Freedom And Reason In Kant
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 ...
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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 ...
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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 one of my personal freedom and Kant wants
to demonstrate that every rational being is free , in order to infer that every
rational being must obey the Categorical Imperative. A second way would be to
show that every rational being ...
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"Freedom And Reason In Kant." Essayworld.com. August 1, 2007. Accessed November 4, 2025. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Freedom-And-Reason-In-Kant/68973.
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