Term Papers on Freedom And Reason In Kant

Term Paper Title	Freedom And Reason In Kant
# of Words	1474
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	5.9

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...

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