Kant’s Freedom And Morality Essay Examples

Perhaps the single most important idea in any theory of morality is the idea of freedom. Morality can only exist in a state where there is a choice to be made between different courses of action and choices only exist when there is a certain amount of freedom. Conceptualising and understanding this freedom is one of the hardest tasks for philosophers today, though Kant laid down an excellent foundation for it nearly two and a half centuries ago. One of his most important ideas is that of a universal moral law which must apply to all rational beings. This paper sill attempt to reconcile this idea of the moral law with Kant’s idea of freedom.
As Jonathan Bennett laid out in his preface, there a clear division in philosophy between natural sciences (the ‘physik’) and moral philosophy (the ‘ethik’) – the first dealing with the way things are and the second dealing with how they ought to be. It is somewhere between these two positions that freedom exists. However, since the question to be asked is how one is to behave, the idea of freedom falls squarely into the realm of the ‘ethik’. Freedom and morality do not arise just as a result of philosophical study, they are principles which have important implications in everyday life. As such, there must be a degree of objectivity, which is to say, a set of rules must be developed so that it can be applied unambiguously to all rational beings.
One of the major issues which the author points out is the fact that there is simply no way to prove conclusively whether there is or there is not such a thing as freedom – it must be pre-supposed that such a thing exists if rational beings are to act morally. In other words, freedom cannot be proven empirically.
Empirical inquiry is the unique domain of the ‘physik’, so much so that Kant insisted on a clear division between the methods of inquiry for the natural sciences and that for ethics. This division is created in the form a certain detachment from the empirically provable world. This is a complex idea because a moral code, as mentioned earlier, is created in order to ensure a certain kind of behaviour which is required for rational beings to co-exist within society – the only way one can know whether or not a moral code works is if it functions in the real world! But this argument does not work if it is used both to test and to create the moral law. If one were to attempt to create a moral law using purely empirical bases, one would simply create a form of utilitarian morality (at best). Kant takes this argument even further and shows that if there is even the slightest amount of empirical consideration in formulating a universal moral law, it will be flawed and biased in favour of one set of rational beings from whom the empirical anchorage was derived.
But a problem arises here – the reason for all this trouble with morality is that it is assumed that there is such a thing as ‘freedom’ which exists a priori to all experience. But, given that this freedom is defined by Kant as freedom from all effective causes (to put it very simply, it is merely freedom from empirical considerations of any sort), it seems somewhat ironic, if not paradoxical that this freedom was assumed only so that we could once again be subjected to a set of moral laws. This brings the argument back to Bennett’s original point that the ‘physik’ deals with ‘how things are’ while the ‘ethik’ deals with how things ‘ought to be’. The very nature of rational beings is such that they are not simply blinded by things that ‘are’ but they can look further and discern things as they ought to be – this is the gap in which freedom, choice and morality lies.
Although this is a vindication of the existence of the moral law, it still says nothing about how this law may be applied and how it interacts with the concept of freedom. The moral law exists specifically because it is a necessity of practical reason – the way things ought to be can only be achieved through a clear understanding of what the ‘ought’ is. Without knowing it, actions will simply be directed according to piecemeal moral codes which do not actually solve any problems of the way things are and only delays them and pushes the ultimate question further into the future. Though this does not make the question any easier. The exact nature of the moral code will never be known because, as Kant pointed out, it must be so crafted that it answers the ultimate question of what is unconditionally necessary and consequently, what ought the world to be?
In the absence of this, the categorical imperative is the closest one can get to this ideal. In every situation one must judge and act in such a way that, if the action was to be universalised as a law, it should be able to hold as a moral principle. However, due to the extraordinary complexity of life and lived experiences, the only point which can truly be universalised is that of motive – it is finally motive that judges whether an action, even if in all other ways is moral, can in fact be a moral law. This long process of pruning and refining is what unifies freedom and morality – without freedom, morality cannot exist and without morality freedom becomes meaningless.