claims about the world, but in acting we must conceive of ourselves as free agents. This “practical account” of Kantian freedom has several explanatory advantages over both the compatibilist and the libertarian interpretations of Kant’s theory, and it is more consistent with the epistemic limitations that Kant establishes in the Critique of Pure Reason.

If in the whole series of all occurrences one recognizes purely natural necessity, is it nevertheless possible to regard the same occurrence, which on one hand is a mere effect of nature, as on the other hand an effect of freedom?

– Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (A543/B571)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There are many passages in which Kant invokes the proposition that “ought implies can,” including A548/B576, A807/B835; CPrR 5:30, 142, 143n; Rel 6:45, 47, 50, 62, 64; TP 8:276–77; PP 8:370; and MM 6:380. Although I am using the proposition for a very limited purpose in this chapter, it plays a crucial role in some of Kant’s arguments in the practical philosophy and his philosophy of religion. For a discussion and assessment of Kant’s use of this claim, see Jens Timmermann, “Sollen und Können: ‘Du kannst, denn du sollst’ und ‘Sollen impliziert Können’ im Vergleich,” Philosophiegeschichte und logische Analyse 6 (2003): 113–22; and Robert Stern, “Does ‘Ought’ Imply ‘Can’? And Did Kant Think It Does?” Utilitas 16, no. 1 (March 2004): 42–61.

  2. 2.

    David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. ed. P. H. Nidditch, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), bk. II, pt. iii, §3 (pp. 413–18).

  3. 3.

    For a more detailed account of how pure reason moves us to act, see Stephen Engstrom, “The Triebfeder of Pure Practical Reason,” in Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason”: A Critical Guide, ed. Andrews Reath and Jens Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 90–118; and Patrick R. Frierson, Kant’s Empirical Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 116–66.

  4. 4.

    This is not to say that only agents who can act wrongly are free. Kant contends that God, as a perfect being with a holy will, can only choose rightly and that God exhibits “true freedom” (LDR 28:1068; see also 1066, 1097). However, practical freedom in imperfectly rational beings involves the ability to choose among different maxims, some of which are contrary to the moral law.

  5. 5.

    Kant’s distinction between Wille and Willkür is given a lot of explanatory weight by Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 176–203. The distinction has been challenged by, among others, Nelson Potter, Jr., “Does Kant Have Two Concepts of Freedom?” in Akten des IV. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, ed. Gerhard Funke and Joachim Kopper, 2 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1978), 2:590–96; and Hud Hudson, “Wille, Willkür, and the Imputability of Immoral Actions,” Kant-Studien 82, no. 2 (Jan. 1991): 179–96. I employ the distinction between Wille and Willkür only to clarify different kinds of free activity. My exposition does not depend on whether Kant consistently maintains it.

  6. 6.

    Harry G. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  7. 7.

    Ralf Meerbote, “Kant on the Nondeterminate Character of Human Actions,” in Kant on Causality, Freedom, and Objectivity, ed. William L. Harper and Ralf Meerbote (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 138–63; and Hud Hudson, Kant’s Compatibilism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). For Davidson’s theory of anomalous monism, see especially Donald Davidson, “Mental Events,” in Essays on Actions and Events, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 214–25.

  8. 8.

    Davidson, “Mental Events,” 224.

  9. 9.

    Robert Hanna, “Freedom, Teleology, and Rational Causation,” in Kant Yearbook, vol. 1: Teleology, ed. Dietmar H. Heidemann (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 99–142.

  10. 10.

    Ibid ., 119.

  11. 11.

    See the special issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies devoted to this question (vol. 19, no. 3 [July 2011]), which includes Robert Hanna, “Beyond the Myth of the Myth of the Given: A Kantian Theory of Non-Conceptual Content,” 323–98; and Robert Hanna, “Kant’s Non-Conceptualism, Rogue Objects, and the Gap in the B Deduction,” 399–415. See also Chapter 33 of this volume.

  12. 12.

    Hanna, “Freedom, Teleology, and Rational Causation,” 119.

  13. 13.

    Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, bk. II, pt. iii, §§1–2 (pp. 399–412); David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, in Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. ed. P. H. Nidditch, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), §8 (pp. 80–103); A. J. Ayer, “Freedom and Necessity,” in Philosophical Essays (New York: St. Martin’s, 1963), 271–84; and Frankfurt, Importance of What We Care About, esp. 1–103.

  14. 14.

    See Frankfurt, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” in Importance of What We Care About, 1–10.

  15. 15.

    Hanna, “Freedom, Teleology, and Rational Causation,” 125–26, 129.

  16. 16.

    Allen W. Wood, “Kant’s Compatibilism,” in Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Allen W. Wood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 74.

  17. 17.

    See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 132–43.

  18. 18.

    See Roderick M. Chisholm, “Human Freedom and the Self,” in Free Will, ed. Gary Watson, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 26–37; Randolph Clarke, “Toward a Credible Agent-Causal Account of Free Will,” Noûs 27, no. 2 (June 1993): 191–203; Randolph Clarke, “Agent Causation and Event Causation in the Production of Free Action,” Philosophical Topics 24, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 19–48; and Timothy O’Connor, Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  19. 19.

    Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, bk. II, pt. iii, §2 (pp. 409–12); and Hume, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, §8, pt. iii (pp. 98–99).

  20. 20.

    Ralph C. S. Walker, “Kant on the Number of Worlds,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18, no. 5 (Dec. 2010): 824–25. Although this is not the time to adjudicate this dispute, I should note that this is in contrast to Allen Wood’s Identity Interpretation, according to which there is an identity between things in themselves and objects as they are when thought through the categories, apart from the objects’ sensible properties. See Allen W. Wood, Kant (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 64–76. I do not see how this interpretation can be squared with some of Kant’s claims in the first Critique, such as: “If by merely intelligible objects we understand those things that are thought through pure categories, without any schema of sensibility, then things of this sort are impossible” (A286/B342; see also A256/B311–12). For an argument against the Identity Interpretation, see Dennis Schulting, “Limitation and Idealism: Kant’s ‘Long’ Argument from the Categories,” in Kant’s Idealism: New Interpretations of a Controversial Doctrine, ed. Dennis Schulting and Jacco Verburgt (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 173–78.

  21. 21.

    Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. and ed. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 137–38, 152–53, 358.

  22. 22.

    Benjamin Vilhauer, “Incompatibilism and Ontological Priority in Kant’s Theory of Free Will,” in Rethinking Kant, vol. 1, ed. Pablo Muchnik (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 22–47; Benjamin Vilhauer, “The Scope of Responsibility in Kant’s Theory of Free Will,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18, no. 1 (Jan. 2010): 45–71; and Benjamin Vilhauer, “Kant and the Possibility of Transcendental Freedom,” in The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism, ed. Matthew C. Altman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 105–25, esp. 115–16. Vilhauer echoes Wood’s conception of intelligible causality in “Kant’s Compatibilism,” 86–89.

  23. 23.

    Vilhauer, “Scope of Responsibility in Kant’s Theory of Free Will.”

  24. 24.

    Eric Watkins, “The Metaphysics of Freedom,” in Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 301–61. Hanna’s view of the relationship between free choosing and the form and matter of experience also overlaps in some ways with Vilhauer’s and Watkins’s views. For example, Hanna writes: “the complete set of general deterministic mechanistic natural causal-dynamic laws provides a skeletal causal-dynamic architecture for nature, which is then gradually fleshed in by the one-off laws of self-organizing thermodynamic systems” (“Freedom, Teleology, and Rational Causation,” 119).

  25. 25.

    Vilhauer, “Kant and the Possibility of Transcendental Freedom,” 113.

  26. 26.

    Ibid ., 116.

  27. 27.

    Ralph C. S. Walker, Kant: The Arguments of the Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1978), 149. For a libertarian response to this objection, see Vilhauer, “Scope of Responsibility,” 45–71. See also Wood, “Kant’s Compatibilism,” 92–93.

  28. 28.

    Jonathan Bennett, “Kant’s Theory of Freedom,” in Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Allen W. Wood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 102.

  29. 29.

    It is called the regulative idea theory by Hanna, “Freedom, Teleology, and Rational Causation”; the deflationary view by Vilhauer, “Kant and the Possibility of Transcendental Freedom”; and a commitment theory by Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 61–73.

  30. 30.

    Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 159–221; Graham Bird, The Revolutionary Kant: A Commentary on the “Critique of Pure Reason” (Chicago: Open Court, 2006), 689–718; and Andrews Reath, “Kant’s Critical Account of Freedom,” in A Companion to Kant, ed. Graham Bird (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 275–90.

  31. 31.

    Bird, Revolutionary Kant, 710.

  32. 32.

    Patrick Kain considers the relation between theoretical and practical belief in “Practical Cognition, Intuition, and the Fact of Reason,” in Kant’s Moral Metaphysics: God, Freedom, and Immortality, ed. Benjamin J. Bruxvoort Lipscomb and James Krueger (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 211–30.

  33. 33.

    Henry E. Allison, “Kant’s Practical Justification of Freedom,” in Kant on Practical Justification: Interpretive Essays, ed. Mark Timmons and Sorin Baiasu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 287–88.

  34. 34.

    Donald Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” Journal of Philosophy 60, no. 23 (7 Nov. 1963): 685–700.

  35. 35.

    Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends, 163.

  36. 36.

    This view has also been voiced by the existentialists. For example, Sartre’s enigmatic claims that I am “as profoundly responsible for the war as if I had myself declared it” and that “I choose being born” are not claims that I literally cause these things to happen (Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes [New York: Washington Square, 1956], 709–10). Rather, he means that by acting freely I am choosing to make my way about in a world in which the war is taking place and I have been born. When I take on certain projects in my life, I am affirming the past that makes them possible. See Dagfinn Føllesdal, “Sartre on Freedom,” in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1981), 392–407.

  37. 37.

    Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  38. 38.

    I am indebted to Cynthia D. Coe, Michael Fletcher, Wayne P. Pomerleau, and Benjamin Vilhauer for reading early drafts and suggesting promising directions for this chapter.

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  1. Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Central Washington University, Ellensburg, USA

    Matthew C. Altman

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    Matthew C. Altman

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Altman, M.C. (2017). A Practical Account of Kantian Freedom. In: Altman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_10

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