Freedom and Internalism

Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 1 Chapter Five: Freedom and Internalism In this chapter I want to explore how understanding Kant as committed to internalism illuminates the argument of Groundwork III and its connection with the second Critique. 1 In his famous essay “Internal and External Reasons,” Bernard Williams defends a roughly Humean account of reasons for action, contrasting internal and external reasons. Internal reasons are always related to an “agent’s subjective motivational set,” whereas external reasons are not so related.2 The latter may be true “independently of the agent’s motivations” (107), that is, an external reason “will not be falsified by the absence of an appropriate motive” (101). The problem, then, is whether reasons that are external tout court could possibly ever generate an internal reason. Reasons that are external tout court cannot, even after the agent deliberates rationally, be related to the agent’s internal motivational set. They may very well be true, but the agent has no reason to care about them. For instance, the hardened criminal may very well agree that morality stipulates that murder is wrong, yet have no reason to believe that moral laws are relevant to him. If he is hardened to his very core, without a modicum of sympathy for others through which morality could be related to interests that are already his own, moral reasons would simply pass him by. Williams argues, correctly I believe, that …there does indeed seem great force in Hume’s basic point, and it is very plausible to assume that all external reason statements are false. For ex hypothesi, there is no motivation for the agent to deliberate from, to reach his new motivation. Given the agent’s earlier existing motivations and his new motivations, what has to hold for external reason statements to be true, on this line of interpretation, is that the new motivation could be in some way rationally arrived at, granted the earlier motivations.… I see no reason to suppose that these conditions could possibly be met. (109) Put this way, the problem should become familiar to readers of Kant’s ethics and their relation to Hume: how is it that reason, independently of the sensuously conditioned desires, can ever give rise to a motive? This is, in fact, the problem of Groundwork III, which I have analyzed at length in the chapter “Freedom and Insight.” 1 Conversations with Stephen Darwall led me to develop this line of argument. 2 Bernard Williams, Moral Luck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, 102. Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 2 In this chapter I argue that Kant’s arguments in Groundwork III show that he is committed to internalism, although he denies that moral motives are sensuously conditioned. Instead, commitment to morality is a necessary feature of what it means to have a will; if one has a will, (where reasoning practically is a necessary feature of what it means to have a will) one has already, in virtue of having such a will, committed to morality as that which the agent must consider as having the most value. It is in virtue of these commitments that the moral law can in fact confront the sensuously conditioned agent as an ought–this ought is, indeed, predicated on an is: the is of the rational agent’s necessary commitment to reason and its efficacy in his or her willing. These arguments, further, will show that if properly understood, we can make sense of everything that Kant argues in the second Critique as in line with his arguments in Groundwork. Only these arguments will save Kant from the charges of moral skepticism and moral mysticism3 that have been leveled against him by readers of the second Critique. Consistent with this internalism is Kant’s view that freedom and the moral law analytically imply one another, so that there is in Kant no understanding of freedom, à la Reinhold, where freedom is understood as “the capacity (Vermögen) for self-determination through volition for or against the practical law.”4 This chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section, “Moral Skepticism and the second Critique,” I argue that the “great reversal” reading of Kant’s second Critique leaves Kant open to the obvious charge of moral skepticism, and that Kant most certainly would have been aware of this. If, however, we read Kant’s discussion of the “fact of reason” as a shorthand for his argument in Groundwork III regarding the first ground of the possibility of a will, these charges can easily be overcome. In my second section, “Back to Groundwork III,” I revisit some of the arguments in my chapter “Freedom and Insight,” and I show why any kind of action in accordance with the idea of laws (e.g., in technical-practical reason) also commits one to moral demands. This implication rests on Kant’s commitment to internalism. And in my last section, “Internalism, and the Impossibility of an Indifferent Choice,” I show how both the early and the 3 Owen Ware mentions Jakob Salat’s complaint in On the Spirit of Philosophy (1803) that Kant’s appeal to a fact of reason “reduced the foundations of his philosophy to mysticism,” and notes its anticipation of Hegel’s remark that “cold duty is the final undigested lump left within the stomach, the revelation given to reason,” in “Kant’s deductions of freedom and morality,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2017, Vol. 47, No. 1, 116-147, 118. 4 C. L. Reinhold, Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie, vol. 2. Leipzig: Göschen, 1792, 270. Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 3 critical Kant argued against the idea of an indifferent choice, one not determined through preponderant grounds, as destructive of the very idea of a will. I. Moral Skepticism and the Second Critique Owen Ware has nicely documented the point that Kant’s first interpreters “saw no fundamental difference between the proof-structure of Groundwork III and the second Critique.” The reversal reading gained traction with the studies of Dieter Henrich and Lewis White Beck, and contemporary commentators used it to try to make sense of Kant’s discussion of the “hidden circle” in Groundwork III.5 Moreover, Kant nowhere indicates that he has given up on the argument of Groundwork III and is offering a new argument in the second Critique. Instead, his discussion in the second Critique proceeds as if he is simply building on the work of the Groundwork. Indeed, Kant notes that the second Critique “presupposes the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals . . . “(5:8). These facts alone should lead us to approach the reversal reading with some suspicion. Here I want to develop some of the suggestions I made earlier in my chapter in my chapter “Freedom and Insight,” with a closer look at the arguments of the second Critique. Arguments for the reversal reading put forward the following claims: in the Groundwork, Kant proceeds from the reality of freedom, established as a condition of the effectiveness of reason, to the bindingness of morality. In the second Critique, on the other hand, Kant gives up on the idea of a deduction of freedom, and asserts freedom “only as a consequence of the ‘a priori fact’ that we see the moral law as binding.”6 On this reading, Kant gives up on the deduction of freedom because “mere transcendental freedom is not enough,” that is, it is not sufficient to get us to the idea that “this freedom is in us,” and “points to our subjection to morality.”7 Since my third chapter provides a detailed analysis of Groundwork III, here I focus only on how Groundwork and the second Critique are continuous.8 The key question is whether Kant has in fact given up on a deduction of the bindingness of the moral law as a necessary feature of having a will (which 5 Ware, “Kant’s deductions of freedom and morality,” 117. 6 Ameriks, Kant’s Theory of Mind, 209. Franks puts the concern clearly when he notes that the problem is that “we cannot exclude the possibility of a being who is capable of theoretical cognition but who lacks a rational will” Franks, All or Nothing, 266. 7 Ameriks 209. 8 I am grateful to Karl Ameriks for challenging me on these arguments and pushing me to develop them further. Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 4 involves freedom), or whether his discussion of the moral law as a Tatsache der Vernunft can be understood as a shorthand reference to the argument of Groundwork III. I have already indicated that Tatsache should be understood not as a fact, but as an act, and the question then is to what degree this reading of Tatsache brings the argument of the second Critique closer to that of Groundwork. The importance of the success of Kant’s project in Groundwork III cannot be stressed enough, for only if Kant can show that we have a necessary interest in the moral law, one that must trump all other interests, can he also claim that the moral law is necessarily binding on all rational agents. Note that on this reading Kant is committed to internalism: if the question is how reason can motivate the will, Kant’s answer will be that it can only so motivate the will because it (the will) must already be so motivated if it is to be a will at all. Here there is no question of a mere externalism, where there is no hook through which an agent can deliberate from his or her subjective set of desires to the adoption of a new reason for action. Kant’s point is that the interests of reason are always already, that is, necessarily, represented among an agent’s subjective motivational set. Important in this regard is the problem of moral skepticism. If we read Kant’s second Critique argument as simply proceeding through the affirmation that the moral law is a necessary fact of reason, one might ask, on what grounds we might consider it to be such a fact, and whether, if Kant has no answer to this question, he is indeed guilty of Hegel’s charge that we have here to do with an undigested lump, an unsubstantiated “revelation given to reason.” If this fact of reason is something simply cognized in inner experience, then it becomes part of our experience, and as such can be accounted for in terms of prior determining causes. For no matter how much I consider myself moved by the moral law, that motivation, as part of my phenomenal experience, can always be accounted for in extra-rational terms. And from this problem it no short step to a further one, namely, that it may very well be a contingent fact about my constitution and its history that accounts for my being so moved, and that another agent without an analogous constitution and history might not have any motive to be moved by the demands of reason, leaving Kant in in an externalist vise. Kant must certainly have been aware that the considerations he put forward against our beginning with freedom, and then arguing from freedom to the moral law, applied equally as well to the argument that the moral law is a fact of reason. In the second Critique Kant notes: I ask instead from what our cognition of the unconditionally practical starts; whether from freedom or from the practical law. It cannot start from freedom, Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 5 for we can neither be immediately conscious of this, since the first concept of it is negative, nor can we conclude to it from experience, since experience lets us cognize only the law of appearances. It is therefore the moral law, of which we become immediately conscious (as soon as we draw up maxims of the will for ourselves) that first offers itself to us and, inasmuch as reason presents it as determining ground not to be outweighed by any sensible conditions and indeed quite independent of them, leads directly to the concept of freedom. 5:29 Importantly, since experience lets us cognize only the law of appearances, any fact of reason that simply appears in consciousness will also be subject to such a law. Hence our cognition of what is unconditionally practical is equally problematic, whether one starts from freedom or from the moral law. Franks draws attention to Fichte’s powerful arguments concerning the susceptibility of the appeal to a fact of moral consciousness to moral skepticism. The problem is that insofar as we already find ourselves valuing the moral law (so that we simply find in ourselves the motive to act in accordance with morality), such a motive is an empirical fact of consciousness along with many others, and can be accounted for accordingly. Hence Fichte notes: But the being-determined of the will appears and now arises the question: is that self-determining to a certain satisfaction or dissatisfaction assumed as a postulate of reason for the possibility of attribution, the cause of the appearance of the being determined to that satisfaction or dissatisfaction? If one answers this question affirmatively, as Reinhold actually answers it: “From its effects, through which it comes forth among the facts of consciousness, the freedom (of the will) is fully graspable by me, etc.”] then one drags an intelligible into the series of natural causes and thereby misleadingly brings it about that it is misplaced into the series of natural effects; assuming an intelligible that is no intelligible.9 If we begin with a given, that is, the condition (a fact of consciousness) through which we simply find ourselves as bound by the moral law (and thereby grasping its value), we are assuming an 9 J. G. Fichte, J. G. Fichte: Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, eds. Reinhard Lauth, Hans Jacobs, and Hans Gliwitzky. Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommannholzboog (1964– ), 1/2: 9-10; quoted in Paul W. Franks, All or Nothing, 272. Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 6 “intelligible that is no intelligible,” for such a condition can be counted as just one among another of a set of natural effects appearing in consciousness. And such a natural effect has a natural cause. This can be true not only of the condition of finding value in the moral law, but of the very idea of the moral law itself, which could be considered an artifact of our biological evolution, or a historical accident, or even just the product of bad faith. And even, were the fact of reason to be presented as just some kind of intelligible entity, the question still remains, why we should care about it at all? It is impossible to think that Kant would not have been aware of these objections, especially since he details the problems with the assumption that we can have an experience of freedom. Those very same problems crop up with thinking that we can have a cognition of the moral law in our inner experience, that it could be some fact in our consciousness, and that from it we could deduce our freedom. For anything given to our experience, whether it be inner or outer, can be understood as subject to the law of appearances. The question is then why the moral law, taken as a fact of consciousness, should not be so understood. II. Back to Groundwork III It is only the argument of Groundwork III, properly understood, that really answers this question. That argument proceeds in accordance with an analysis of the essence of the will, where what is meant by the essence of a thing is “the first ground of its possibility” (JL 9:144). There Kant argues that if there is such a thing as a will, it must contain within its concept (in accordance with its essence) the idea of a commitment to the complete demands of reason, that is, to morality. The discussion of freedom in Groundwork III does not begin with any experience of it, but with an analysis of the “activity [italics mine] of all beings whatever that are rational and endowed with a will” (4:447). I have argued earlier that it is through Kant’s first analysis of that activity through which a will first becomes possible, in particular the use of laws in hypothetical imperatives, that he arrives at a concept of both negative and positive freedom. If there is such a thing as a will, it involves intentional and directed action in accordance with the idea of laws, through which the agent is able to exercise her causality. The use of the idea of laws, and the exercise of one’s causality in accordance with such ideas (the act of reason), already commits one to the space of reasons, that is, to the conditions of the efficacy of reason. Those conditions involve both the idea of freedom from prior determining causes (negative freedom) and the capacity to direct the will in accordance with the idea of these laws, such that here we have a causality of reason. Both conditions are present in action in accordance with mere hypothetical Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 7 imperatives, for here, no less than in the case of pure practical reason, we think of reason as an efficient cause of our actions in the world of sense. Kant’s argument in Groundwork III does not begin with freedom, but with an analysis of an activity, namely that activity through which a will first becomes possible. This is an activity of practical reason, which, it turns out, presupposes freedom. So from an analysis of the activity of practical reason, Kant moves to freedom, which Kant then argues is inseparably connected with the moral law. So understood, the argument of Groundwork III can be made consistent with Kant’s claims in the second Critique: both are centered on an act of reason through which the agent is revealed as both free and as bound by the moral law. Giving oneself the moral law is a necessary act of reason because it lies in the first ground of the possibility of having a will. Kant’s Tatsache or Factum der Vernunft is not an “undigested lump” or a “revelation” of reason, but a shorthand for the necessary act of reason presented in Groundwork III. Note that in the second Critique Kant notes that we become immediately conscious of the moral law “as soon as we draw up maxims of the will for ourselves, [italics mine]” (5:29). Consciousness of the moral law is an immediate implication of the drawing up of maxims for the will, which is a capacity grounding the essence of the will. Kant’s position here is entirely consistent with his argument in Groundwork III. It may very well be objected that my synopsis of Kant’s argument Groundwork III moves too quickly, that the act of reason Kant there analyzes only gets us to the conditions of a Verstandeswelt, and not to a moral world.10 That is, one could very well say that the activity necessary to the constitution of a will merely concerns the conditions for acting in accordance with hypothetical imperatives, but that those conditions do not imply any kind of commitment to moral demands. Kant’s analysis, however, is designed to show that the very same act through which the will is constituted as a will is at the same time the act through which the will binds itself to the moral law, that is, through which the will acknowledges the moral law as a supreme incentive. Kant must show that the act of reason through which the will is constituted as will brings both freedom and the moral law (as autonomy) in its train. It is for this reason that he 10 I have already briefly dealt with these objections in my chapter “Freedom and Insight,” but want to approach them from yet another angle. The full force of the objection was brought up in the conference on the idea of freedom at the University of Toronto in May 2019, and for these objections and therefore the demand that I think about them further I am deeply grateful. Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 8 moves from the act of the use of reason in hypothetical imperatives, to its condition, namely freedom. The most important point for our purposes here is Kant’s move from freedom to autonomy, that is, positive freedom, in which the demands of reason are a motive for the will. That move, I will argue, is intrinsically connected with Kant’s commitments to internalism, and is a move that Kant again commits to in the second Critique. In order to move from the analysis of the conditions of having a will, realized in the giving of hypothetical imperatives to oneself, to autonomy, Kant must show that the freedom implied by the use of technical practical reason also implies an act through which the agent commits to moral laws. I have already discussed in detail that having a will implies intentional and directed action, and this means action directed by insight, that is, by the idea of laws. This insight implies freedom from the determination of prior determining causes (negative freedom). But having a will also implies the capacity to control the self in accordance with this idea of laws, so that the will can initiate a series of causes in the sensible world. It can thus be seen that in the mere use of technico-practical reason we must already assume that reason has a causality of its own, namely, that it is an efficient cause. But the real issue is whether Kant is warranted in moving from the conditions of freedom implied in the use of technico-practical reason to moral reason. The efficacy of the use of reason in hypothetical imperatives demands negative freedom, which Kant defines as “that property of a causality that it can be efficient independently of alien causes determining it” (4:446). In order to move from technico-practical reason to moral reason, Kant needs to show that from negative freedom (implied in technico-practical reason), we can move to positive freedom in the full-blown sense of autonomy, where the will gives itself the moral law and is motivated by it. That is, Kant needs to show that there is no instance of an independence from prior determining causes that is not also an instance of the causality of reason. The argument for this is actually provided in a very dense passage at the beginning of Groundwork III, where Kant argues that “there flows from it [negative freedom] a positive concept of freedom, which is so much the richer and more fruitful” (4:446). Kant begins his argument by noting that “Will is a kind of causality of living beings insofar as they are rational, and freedom would be that property of such causality that it can be efficient independently of alien causes determining it, just as natural necessity is the property of all non-rational beings to be determined to activity by the influence of alien causes” (4:446). The key idea here is will as a kind of causality of living beings. The idea of causality concerns the relation Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 9 of changes of state to one another, and the question here is how we can think of the will as initiating a series of changes in the sensible world. Important here is that the series of changes initiated by the will must concern changes that are both internal as well as external to the agent, that is, if the will is to be effective it must be able to direct all of the agent’s inner forces so that they can be marshaled in outer action. How, then, are we to understand that first moment initiating a series of causes that is independent from prior determining causes? Importantly, Kant notes the following: Since the concept of causality brings with it that of laws in accordance with which, by something that we call a cause, something else, namely an effect, must be posited, so freedom, although it is not a property of the will in accordance with natural laws, is not for that reason lawless but must instead be a causality in accordance with immutable laws but of a special kind; for otherwise a free will would be an absurdity. 4:446 The idea here is: if the will is to be a cause, it must have a law of its causality in accordance with which it is effective. Such a law cannot be natural law. But there are only two kinds of laws of causality: natural causal laws and the laws of reason. Since the free will does not operate according to the former, it must operate according to the latter. There is no third option. This is because a lawless freedom, one not determined in accordance with a principle, is an absurdity. This is absolutely central to Kant’s argument, for it eliminates the possibility that the establishment of negative freedom might leave open the possibility of an undetermined freedom, one that does not already contain within it an internal reason for action.11 Such a lawless freedom would be precisely the kind of freedom introduced by Reinhold, namely the capacity to determine the self through choice of the will for or against the moral law. 11 My arguments here stand in direct opposition to those put forward by Desmond Hogan, who in a series of recent articles has argued that the mature Kant came to adopt a libertarian metaphysics of human agency by the mid to late 1760’s; see, for example, his articles “Noumenal Affection,” Philosophical Review 118 (2009): 501-532; “How to Know Unknowable Things in Themselves,” Nous, 43.1 (2009): 49-63; “Three Kinds of Rationalism and the Non Spatiality of Things-in-Themselves,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 47 (2009):355-382; “Metaphysical Motives of Kant’s Analytic-Synthetic Distinction,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 51 (2013): 267-307. Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 10 III. Internalism and the Impossibility of an Indifferent Choice Kant’s point is that the idea of such a will is self-contradictory, and therefore an absurdity. For here, ultimately, no motive or driving force of the will can be specified. This is the freedom of ultimate indifference, a notion that is utterly destructive of the idea of a will. The early Kant had well-developed and compelling arguments against such a freedom of indifference and the reasons for which it is destructive of the idea of a will. For instance, in his 1755 Nova Delucidato he criticizes the views of Christian August Crusius (1715-1755), who had put forward the idea of an indeterminate freedom.12 Kant characterizes this view of freedom in the following way: Personally, I should think that if you eliminate everything which is in the nature of a connected series of reciprocally determining grounds occurring in a fixed order, and if you admit that in any free action whatever a person finds himself in a state of indifference relative to both alternatives, and if that person, even though all the grounds which you have imagined as determining the will in a particular direction have been posited, is nonetheless able to choose one thing over another, no matter what – if all that is conceded, then I should finally admit that the act had been freely performed (NE 1:402). But, notes Kant, the idea of such an indeterminate freedom is destructive of the notion of the will. For it ultimately implies a will that is not determined in accordance with its character and intentions, but whose willing is ultimately a chance occurrence: 12 For an in-depth discussion of Kant’s reaction to Crusius, see Nicholas Dunn, “A Lawful Freedom: Kant’s Practical Refutation of Noumenal Chance,” in Kant Studies Online 2015: 149177, www.kantstudiesonline.net. Dunn accepts Hogan’s reading of Kant, according to which Kant finally came to accept Crusius’ view of freedom; his attempt to save Kant from the objection that an indeterminate freedom is ultimately destructive of the will is ultimately unsatisfactory, as Dunn simply argues for both the idea of a Willkür that is undetermined as to its choice for evil or the moral law, as well as the for the determination of the free will through practical reason. Insofar as the Willkür is thought to be indeterminately free, it is not yet determined through practical reason, but must choose to be so practically determined, and then it remains unclear on what grounds it made such a choice. Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 11 If any deity granted you this wish [of libertarian freedom] how unhappy you would be at every moment of your life. Suppose that you have decided to follow the path of virtue. And suppose that your mind is already sustained by the precepts of religion and whatever else is effective in strengthening your motivation. And suppose that now the occasion for acting arrives. You will immediately slide in the direction of what is less good, for the grounds which solicit you do not determine you. I seem to hear you expressing still more complaints. Ah! What baleful fate has driven me from my sound decision? Of what use are precepts for performing the work of virtue? Actions are the product of chance; they are not determined by grounds…. I loathe the unknown something which makes me favorably disposed towards my fall into what is worst. The shame of it! What is the source of this hateful desire for what is precisely the worst course? – this desire which could just as easily have inclined me in the opposite direction. (NE 1:402-3). If the will possesses such libertarian freedom, when it is asked, why did such an individual choose this course of action rather than another, no reason or account can be given. The moment of choice is therefore a chance event. Here it cannot be said that the ultimate ground of the individual’s choice lies in either nature or reason, for both possibilities, that of acting merely in accordance with one’s sensuously conditioned desires, or of moral action, must remain equally live options on this account of freedom. Why chose one rather than the other? Libertarian freedom implies that we cannot already have grounds that incline us further in one direction than the other. Rather, each moment of choice must be one that is not determined by the agent’s character or previously existing wants, wishes, or desires. And absent those determining grounds, the choice would seem to be a random one, more in keeping with an unexplained event occurring by chance than with an act. For an act must be intentional, and if it is intentional it must be related to the character and desires of the agent. Now, it is obvious that Kant’s thinking on these matters evolved, and that his critical position was distinct from the ideas he put forward in Nova Dilucidatio. However, the decisive character of the arguments he presents here, and their continuities with his later, critical arguments concerning the intelligibility of the idea of a will should not be ignored. The critical Kant was too well aware of the difficulties surrounding the Reinholdian idea of libertarian choice, and his earlier, non-critical work reflects his awareness of the depths and details of this Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 12 intractable issue. Rather, the main insight driving Kant’s critical work is that we cannot simultaneously hold our reasoning powers to be efficacious while at the same time holding that states of the mind are causally determined. If reason is to be efficacious, the process of reasoning cannot be determined by prior causes.13 Kant’s notion of transcendental freedom is principally tied to the conditions of insight in our practical reasoning, and not to the idea of a libertarian choice. If we eliminate libertarian choice, we are left with only two possibilities. Either the ultimate ground of an individual’s choice lies in natural causes (sensuously determined motives), in which case the ends of an individual’s actions are determined through nature, or, if prior causes do not ground action, the internal motive for action must be provided by reason itself. But both possibilities are fully determined, only in different ways.14 If the will is determined through sensuously conditioned motives, it is determined in accordance with prior determining grounds. If it is determined through reason, it is determined through insight into what is best, and the ends of reason determine action. In both cases, however, the individual acts in accordance with what seems to her to have the most value at that moment in time. In the case of the choice in accordance with sensuously conditioned motives, where the individual makes reason a slave of the passions, what we have is a failure, a failure of insight, for what the individual considers to have the most value has been determined through the lower faculty of desire. It is for this reason that in the Metaphysics of Morals Kant will argue that “the possibility of deviation from it [the moral law] is an inability”(MM 6:227).15 13 On this point see my arguments in my chapter “Freedom and Insight.” 14 It can of course, be asked, why one “choice” rather than the other occurred. The ultimate answer for this can only be given in terms of reason, that is, one can only posit that there is a necessary progression to the development of reason in finite but sensuously conditioned beings such as ourselves. Of course, such a notion leads to later idealist systems such as those of Hegel or Schleiermacher. While their systems were very different, both posited an ultimate determination of the of the world and its development through reason; Schleiermacher, for instance, posits the notion of the progressive “ensoulment of nature through reason,” which occurs in accordance with the decrees of the divine wisdom. 15 No doubt there is a significant problem here, and that is, if the individual, in her use of technico- practical reason must consider herself as free, and as therefore having determining grounds in Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 13 Note the importance of the mature Kant’s denial of the kind of freedom espoused by Reinhold: only if it can be shown that Reinhold’s kind of freedom is an absurdity, can it also be shown that negative freedom implies positive freedom. But if negative freedom implies positive freedom, then technico-practical reason implies moral reason. And this means further that the very same act through which the will constitutes itself as an effective force through opting into the space of reasons, is also that act through which it binds itself to moral laws. We therefore see that there is no fundamental difference in argumentation between Groundwork and the doctrine of the second Critique. Both arguments begin with the act of reason through which the will constitutes itself, only Groundwork provides an analysis of why the act of reason, lying at the very ground of the possibility of the will, must be one in which the will binds itself to moral laws. The same point–that there is no such thing as a lawless freedom–is made by Kant in the second Critique when he notes that a free will “must nevertheless be determinable,” that is, “it must find a determining ground of the law but independently of the matter of the law” (CPrR 5:29). And again in the Religion he repeats “to think of oneself as a freely acting being, yet as exempted from the one law commensurate to such a being (the moral law) would amount to a cause operating without any law at all (for the determination according to natural law is abolished on account of freedom) and this is a contradiction” (6:35). And later he notes: There is no difficult in reconciling the concept of freedom with the idea of God as necessary being, for freedom does not consist in the contingency of an action (in its not being determined through any ground at all), i.e., not indeterminism (the thesis) that God must be equally capable of doing good or evil, if his action is to be called free) but in absolute spontaneity. The latter is at risk only with predeterminism, where the determining ground of an action lies in antecedent time, so that the action is no longer in my power but in the hands of nature, reason, we cannot really make sense of the failure of reason. If freedom is tied to the determination of reason, it is very hard to account for the intermediate state where reason is used in technical reason, so that the will is free, and yet where reason fails to fully determine the will. Here we have a hybrid situation, where insofar as it makes use of the idea of laws, the will is free, but yet it (inexplicably) succumbs to the determination of prior determining causes in assessing its final ends. Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 14 which determines me irresistibly; since in God no temporal sequence is thinkable, this difficulty has no place. Religion 6:50n. Kant quite clearly notes that “freedom does not consist in the contingency of an action (in its not being determined through any ground at all).” The idea of an activity with no ground would amount to a random one; one could give no account of why that action was chosen rather than an alternative one. The same is ultimately true of the idea of an action with some kind of ground, but never a sufficient one, so that there could be alternative choices, both of which are equally attractive even given all circumstances, and no final reason to decide one way or another. That kind of freedom, the freedom of alternative possibilities, neither of which by itself is sufficient to incline one way rather than the other, is no help in thinking about free will, for there is nothing intentional in acts that must ultimately be understood in terms of chance, and hence they can hardly be the actions of a will at all. Derk Pereboom has argued that this passage suggests that Kant is a source rather than a leeway incompatibilist, where the former requires that the self “be the undetermined source of one’s own actions,” and the latter is “the ability to do otherwise.”16 What this passage, and others suggest is that Kant does not believe that the inability to do otherwise threatens freedom: he notes that the difficulty freedom poses does not consist in “reconciling these [inner sufficient grounds] with freedom,” this is an issue “that does not enter anyone’s mind.” The issue is rather: “how can predeterminism exist with freedom, when according to predeterminism freely chosen actions, as occurrences, have their determining grounds in antecedent time (which, together with what is contained therein, no longer lies within our control” (Religion 6:51; cf. CPrR 5:97). If the past determines the action, the action can be traced to events that fully preexisted the agent, and hence are in no way attributable to the agent. So what threatens freedom is a causal nexus implying that the agent is not herself the source for her own actions. 16 Derk Pereboom, “Kant on Transcendental Freedom,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 73, No. 3, 537-567, 542. He further develops the idea in Living Without Free Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) chapters 1-4. In “Kant on Transcendental Freedom Pereboom later argues that Kant does argue for the freedom of alternate possibilities, and that he derives this from the idea that ought implies can. I have shown earlier that this mistaken reading depends on a reversal reading where Kant derives freedom from the validity of the moral law and the notion that “ought implies can.” 560. Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 15 The point made in Religion is particularly important for two reasons: first, it demonstrates, against such interpreters as Beck, Silber Rawls, Allison, and Franks, that even in Religion Kant remains committed to denying that there could be a faculty of choice (the Willkür) that can choose for or against the moral law.17 Second, the reasons why the idea of such a radically free, indeterminate willing is a contradiction are further developed. It is not only that in the case of the indeterminate will we cannot provide a reason or an account for why one choice, rather than another, was made. It is also that without a law determining the moments of the change in an action we cannot provide an account of the unity of the distinct moments constituting it. Since each action involves a change in the agent (and given the continuity of change an infinite set of changes) there must be a principle unifying and determining the necessity of each moment of the change and connecting it with others. Without such a principle, the different states of a change in action would be random, and incoherently connected with one another. But if such states are random and incoherently connected, it can hardly be said that such an action is the activity of a will at all. Hence, an indeterminate freedom is a contradiction. This means, then, that if natural causality does not determine change, if an action is to have unity its moments cannot be indeterminate, and must thereby be determined through the causality of reason. There are only two possible ways in which the states of a change can be 17 The reading of choice as a kind of liberty of indifference can be found in many contemporary readings. Silber, for instance, notes that “the determination of Willkür by Wille can occur in varying degrees, with the general provision that nothing determines Willkür unless Willkür chooses to be so determined” John Silber, “The Ethical Significance of Kant’s Religion,” in Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. T. M. Green and H. H. Hudson, New York: Harper and Row, 1960, cv. A similar reading is put forward by Louis White Beck in A Commentary on Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason, John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971, 124-7, Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, chapter 7, and Paul Franks, All or Nothing, where he notes that “. . . we are all free to be heteronomous, to repudiate through individual Willkür the law that Wille legislates to itself” 297. In his article “On a Supposed Solution to the Reinhold/Sidwick Problem in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals” Courtney Fugate does an excellent job of detailing this reading and other current ones associated with it, and demonstrating why it is mistaken. European Journal of Philosophy, 2012, DOI 10.111/j.1468-0378.2012.00531.x. Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 16 united. If a change happens merely in accordance with laws, then an event is determined from behind, that is, it is determined by the past, and through what has already occurred; such a change is understood in terms of efficient causes. This determination is to be contrasted with determination in accordance with the idea of laws. Here the states of the change in an action are unified through the idea that is the ultimate goal of action, and the laws governing how it is to be achieved, that is, they are teleologically, and not efficiently, determined. Each action, and each state of a change, is understood as for the sake of the end. Here determination is through an idea, through that which is not yet, which is the object, or goal of action. In the case of moral determination the end is the establishment and maintenance of the moral community itself. Importantly, there is determination here too, but in this case it is determination through insight, that is, through the understanding of laws and what they require for action. Since some kind of determination is a necessity, and the universe of determination includes only natural and rational determination, once natural determination is ruled out, determination must occur through the idea of laws. Finally, let me briefly mention Kant’s answer to Reinhold in the Metaphysics of Morals. There Kant unequivocally argues against Reinhold’s understanding of freedom: Laws proceed from the will, maxims from choice. In man the latter is a free choice; the will, which is directed to nothing beyond the law itself, cannot be called either free or unfree, since it is not directed to actions but immediately to giving laws for the maxims of actions (and is, therefore, practical reason itself). Hence the will directs with absolute necessity and is itself subject to no necessitation. Only choice can therefore be called free. But freedom of choice cannot be defined - as some have tried to define it - as the ability to make a choice' for or against the law (libertas indifferentiae), even though choice as a phenomenon provides frequent examples of this in experience. For we know freedom (as it first becomes manifest to us through the moral law) only as a negative property in us, namely that of not being necessitated to act through any sensible determining grounds. But we cannot present theoretically freedom as a noumenon, that is, freedom regarded as the ability of the human being merely as an intelligence, and show how it can exercise constraint upon his sensible choice; we cannot therefore present freedom as a positive property. But we can indeed see that, although experience shows Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 17 that the human being as a sensible being is able to choose in opposition to well as in conformity with the law, his freedom as an intelligible being cannot be defined by this, since appearances cannot make any supersensible object (such as free choice) understandable. We can also see that freedom can never be located in a rational subject's being able to choose in opposition to his (lawgiving) reason, even though experience proves often enough that this happens (though we still cannot comprehend how this is possible). - For it is one thing to accept a proposition (on the basis of experience) and another thing to make it the expository principle (of the concept of free choice) and the universal feature for distinguishing it (from arbitrio bruto s. servo); for the first does not maintain that the feature belongs necessarily to the concept, but the second requires this. – Only freedom in relation to the internal lawgiving of reason is really an ability; the possibility of deviating from it is an inability. How can the former be defined by the latter? It would be a definition that added to the practical concept the exercise of it, as this is taught by experience, a hybrid definition (definitio hybrida) that puts the concept in a false light. MM 6:226-7 Here Kant recognizes a distinction between Wille and Willkür. Wille is practical reason itself; it is neither free nor unfree, since it is the kind of thing to which this kind of predicate is inapplicable, for it is not directed to actions.18 I take this to mean that it is not the faculty of the will in and through which action occurs, but is simply that through which legislation is determined. It “directs with absolute necessity and is itself subject to no necessitation.” On the other hand, the faculty of the will to which the predicate of freedom can be applied is the Willkür; Kant notes that “only choice can therefore be called free.” This does not mean, however, that it is not itself subject to necessitation. Kant notes, directly against Reinhold, that “freedom of choice cannot be defined–as some have tried to define it–as the ability to make a choice for or against the law (libertas indifferentiae),” and furthermore, “freedom can never be located in a rational subject’s being able to choose in opposition to his lawgiving reason.” The subject’s choice against lawgiving reason is rooted in failure, or in an incapacity: “only freedom in relation to the internal lawgiving of reason is an ability; the possibility of deviation from it is an inability.” All 18 Just as, for instance, a stone is neither loving or unloving–that kind of predicate is inapplicable to it. Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 18 of this is evidence against reading Kant’s distinction between Wille and Willkür as licensing the notion that the self-determination of choice is equally realizable in choices for or against the law.19 Rather, because Wille provides sufficient reasons for action to the Willkür, the Willkür is subject to necessitation, and its freedom is nothing other than its immediate determination by Wille, or pure practical reason.20 Kant clearly notes that failure to act in accordance with morality is due an inability. No doubt there are contemporary readings that try to gloss over this passage by reading Kant’s statement as referring not to an inability per se, but to the possession of an unactualized or weakened power.21 Evil actions are imputable because if “the will acts heteronomously, it still has this power, but it has failed to exercise it.”22 Here choice in favor of morality is supposed to be a capacity, but one which an agent can intentionally fail to exercise, so that failure is ultimately due to some kind of choice that can be imputed. This idea, however, is tied to all the problems discussed so far regarding an indeterminately free will, one which can freely determine itself for or against the law. Kant, however, rightly considers this to be a contradictory concept, for such a 19 Fugate puts the problem with this view quite nicely: “For if will is to provide an incentive to choice, and indeed an incentive that it cannot entirely ignore, then to this extent will provides a determining factor for choice. But if choice in turn is to be absolutely free and so completely selfdetermining, as Kant argues, then it would seem that it cannot in any way be swayed by the supposed incentive offered by the will. For to do this it would have to enter at least to some degree into the determination of choice, and that is inconsistent with the idea of freedom as absolute and unmediated spontaneity” Fugate, “On a Solution to a Problem in the Metaphysics of Morals,” 9. 20 This is, in fact the interpretation of Kant offered by Carl Christian Erhard Schmid, the first representative of Kant’s philosophy at Jena. On this point see Franks’ discussion in All or Nothing, 267ff. 21 On this point see Nelson Potter, “Does Kant Have two Concepts of Freedom?” in Akten des 4. Internationalen Kant-Kongress, ed. By G. Funke sand J. Kopper., Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974, Allen Wood, “Kant’s Compatibilism,” and Stephen Engstrom, “The Inner Freedom of Virtue,” Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretive Essays, ed. by Mark Timmons, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 289-315, as well as the discussion by Fugate in “On a Solution. . . .” 22 Allen Wood, “Kant’s Compatibilism,” in Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy, 81. Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 19 will lacks internal reasons: we cannot provide an account of why a choice was made. Instead, Kant argues, the failure to follow through with the determination of reason is simply an Unvermögen, that is, an inability. An inability is to be distinguished from an unactualized capacity, one which one can choose to actualize or not. As Fugate so aptly notes: On the other hand, to lack a faculty or to have an “Unvermögen” for a certain kind of action is not only not be not performing it, but to be unable to perform it even in the best possible circumstances, i.e., to lack a certain “possibility of acting.” Kant’s use of the term “Unvermögen” to describe a presumed capacity to will against the law therefore clearly indicates that he does not think it to be like the case of a person with closed eyes, but rather like the case of a person with no eyes, or at least like one who has not developed eyes to a state where they are ready to become active.23 Fugate’s suggestion that the incapacity in question is one very much like that of the fetus that has not yet developed eyes is a telling one. For it suggests that the failure in question is in some sense a failure of insight or of the power of insight. This failure, however, cannot mean that the moral law is not always already an incentive to the will. As Kant notes in Groundwork, the very having of a will presupposes an a priori commitment to what reason demands, and were this the only incentive, the rational being would automatically will in accordance with morality. In Groundwork III Kant notes . . . I must still necessarily take an interest in it [the moral law] and have insight into how this comes about; for this ‘ought’ is strictly speaking a ‘willing’ that holds for every rational being under the condition that reason in him is practical without hindrance; for beings like us–who are also affected by sensibility, by incentives of a different kind, and in whose case that which reason by itself would do is not always done–that necessity of action is called only an ‘ought,’ and the subjective necessity is distinguished from the objective.” (4:449; cf. 4:413) 23 Fugate, “On a Solution to a Problem in the Metaphysics of Morals,” 15. Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 20 Since the incentive of reason is always already present, what does it mean, then, when an individual fails to act in accordance with such an incentive? For it seems that if the individual acts in accordance with technical reason, she must consider herself free, on pain of a practical contradiction. And this act, through which she must consider herself as free, implies her recognition of the supreme value of acting in accordance with morality, and a capacity to be moved to act in accordance with it. How then can it be possible for her to fail to act in accordance with morality? The dual status of the human being makes possible the failure of reason. Since reason is the very condition of having a will, such a failure is always one in which the will stands in contradiction with itself. There are three distinct ways in which reason can fail, each associated with one of the degrees of radical evil. The first is the case of the akratic will: here the person correctly recognizes the implication that action in accordance with the idea of laws also implies the supreme value of the moral law, but the person has not been fully able to marshal the powers of reason in such a way that she can control the sensuously conditioned desires. Somehow, at the moment of action she attends to the object of the lower faculty of desire, and the demands of reason, which are fully and clearly acknowledged in moments of lucidity, are the worsted party. The second degree of radical evil involves a failure of judgment. Here there is also a clear-sighted recognition of the supreme value of acting morally, but one judges incorrectly regarding one’s own case, constantly mixing moral incentives with non-moral ones–one does not take enough care to distinguish between the two. In the last degree of radical evil, the depravity of the will, there is a willful attempt to contradict the essence of the will itself, so that the person seeks to ignore the implications of her capacity to act in accordance with the idea of laws. Because the supreme value of the moral law is an implication of the act through which the will is constituted and cannot be ignored, this last degree of radical evil is the supreme degree of a will in contradiction with itself. There is inherent instability in all three species of evil actions; the depraved will is the most unstable of all. The evil individual is sunk in sensuousness, and it only through her becoming one with her rational essence that she escapes this condition. In all three cases, moral evil can be understood as a kind of incapacity, that is, it can be understood in terms of a limited development of the powers of reason. The development of the powers of reason can be thought of in a similar way to the development of the eyes: just because the fetus has not yet developed eyes does not mean that it will not, in the future develop them. Furthermore, the initial (perhaps only implicit) commitment to the demands of reason through which the will is constituted may operate teleologically on the development of the person. While Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 21 the complete force of the commitment to reason’s demands may not yet be fully operative in the life of an individual, it may yet be the that the power of the demands of reason must slowly gain strength in the development of the will. It must do so, because a will that ignores the demands of reason is a will in contradiction with itself, that is, it stands in contradiction with that very power through which it can be said to be a will at all. It is a will that is inherently unstable, for it stands in opposition to that through which it is constituted. If the above argument is correct, then we can see why viewing Kant as committed to a developmental model of reason is that much more fruitful in understanding his claims regarding the universality of moral evil in the Religion. Moral evil is due to an incapacity. To what degree, then, is it imputable? Perhaps only in weak sense that the person already stands under an ought, even when, strictly speaking this ought does not imply that at the moment the individual acts in accordance with an evil maxim, she really could have done otherwise. Instead, this ought is to be understood in terms of a commitment to the demands of reason that the person has already made,24 although she may not have fully grasped its implications, or she may still be in a situation where her other, non-moral desires take the upper hand. The force of the ought then just means that the person has already willed to stand under moral laws, that her reason allows her to recognize the supreme value of morality, and that she must think of reason as having the power to control all the sensuously conditioned desires. Evil is due to a lack in the development of the powers of reason, or rather, it is a stage, perhaps a necessary one, in the development of the race, one that will, of necessity be overcome. Important here is that the idea of the development of the soul, or even of the possibility of growth in virtue, presupposes internalism. For what could it possibly mean to say that an individual has grown in virtue, if at every moment of choice she possesses an indifferent liberty, with no preponderant grounds inclining her one way or another? Only if what has been learned provides a reason for acting, and hence inclines the will in one direction rather than another, does it make sense to say that the individual has grown, has, perhaps, learned from past mistakes, and grown stronger. This was Kant’s important point in the Nova Dilucidatio, and we see it repeated in the Metaphysics of Morals. When Kant speaks of noumenal causation in the Critique of Judgment, he speaks of causation in terms of reason: “The word cause, when used of the supersensible, signifies only the ground for the determination of the causality of natural things to an effect that is in accord with 24 This is in fact the argument of 4:449, cited above. Jacqueline Mariña – Freedom and Internalism 22 their own natural laws but yet at the same time is also in unison with the formal principles of the laws of reason” (CJ, AA:05:195). Noumenal causation is not noumenal choice, but rather concerns the idea that all world processes, especially those concerning moral development, are subject to laws yet higher than those of a blind natural causation because they are ultimately grounded in them. Nature works in accordance with its laws, but these are themselves determined by something higher, namely the complete demands of reason, which determine the course of the world in accordance with the highest good. This is a very different reading of Kant than the standard one, which takes a central pillar of Kant’s practical philosophy to be a commitment to an indeterminate freedom of choice. If my reading of Kant is correct, then for him the will must be determined in accordance to certain preponderant grounds, although the commitment to the moral law as that which has the most value is always already contained in the constitution of the will. In this Kant is committed to internalism.