Diversity involves different people who are of different sexes, ethnicities, religions and races coming to form a community, organization or group. If people, therefore, embrace each other’s differences, it will be possible to achieve a “we” among diversified people. Diversity is achieved if and only if morality comes in handy. It is only then that the idea of free will makes sense. Most people, especially those who are not active in philosophical thinking, tend to believe that they are free to choose from various alternatives when making various day-to-day decisions with the simplest of them- to say yes or no. To ensure that there is good co-existence, there is a need for every individual to ensure that they respect other peoples’ right to freedom of life, speech, and existence.
Immanuel Kant in his work, Groundwork of the metaphysic of morals, talked about “the idea of freedom”, an assumed ideology that freedom is purely a universal perception. Kant explained that without the category of the imperatives, then responsibility and morality would prove difficult to achieve. The idea of morality is greatly denied by the determinists while compatibilists affirm that there is a need for free therefore meeting each individual’s responsibility in achieving diversity. It is, therefore, true that there exists an idea of freedom alongside the existence of free will.
Kant in the third section, the concept of freedom is the key to explaining autonomy of the will, describes the characteristics of the moral will hence account for the nature of morality. He states that freedom is the key to describing will, which is independent of all external determinations. Freedom is an agency to moral autonomy. Will makes people produce effects in their worlds hence it is “causality”. Kant lays down an argument that each is self- legislated as well as have free will. Our moral laws are what bind each person to will. To determine one’s free will, people can view themselves as members of the intellectual world or the world of appearances. The laws of nature are what coordinate the world of appearances while the intellectual world is based on how people view their ability to have the free will and how this influences their thinking and point of action. Kant explains how people can have their free will using the two viewpoints. If each person properly coordinates their intellectual and appearance world, then unity is achieved and this is propagated to the rest of the people making it easy to achieve diversity. Conflicting the two worlds will cause disunity within the individual and consequently the people around the person.
Kant defined will as the cause of action. As long as the will is not influenced by external forces, then an individual becomes rational. On further consideration, however, this definition of freedom is negative. This is because it argues that freedom is determined by alien forces. Kant goes further to give a positive definition of freedom: “a free will gives itself a law- it sets its ends and has a special causal power to bring them about” (Kant 1788, 115). If an individual’s will influence actions differently from the usual laws of nature, then this is a free will hence unity within self. Rules are important as they influence free will. Without them, the influences behind the free will would be subtle.
According to Kant, the only source of the laws that affect the free will is the will itself. The ideology forms Kant’s notion of autonomy. Persons of interest have to impose therefore moral laws in themselves to achieve the freedom of will. The concept of autonomy is later used by other scholars to invent the reciprocity thesis that was influenced by Kant’s categorical imperative, which emphasized that as long as there were moral laws, then there is no difference between a free will, and will. Rules are the best tool to regulate a person’s ideology and consequently how they judge other people with different cultures, races and sex. Rules that promote diversity should be put in place to ensure that there are codes of ethics that regulate how the minorities, sexes, and races considered as inferior are treated.
Kant is not compelled by any interest to follow the principle of morality. He wondered how it was possible for an individual to subject themselves to certain laws and yet regard himself or herself as free. Human beings do not have an idea of how reality is structured. They only see the world using the three-dimension approach, yet this is not enough when it comes to explaining the ultimate reality. The god's eye perspective, which does not view the world as how the people see it, can give an idea of what the ultimate reality is. Individuals are called upon to do away with laws that promote disunity among each other. They are called upon to accommodate differences and do away with those laws that tend to undermine others.
It is not possible for any individual to leave the human perspective and for this reason; it is not possible to tell how the world appears independently of an individual’s point of view. The god's eye perspective is the “world of understanding”. According to Kant, it is only in this world that an individual can attain freedom hence encourages every individual to consider himself or herself while trying to understand the world. This is not so in the world of appearances as almost everything is determined by the physical law hence getting hard to alter the course of events, as there is no room for free will. Viewing one in the world of understanding enhances an individual’s will, which brings things into existence. It is until individuals learn to look beyond the human perspective that favors certain races, cultures or religions that diversity is achieved. Men and women need to visualize how a united world would look like and with this, a “we” society is achieved.
Morality applies to all rational beings. If any action is determined not by sensual impulses but by reasoning, then it is a moral action. The reason behind every action is determined by the motive of the action. If a person can turn the motive into a universal maxim, then one can determine what influenced the reasoning. Morality should be consistent among all people since reason is considered same at all times. Actions are considered to be full of morals if they embrace the universal laws that define will. For each person to attain their will, they should then consider that it applies equally to every person, and, therefore, recognizing other people as moral agents and not as tools used to achieve each other goals. Before any action is taken, there is the need to consider whether it is rational or irrational. Each person should ensure that the action promotes diversity and not the other way round. The ability to have a free will is of great importance as there is limited influence from external forces.
The categorical imperative is made possible since it is the world of understanding that forms the basis of the world of sense and laws. This makes this world more fundamental thus grounding the world of sense. Understanding is paramount, and this makes the laws of this world apply too in the world of sense thus the moral laws connecting the different individuals to the world of appearances.
The thought of having the free will is what drives the majority of the people to make various judgments, a notion that is not drawn from people’s experiences. As experiences are acquired majorly from an individual’s sensible world, then, it is not possible to develop free will using the experience as they are majorly influenced by the forces of nature while free will should be influenced by the world of understanding. Every individual usually finds themselves in two positions that are incompatible; from the position of a practical person and that of a speculative person. The practical person views himself or herself as free when taking any action while the speculative one views freedom as impossible since he/she investigates the world of appearance. The practical world commits individuals to freedom while the speculative world has no room for freedom as everything is run by the rules of nature. This leads to the dialectic of reason which points to the fact that although there is a contradiction between natural necessity and freedom, it is impossible to give up on either, the world of understanding and the world of appearances. It is impossible to ignore the world as determined by the laws of nature but it is equally impossible for individuals to take themselves as free whenever they undertake any action.
Despite Kant’s work receiving positive criticism from various scholars, there are those who negatively criticized his work. Arthur Schopenhauer authored and tried to give an analysis of Kant’s Groundwork. According to him, one cannot consider actions as moral especially when it is a call of duty. The idea of the categorical imperative is just egoistic and cold according to the Arthur openly displaying the inconsistencies found in Kant’s work on the concept of freedom.
In conclusion, the use of both the practical reasoning with respect to reasoning and speculative reasoning leads to the absolute necessity for every rational individual who are armed with the right mind that embraces and respects diversity. Knowledge makes necessity acquire sound reasoning. Reasoning, therefore, aims at seeking necessity in finding presupposition. The idea of freedom is the only possible way to explain the possibility of the categorical imperative. It is however not possible to explain the freedom of will as natural necessity will automatically be contradicted. A rational person should ensure that they exercise will especially in appreciating the minorities and the oppressed sexes, through the means of reason. With this in mind, it is possible for a “we” to exist within or out of a group of diverse people.
Bibliography
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practicle reason. 1788.
