The Metaphysics of the Moral Law: Kant's Deduction of Freedom (Studies in Ethics)

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GARLAND STUDIES IN

ETHICS

edited by

ROBERT NOZICK PELLEGRINO UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR HARVARD UNIVERSITY

A GARLAND SERIES

THE METAPHYSICS OF THE MORAL LAW KANT'S DEDUCTION OF FREEDOM

CAROL W. VOELLER

GARLAND PUBLISHING, NEW YORK

&

LONDON

INC.

Published in 2001 by Garland Publishing, Inc. 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain by Garland Publishing, Inc. II New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE

Garland is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group Copyright © 1998 by Carol W. Voeller

(Revised 200 I) All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 10

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Voeller, Carol W. The metaphysics of the moral law : Kant's deduction of freedom I Carol W. Voeller. p. cm. - (Studies in ethics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8153-3772-8 (alk. paper) I. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-l804-Contribulions in concept of freedom. 2. Liberty-History-18th century. 3. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804. 4. Ethics-History-18th century. I. Title. II. Series. B2799.L49 V64 1999 123' .5'092-dc21 99-052449 Printed on acid-free, 250-year-life paper. Manufactured in the United States of America

for my parents W Joanne and Stanley C. Voeller with love and immense gratitude

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments Further Acknowledgments

IX

xv xvii

Introduction Note on Sources and Translation

1 12

PART I Belief, Subjectivity, and the Epistemic Power of Practical Reason

15

CHAPTER 1 The Moral Argument for God's Existence § I The Disputed Interpretations §2 Kant's Argument for God's Existence §3 Glauben (Belief) §4 God's Existence as Necessary Condition of the Possibility of the Highest Good §5 Preliminaries: The Possibility of the Highest Good and the Existence of God §6 The Highest Good as an Object of the Will §7 The Possibility of the Highest Good §8 Kant's Conceptions of the Subjective and the Objective §9 Why the Possibility of the Highest Good is an Only Subjectively Sufficient Condition for God's Existence § 10 The Practical and the Subjective: The Limits of the Argument vii

17 18 23 27 29 32 35 37 42 46 50

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Preface

PART II The Deduction of Freedom: The Argument of Groundwork III and Chapter I of the Second Critique CHAPTER 2 The Argument and Its Background § 11 A Deduction, Moreover, a Deduction of Freedom § 12 Two Preliminaries: A Yet Earlier Problem about Freedom with More on What the Deduction Is, and Isn't § 13 Kant's Notion of Law (in the Theoretical and Practical Deductions) § 14 The Argument for Equivalence § 15 The Argument for the Moral Law § 16 The Argument for the Constitution of the Will

59 61 65 71

77 88 90 92

CHAPTER 3 Texts: Groundwork III and Second Critique I § 17 The Logical Possibility of Freedom in the Groundwork § 18 The Equivalence Claim § 19 The Real Possibility of Freedom §20 Consciousness of the Moral Law, the Critique's Deduction of Freedom §21 Consciousness of the Moral Law, the Groundwork's Deduction of Freedom §22 In Conclusion: The Ratio Cognoscendi of the Ratio Essendi

10 I 101 108 112

Afterword Selected Bibliography: Works in English Index

151 159 165

121 132 148

Preface

Quite a long time ago, I conceived a desire to understand the third chapter of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, what it had to tell us about freedom of the will and what and how it contributed to the foundational moral theory of Groundwork I and II. Some time later, the project of answering these questions became my dissertation and thence this book. The questions turn out to be rather difficult; ones I believe it is not possible for us to answer out of attention to the Groundwork alone. It has long been thought that Kant's aim in Groundwork III was to justify the categorical imperative as the moral law by showing, given the text, that it follows from the equivalence of being under the moral law and being free, together with freedom. But no construal of the text yields a compelling argument for the freedom premiss, nor, apparently by Kant's own lights, could there be one. The evident inadequacy of this argument, together with the text of the Critique of Practical Reason, which pretty clearly derives freedom from the moral law and the equivalence claim, led to the traditional view of a "reversal" between the argument strategies of the Groundwork and the Critique. On which view, the best that can be gotten for the moral law is the relatively weak "credential" of the second Critique. A number of puzzles arise out of this picture. The question at the end of Groundwork II that helps lead to the 'justification of the moral law" construal of III is how the categorical imperative, as a synthetic a priori proposition, is possible. But it is not as though the argument as construed gives us any answer to this question. Worse, it is not at all clear what an answer to the question would contribute to the justification of morality. At the same time, if, turning to the Critique, we continue

ix

Preface to think of the problem as one about the moral law and the project as one of justifying Kant's moral theory, justification in the form of a "credential" seems vacuous because the moral law itself is the main premiss in the argument allegedly affording the credential, and at the same time absurdly weak, given that the moral law has already been claimed by Kant to be a "fact of pure reason," of which we are "immediately conscious." Eventually, it came to seem to me that one might acquire some leverage on these issues hy considering the question of what a deduction is in Kant's critical work and what he expected such an argument to accomplish. To make a long story short (the long version is to be found below), this approach led to the following picture. Prima facie, one might, like Hume, think that pure a priori concepts, not having been derived from the world, have no possible application to it. Kant took the worry seriously in the case of non-mathematical metaphysical concepts. If we would make legitimate use of such concepts, we need to show that they have really possible objects and how these concepts and objects are related. To show this is the purpose of Kant's deductions. An adequate deduction shows not just that something is the case (e.g., that we are free), but gives us insight into the real possibility of the fact in question (how it is possible that we are free in an empirical world governed by natural causal law). Freedom is an a priori concept in Kant's view. Freedom is a necessary metaphysical condition of our moral agency. However strong our conviction that we are bound by the moral law, whatever our grounds for this, as long as we lack insight into the real possibility of this, which is in fact the real possibility of freedom, philosophy has failed. We want a philosophical understanding of morality and our own moral agency, and that is what Kant is after-in Groundwork III and in the first chapter of the second Critique (not some additional proof of the truth that one ought to act only on the moral law). The sense in which the deduction contributes to the justification of the moral law and Kant's moral theory is this. Given an adequate deduction of freedom, we can understand what, at best, seems true but unintelligible without it: how we fit as moral agents into a world we otherwise appropriately try to understand through empirical science. So the two texts have the same project; they presuppose the same problem and they presuppose the same resources in the first two chapters of the Groundwork. What, of the two, only the Critique presupposes is the results of the first Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason. And what the first Critique provides is the distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal, with the former as the necessary ground of the latter,

Preface

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i.e., transcendental idealism. This is crucial for two reasons. First, it is the basis of another needed first Critique result: that freedom, understood as causality independent of natural law, is not logically impossible, even though natural law determines (and thereby gives cognitive content to the concept of) all empirical causality. The noumenal is a logically possible part of the domain of causes. Second, transcendental idealism provides the moral law as law (as theform of some possible object), with the noumenal as its a priori matter. To show that freedom is really possible, it must be shown that we have sufficient content for the concept of freedom to determine a real possibility-an object that could exist as such in this world as it metaphysically is. It is the combination of the moral law as form and the noumenal as matter that, togethcr with the equivalence claim, shows both that and how freedom is really possible. All of which goes to show why, even allowing for sheer density, the argument of Groundwork III looks, on its face, so different from that of the second Critique. Groundwork III must argue for both the distinction between and the relation between the noumenal and phenomena, as well as for the logical possibility of freedom, all as part and parcel of its deduction of freedom. But it also forces us to the conclusion that the bones of the argument of Groundwork III could not be different from those of the second Critique in the way the "reversal" thesis would have them be. The possibility of the categorical imperative as a synthetic a priori proposition is exhibited in the intelligible world in which free rational causes (wills) are constituted by the moral law. In other words, elements (the noumenal and the moral law) of the same account that gives us an understanding of freedom as really possible allow us to understand how the categorical imperative as a synthetic proposition a priori is possible. Along the way of arguing for this account, I delve into a number of interesting things. The work is divided into three rathcr long chapters, plus a brief Afterword. I begin with a new interpretation of Kant's argument from the second Critique for God's existence. Because Kant claims for the proposition that God exists the epistemic status of Glaube (belief or faith) rather than Wissen (knowledge), and because we have no Erkenntnisse (cognitions) of God, this argument is the readily identifiable locus of an epistemic worry about practical rC,ason and practical arguments, namely, that they are not apt for yielding truth. Given this, the argument affords an excellent opportunity for exploring Kant's understanding of the distinction between theoretical and practical reason and, with that, a significant number of the central technical notions of Kant's critical philosophy: the above-mentioned belief, knowledge, and

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Preface

cognition; subjective and objective; objective reality and law. As I show, none of these notions is, in Kant, quite what a twentieth-century philosopher expects. Besides a better understanding of these notions as Kant uses them, what emerges is that Kant argues for the truth of "God exists." Moreover, the status of this truth as Glaube rather than Wissen is a function of the subjective grounds of the argument-happiness as a necessary end and the highest good as having objective reality-, not a function of its being an argument of practical reason. All of this background in hand, I then turn to the central issue and take up the matter of deductions. A look at the Critique of Pure Reason's theoretical deduction yields the characterization of Kant's problem concerningfreedom and of deductions given above. I also here explore further Kant's notion of law and argue that in Kant the notion is univocal: any law, including the moral law, is a necessary constitutive principle (a law determines, at least partially, the nature of some kind of object) and pure a priori laws are, as such, co-realizable (objects, insofar as they are determined by such laws, can co-exist). Given transcendental idealism, it is this that makes for the objective reality of the moral law. The moral law, by the arguments of Groundwork I and II, is the constitutive principle of the good will, of reason itself, which, by the equivalence claim, is the free will. Among other things, this explains what continues to seem puzzling to many, namely, how immoral acts can be free on Kant's view. An extended account of the argument for the moral law as the constitutive principle of the will ends Chapter 2. This last is attempted in considerable abstraction from the texts of the Groundwork and the second Critique. So, the overall result of Chapter 2 is, I hope, a reasonably articulated picture of what the practical deduction should accomplish and how it should accomplish it. Which brings me, finally, to the texts themselves. In parallel and in detail, I go through the first four sections of Groundwork III and Chapter I of the second Critique. Besides adducing the textual support for my interpretation and for my argument against the "reversal" thesis, I disentangle the various lines of argument in Groundwork III, and explain the "fact of reason" and our consciousness of the moral law. If the account I offer is even roughly right, it draws our attention to two points of fairly general concern. First, Kant was surely right to hold that a philosophical understanding of our moral agency, our free will, is no incidental part of the justification of morality. That few moral philosophers acknowledge this, never mind make the attempt, does nothing to show that moral theories other than Kant's are exempt. On the contrary,

Preface

xiii

whatever one thinks of Kant's attempt, it is to the benefit of his theory over others that it embodies such powerful tools as his conceptions of law, of causality, and of reason with which to address the issue. But second, it must be admitted that, on the account I give, Kant's moral theory is every bit as embedded in transcendental idealism as might have been feared. In response to these two points, I offer, in a brief Afterword, an argument that shows, by appeal to Kant's conception of reason and one each of the central intuitions of incompatibilism and compatibilism, that it cannot be shown that we are not free. (The moves of the argument are mostly venerable, but the purpose relatively novel.) If successful, I believe the force of this argument would be, first, to excuse moral philosophy generally from regarding the task of giving a positive account of freedom as pressing, and, second, to make a move in the project of establishing the independence of Kant's moral theory from his transcendental idealism. I hope that the above is of some help with what is to come. I've made no substantive changes to the dissertation-that is, changes to positions expressed or to the arguments given for them. (Arguments, of course, can almost always be improved upon, but only one position taken or knowingly implied in the dissertation now seems to me simply wrong-which is not to say others aren't worrisome-, viz., that objective reality and real possibility amount to the same thing in Kant. At the same time, I do not think that so representing them is damaging to the substance of any claim I make below, and since I haven't a worked-out alternative with which to replace it, I have let the implied position stand.) I have, however, made numerous changes where there were typographical and editorial errors in the original (including correcting several oversights in the Bibliography). In addition, I have added to the Bibliography a small number of more recent publications of particular relevance to this project and made a number of changes to correct or at least improve especially infelicitous ways in which I had earlier expressed myself.

Acknowledgments

I want to begin by thanking my committee, Bob Adams, Tyler Burge, and Barbara Herman. They are the dissertation committee better than which cannot be conceived. As a group they have afforded me the benefits of tremendous philosophical acumen coupled with profound scholarship. Doing philosophy with them is a joy. I am endlessly grateful for their generosity with help and support for this project as well as for the ways in which their philosophical interests generally, and in Kant specifically, complemented and reinforced one another to the benefit of this work. I thank Bob, in particular, for his help and encouragement during the proposal stage, for great discussions about Kant's theology and modalities, and for his help with Kant's German. Tyler I thank especially for saving me late in the day from a most embarrassing mistake, for an early instruction regarding compatibilism, for some really terrific discussion of the theoretical deduction, and for his help with translation difficulties. Beyond acknowledging her supererogatory efforts as my chair, I want to try to thank Barbara for her mentoring of me and her nurturing of this work in particular. I want to thank her, too, for her work in ethics and on Kant; the substance is crucial to our moral understanding and the philosophy is exemplary. My debt to her and to her work is more than can be said. It was in connection with a class of Barbara's, my first ethics class as a graduate student, that I conceived this project and it says much for her that these many years later there is fruit on the tree. There was a time when, absent her example and friendship, I would not have returned to philosophy. I would also like to thank my other mentor, George Bealer, whose instruction and early support of my philosophical efforts made doing xv

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Acknowledgments

philosophy possible for me in the first place. Though not intimately involved in this project, his efforts and philosophical influence over the years have been pervasive in their effects, and the results are ever so much better than they would have been without his instruction. My friends, Andrew Hsii, Dana Nelkin, Houston Smit, and Candace Vogler, have been with me at every step of this dissertation. These are the people-in addition to my teachers-whose work has most influenced my own and I am grateful for their philosophical judgement as well as for their friendship. Without their objections, many more errors would remain; without their endless willingness to let me run by them yet another argument, yet another idea-without their enthusiasm-I wouldn't have made it. In addition, I must particularly thank Sean Foran, Graham Oddie and Rogers Alhritton for pressing certain worries that remain with me. And I thank John Carriero and Christine Korsgaard for their support of me and of this work; it has meant a lot in some tough times. For the year and a half during which it was finally possible for me to complete the thesis, I had the good fortune to find a professional haven in the Philosophy Department of Illinois Wesleyan University. For this, I cannot thank enough my now friend and then department chair, Charlotte Brown, and my friends and colleagues, Lenny Clapp, Carl Gillett, and Deborah Waldman; but I do thank them. For their earlier support of work on the dissertation, I thank the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation for the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and the UCLA Department of Philosophy for a Department Fellowship and for Teaching Fellowships. I thank my parents, Joanne and Stan, for being behind me every step of the way, indeed, for everything. And I thank Secret and Ginger and Blaze and Sulu-for being. Finally, I thank Seth Crook, lover, friend, and philosopher.

Further Acknowledgments

For the opportunity to publish this (and in such good company), I thank Robert Nozick, editor of the series, and Garland Publishing. I thank Damon Zucca, the editor at Garland, for his help and patience. I should also like to add the following to my earlier expressions of gratitude, still profoundly felt. In editing the dissertation, it seemed to me that the substantive influence on my views of two people's work required further acknowledgement: Michael Thompson's work on species and several early discussions with him contributed a great deal to the way in which I understand and articulate the notion of law that I find in Kant; Houston Smies work on the first Critique, and on the notion of cognition in particular, has influenced and interacted with my own over a number of years and indefinitely many conversations; I thank them both. I am grateful to Candace Vogler, not only for her untiring gifts as a philosophical interlocutor and friend, but for teaching parts of this material and thus, with some of her students, encouraging me to believe that it might, even in its present state, be of some utility; many thanks to all of them. Finally, I must again thank Barbara Herman, without whom none of this would have or could have happened.

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THE METAPHYSICS OF THE MORAL LAW

Introduction

Our understanding of the way the world is put together and our understanding of morality and ourselves as moral agents intersect, in Kant's philosophy, in the deduction offreedom. Freedom, as we all know (whatever our different takes on this fact), is a necessary condition of our moral agency. But, by Kant's lights, being free is also, if it is anything, a characteristic of the kind of being we are, existing in the kind of world this is. Thus, to understand ourselves as moral agents, to understand morality as something which informs, and ought to inform, what we do, we must understand what it is to be free in this world. There are two texts in which Kant attempts to lay bare what it is to be free under the moral law and so to be a moral agent-not only capable of acting morally, but bound to act morally-, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. 1 In each, Kant presents an argument he calls the deduction of freedom. The primary objective of this work is to show what that argument is. (The heart of the argument appears in the third chapter-Groundwork III-and in the first chapter of the Analytic, respectively.) Kant's deduction of freeI For bibliographic information, please see the Note on Sources and Translation at the end of this Introduction. Some might expect me to include with these texts the Canon of the Critique of Pure Reason; that no such argument is offered there will be sufficiently implied by my analysis of the deduction. In general, it is not Kant's aspiration in the first Critique to carry out the substantive work of his practical philosophy, though he does give extensive indication of its outlines with respect to morality and moral agency in the Solution to the Third Antinomy (see §21 for some discussion of this).

I

2

The Metaphysics of the Moral Law

dom is central to the project of his critical philosophy, but despite this it has been inadequately understood. This is evidenced, in part, by the received view of these texts, which ascribes to them incompatible arguments. In fact, the texts represent just one argument. In this Introduction I want to sketch the argument and some of its background, suggesting a few of the difficulties standing in the way of its being properly grasped. There are two basic questions that must be asked and answered if we are to understand these two texts: Why, in the midst of doing moral theory, are we worried about freedom? and Why are we here being givenwhy must we be given-a deduction (whatever one might think it a deduction of)? The first question is answered as effectively from the naive perspective as from any: freedom is the (metaphysically) necessary condition of morality; if we are not in the appropriate sense free, we are not moral agents and there is nothing we ought, or ought not, to do. (Maybe this question gets less straightforward after we've looked at the argument, but I'm going to leave it here for now.) The other question is posed, and must be answered, in the technical terms of Kant's philosophy. The particular philosophical project in which Kant is engaged in Groundwork III and the second Critique, as well as in the first Critique, is critique. In the high rhetoric of the A Preface to the first Critique, in critique is where we answer the "call to reason to undertake anew the most difTIcult of all its tasks, namely that of self-cognition [Selbsterkenntnis]" (Axi/9*), where we critique "the faculty of reason in general, in respect of all cognitions [Erkenntnisse] after which it may strive independently of all experience" (Axii/9*).2 Which is to say that this is where we find out about whether and how we can have various a priori cognitions. A cognition, any cognition, is thought determinately related to an object. 3 Now, with most of our thoughts the question whether they 2 Although I am using standard translations of Kant's work throughout the dissertation, I have routinely altered them in certain respects, most often, as in this case, with respect to the translation of 'erkennen' and its cognates. Any altered translation is indicated by an asterisk following the page cite. For further information about my practice in this and similar connections, see the Note on Sources and Translation at the end of the Introduction. 3 Kant's most general term for a content of consciousness is 'Vorstellung', routinely translated 'representation'. To think (zu denken), in Kant's broadest sense, is to entertain some representation in consciousness. The expression 'thought' is, thus, not restricted to items of, as we would say, propositional content and can be used in a way that is indifferent to the sensory presence of an item thought about (though typically intuitive thought, i.e., cases where the object is occurrently given in intuition, would be referred to as intuition rather than, merely, as

Introduction

3

are cognitions doesn't arise for the simple reason that we acquired the thought (either piecemeal or whole) from intuition of the sort of object(s) to which the thought applies (is related). Of course, this isn't always the case; while the concept round and the concept square are both thoughts of which this is true (i.e., they are cognitions), "round square" is not even a thought, let alone a cognition, rather it's the empty concatenation of two incompatible thoughts. 4 And, perhaps, "witch" is like "round square" in this, logically impossible. Alternatively, "witch" might be a thought, not logically impossible, but still fail to be a cognition inasmuch as no metaphysically possible object corresponds to the thought "witch"-given the way the world is put together, nothing that corresponds to our thought of a person with such supernatural powers could exist in the world. In Kant's terms, witches, then, would not be really possible; so, trivially, when we think "witch," we are not related to any such (possible) object. Which brings us to the short answer to the deduction question. The concept of freedom purports to be an a priori thought applicable to a cause insofar as that cause is independent of natural law. But given that the concept of freedom is a priori, there are not even grounds for presumption (as there usually are in the a posteriori case) of its applicability to any (really possible) object. We need a deduction to show, at least, that the concept of freedom has real possibility.s In fact, we need a deduction to show, further, that freedom has actuality in us as rational beings, but that takes us back to the needs of moral theory. Prima facie (especially in the second Critique), the argument Kant gives us is a simple modus ponens: A free will and a will under the moral law are one and the same thing. Rational beings, ourselves included, are, in fact, under the moral law. Therefore, we are, in fact, free. The thing to say about this is not so much that it is wrong as that it is insufficiently

thought). 'Concept' CBegriff) has a similarly odd use in Kant in that its reference includes complete propositions as well as the elements thereof. Also, while technically and narrowly a type of cognition (Erkenllinis), 'concept' is often used by Kant in cases where, officially, whether or not the thought in question is a cognition is precisely what is at issue; e.g., note that even before the deduction, the categories are "concepts." See the first Critique, A320/B376-7/314 for his taxonomy of representations and for the narrow use of 'concept' . 4 See Bxxvi(n)/27. 5 Kant's notion of real possibility is discussed in Chapter 1 §§5 and 7, and in Chapter 2 §§ 11-13.

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forthcoming, to the point of being quite misleading. Consider some of the mysteries fostered by this reading. If the second premiss is legitimate, we must ask again: what is the interest of moral theory in this argument? Surely it makes more sense to construe the practical deduction, as most commentators construe the Groundwork argument, as an inference to the moral law (to its bindingness) from our freedom; i.e., interchange or "reverse" the second premiss and conclusion. But if we do that, we run full tilt into an unacknowledged, radical shift in Kant's philosophy, with the earlier text, the Groundwork (written between the two editions of the first Critique), taking the role of odd man out; for it is this reading and not the firstmentioned that is incompatible with the doctrine of the Critique of Pure Reason. On either construal of the argument there is the question, what is so special about this argument; why call it, with the argument for the objective validity of the categories of the pure understanding, a deduction? What, at bottom, is at issue when the question is, does this a priori concept (or principle) have objective reality (real possibility)? Why would showing that the moral law binds us entail that freedom has it? How would our being free imply that the moral law has it? If the issue of freedom arises in the moral philosophy, as surely it must in some way, out of the thought that freedom is a necessary condition of morality, what could possibly be going on in the second Critique? For whatever one thinks about the structure of the relatively more obscure argument of the Groundwork, the Critique cannot be understood to contain an argument from freedom to the moral law (never mind that business about the "credential"6). The main steps of the argument as I see it are (1) a free will and a will under the moral law are one and the same thing, (2) the moral law, being really possible, gives real possibility to freedom, (3) the moral law, being actual in us, shows freedom to be actual, so (4) freedom is actual in us. In the course of defending this as the correct reading of both texts, I will provide answers to the above and other questions about how best these two texts are to be understood. As I have already begun to indicate, it is my contention that the way to solve these mysteries, the way to resolve the many issues of the practical deduction(s), is to work our way into the two texts, surveying carefully as we go their connection to and even foundation in the first

6

See the second Critique, C47-8/49 and Chapter 3 §22 below.

Introduction

5

Critique. Moreover, the desirability of a reading coherent with all three texts should be kept in mind as a fundamental interpretive principle. And this is the way I intend to proceed. In the balance of this Introduction, I want to indicate the nature of that survey. Let me begin with a few comments about the relationship between the Groundwork and the second Critique. The earlier of the two texts is, of course, the Groundwork, but the Groundwork, unlike the second Critique, is meant to stand on its own; Kant's reader is not assumed to have read the first Critique and the arguments are not meant to rely on its results (which by no means implies that the serious interpreter of the Groundwork, or the second Critique, but especially Groundwork III, can get by without some familiarity with the first Critique). Still, given that the project of Groundwork III, insofar as it is critique, is one peculiar to the critical philosophy, Kant's unwillingness to appeal explicitly to the arguments of the first Critique, coupled with his highly condensed presentation, can make the chapter seem nearly impenetrable. The Critique of Practical Reason, in the first chapter of the Analytic, suffers not at all from the first of these problems and little from the second. This might suggest that any reader of the two texts would do well to follow the lead of the Critique in sussing out the general line of the argument, but only if, contrary to the received views of these texts,7 one is antecedently convinced that there is good reason to view them as likely to expound the same general line of argument. I hope to demonstrate my view that they are the same by detailed examination of the texts, but at this point I should like to set the stage a bit. In the first two chapters of the Groundwork, Kant offers us everything one normally expects of the propounder of a new moral theory; in particular, he argues from various truths of our ordinary conception of morality, truths about moral agency and the good, to a fundamental moral principle, explains the relationship between that principle and our practical lives more generally, and begins to develop the substantive (a priori) implications of the theory for how we are, and are not, to conduct ourselves (what Kant calls the metaphysics of morals). (Compare Aristotle,

Henry Allison, in his book Kant's TheO/y of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), is the most recent commentator to proffer the "reversal" view of Kant's arguments in these texts. See especially pp.2-3 and 236. But whether casually or upon direct investigation of the question as in Allison's case, most commentators have held the view that Kant derives morality from freedom in the Groundwork and freedom from morality in the second Critique. 7

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Nicomachean Ethics or 1.S. Mill, Utilitarianism.) We should, from this perspective, be a bit mystified at Groundwork III and perhaps even more so at the Deduction in the second Critique, unless we acknowledge the problem of freedom as real and central, something which (granted, it is a modern problem) few moral theorists as such have been willing to do. As we at least sometimes think, we live and act in a world operating according to laws, minimally, in a world such that all behaviors of everything are, in some fundamental way, of a piece, such that, at bottom, there is only one kind of accounting for everything that happens. Given this, how can it be true that we are moral agents-that there are things we ought, but might or might not, do? that we, unlike the weather or planets or many other kinds of creatures, can be morally responsible for things happening? It is not incidental to moral theory, by Kant's lights, that the necessary conditions of moral agency as we conceive them-freedom being the problem case-be reconciled with the way the world is as we conceive it. For Kant, there is no easy avoidance of the problem through thinking that, "well, perhaps, the world seems that way, but isn't really," or "after all, however it seems to be with the world at large, we surely are moral agents." For Kant takes himself to have proven, in the Critique of Pure Reason, that every event in nature has a cause in nature, which is its cause by virtue of natural law, and that our experience of ourselves and our behavior and of other human beings and their behavior affords no exception whatsoever to this rule. That we might not be moral agents, that we hav"e, empirically anyway, every reason to think that we are not moral agents, is a real problem for Kant and for anyone who shares even roughly in his "scientific" world view. Given that we eschew appeal to the results of the first Critique, when we arrive at Groundwork III we are lacking any (articulate) reason to think we have not been engaged in the idlest of contemplations. Not only do we suffer from a certain (as more recent writers might have it) "naturalism" in our world view, but we have been trafficking in the analysis of a priori concepts-morality, obligation, etc. (in the very next step we will introduce freedom)-; a process conducted on a material both of which threaten (independently) to be utterly without connection to the world, to anything real. The problem of a priori concepts I've already mentioned, and it is one of the more widely accepted of philosophical commonplaces that even the most meticulous analysis of the constitutive elements of a concept will not tell one whether that to which it applies exists: "from a mere concept no propositions can be obtained which go beyond the concept" (B41170).

Introduction

7

All of the points I have just rehearsed are crucial to one's proper orientation as one begins to consider the argument of Groundwork III and of the Analytic of the second Critique: that freedom is an a priori concept, that freedom is the necessary condition of morality, and so, that the fundamental problem Kant faces is one of proving the real possibility of this a priori concept. In other words, Kant requires a deduction of freedom. I will argue that if we do keep these things in mind, we will find a univocal account of freedom and the moral law in these two works, and a fascinating, even promising argument that we are actually free-in the deepest, metaphysical sense, transcendentally free. But the problems that have hampered adequate understanding of this argument in these two texts, and so (in many ways) of the whole of Kant's practical philosophy, do not end with correcting our orientation as suggested above. There is the technical language of the critical philosophy, much of which has come down to us part and parcel of philosophy's technical vocabulary, but with subtle and not so subtle differences from Kant's meanings. And there is, in general, the relationship of the practical philosophy to the theoretical, which has been given short shrift. Any attempt to start again with the practical deduction must begin to come to tenns with all of this. The most egregious of the problems stemming from inadequate integration of our understanding of the theoretical and practical philosophies is that the tradition concerning Kant's moral theory has left us in the following peculiar position. Before we can appreciate any particular interpretation of Kant's justification of morality, we must have an understanding of what sort of justification he means to be offering us. By "what sort of justification" I mean to ask whether Kant intends to give us grounds in support of the truth of his claim or something else. That this question needs to be raised is the result of the unfortunate fact that Kant has been widely taken (wrongly) to be offering us "something else" than rational support for the truth in the case of his practical philosophy. Perhaps the problem begins with the very distinction between practical and theoretical (that is, with inadequate attention to what it actually is), but it does not wholly rest here. Having gotten the moral law in the Analytic of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant goes on in the Dialectic to offer an argument (an argument of practical reason) for God's existence. The argument is said by Kant to justify Glauben (belief or faith) in God's existence, but not Wissen (knowledge). Inasmuch as this argument makes essential appeal to the moral law, the result that it justifies only Glauben is one of a number of things that have led people to wonder

8

The Metaphysics of the Moral Law

whether practical reason has less in the way of epistemic wherewithal (that is, is less competent at establishing truth) than theoretical reason. This, notwithstanding that Kant himself contrasts the cases of God and freedom on just this point: Freedom, however, among all the ideas of speculative reason is the only one whose possibility we know [wissenl a priori. We do not understand it, but we know it as the condition'of the moral law which we do know. The ideas of God and immortality are, on the contrary, not conditions of the moral law.... Hence we cannot say that we cognize or understand either the actuality or even the possibility of these ideas. (C4/4*)

We can have knowledge, through practical reason, of freedom that we cannot have of God. Worse yet, the result that only Glauben is justified in the case of God and immortality has even led people to wonder whether the moral law itself is taken by Kant to have a weaker justification than principles established by theoretical reason. Should we be less firm in our conviction of the truth of that which is established by practical reason? Or would we be misled were we to think we have been offered anything at all relevant to the question of truth? Kant's answer to both these questions is "no." That an argument is practical, rather than theoretical, in no way detracts from the degree of conviction licensed by it. Moreover, this conviction appropriately attaches to the truth of the proposition in question (and not to some intentional embedding of the proposition, e.g., that one ought to believe it). For, as I show, Kant means in his practical arguments, just as in his theoretical ones, to support the truth of that for which he argues. The argument for God's existence is no exception; Kant takes his argument here as elsewhere to be sufficient for the truth of his conclusion. Theoretical philosophy could not solve the problem of God's existence (one way or the other), but, allegedly, the practical can. Showing exactly what the argument does turns in large part on getting clearer about a number of distinctions Kant relies on quite generally, including that between the theoretical and the practical. That Kant intends to be giving an argument straightforwardly in support of the truth that God exists (as I show in §§1-7) goes a long way in dispelling any suspicion that he might be about a project of some other sort elsewhere in the practical philosophy. I, therefore, take this argument to provide the perfect opportunity to explore, fairly extensively, the relations between the theoretical

Introduction

9

and practical philosophy and withal some of the central technical notions of Kant's critical works. Not only the distinctions of the theoretical from the practical and of belief (Glauben) from knowledge (Wissen) are delved into (§3 and § I 0), but the distinction between subjective and ohjective (§§8- 10), and Kant's conception of law as well (§7). All of this is carried out in Chapter 1.8 The yield is a new reading of the moral argument for God's existence and of a number of Kant's technical notions, and, most importantly, proof that the practical philosophy stands equally or better at the base (apex, if you prefer) of philosophical knowledge in Kant's scheme of things. In Chapter 2, I begin with those further preparatory matters most directly related to the practical deduction itself. In the first half (§§ I I -13), I make the argument from the nature of Kant's philosophical problem that, in the first instance, what the practical deduction must show is the real possibility of some a priori concept. I argue further that, given the exigencies of this task and the available materials, the deduction must be a deduction of freedom which takes the moral law as a premiss. Along the way (§ 12), I distinguish Kant's notion of real possibility from that of logical possibility and discuss the argument from the Antinomy for freedom's logical possibility. The basis of the argument concerning the deduction's point is primarily to be found in the first Critique. I begin with Kant's observation that the problem with a priori concepts is, as Hume before him observed, that, on the face of it, we have no reason to expect them to have legitimate application to the world, since, after all, we did not get them from the world. (This is the "cognition" problem that I mentioned above.) Furthermore, there is an impediment to showing that such a concept has objects (i.e., possible application to the world) inasmuch as any object that could be given cannot be given as something to which the a priori concept applies; for if it did, that would be reason enough, in most cases (space and time being the putative exceptions), to show the concept to be a posteriori. This leads to the view, supported in various ways by the first Critique, that the only way to solve the problem of a priori concepts is with an a priori argument that shows the concept in question to be really possible, laying out what the connection would be, between the concept and its possible object. I conclude that a deduction is an argument intended to solve this problem in just this way, at least in the cases of the R

More precisely, the textual work on the notion of law is put off to Chapter 2

(§ 13), but the substance of the position is explained in Chapter 1 (§7).

10

The Metaphysics of the Moral Law

deduction of the categories and the practical deduction. Although this gets us fairly directly to the result that a deduction is to be expected in the practical philosophy, it does not suffice for showing that the practical deduction will be a deduction of freedom rather than a deduction of the moral law itself. To show that the practical deduction must be, in both the Groundwork and the second Critique, a deduction of freedom, it is necessary to consider how one might go about showing the real possibility of an a priori concept. (The examples of the arguments for the real possibility of the highest good and of God are inadequate here, since the results were inferred from the assumed real possibility of the moral law, which had not, at that point been investigated; I need an "ur" case.) Noting that Kant's characteristic complaint about a priori concepts whose real possibility has not been shown is that for all we can tell, they might be empty, without content, mere forms of thought rather than cognitions, I take my cue from the relationship between definition and real possibility and from Kant's remark, following the deduction in the second Critique, that the "moral law ... [gives] positive determination [Bestimmung] to a causality thought merely negatively, the possibility of which was incomprehensible to speculative reason" (C48/49*). Against the background of the question why the moral law should be in a position to do anything at all for the concept of freedom, notwithstanding that Kant clearly thinks (at least in the Critique) that it does, the clues lead to the thought that law, being a law, might have special significance in the context of a search for a priori content. So (in § 13), I have a look at Kant's notion of law, and, more specifically, at the pure a priori natural laws in relation to the real possibility of the categories in their deduction. This puts me in a position to argue that, given we know what its matter would be, as a law the moral law has no need of a showing of real possibility; as a pure a priori necessity, it defines a real possibility. This result, coupled with the concept of freedom's pressing need of a showing that it is really possible, supports my claim that the deduction on offer in both the second Critique and the Groundwork is a deduction of freedom, from the real possibility of the moral law. But my argument is, after all, a somewhat indirect one; so, final judgement on the issue awaits a close look at the two texts in Chapter 3. In the meantime, there is the question of what the force of Kant's argument is meant to be. In the last half of the chapter (§§ 14-16), I offer a version of Kant's argument in abstraction from the texts in which I show what the force is of Kant's claim that the moral law is actual in us. The

Introduction

11

moral law is actual in us because it is the constitutive principle of rationality. I argue (in § 16) that, given Kant's understanding of laws, there is no possibility of our acting rationally-whether our maxims be good, bad, or indifferent-absent a constitutive principle (necessary and universal) of the capacity in us to be causes determined by our conception of the very action in which we are a cause. The will, Kant says, is a cause; it is reason as a cause. But it is a, literally, peculiar cause because it does not bring its effects to be under natural law. Natural laws constitute natural causes; the moral law constitutes reason as a cause. The often posited conundrum of how, according to Kant, bad actions could be free if the moral law is the law of the free will is completely obviated when one approaches the argument as an answer to the question: What law could constitute a rational (in contrast to a physical) cause? In this context, it is more to the point to observe that the moral law constitutes the will as a will than that it constitutes it as free, where a will is a cause that acts on representations (sometimes faulty in various ways) of law. Rational beings act by representing their actions to themselves and judging that they are good, choiceworthy, to be done. It is no surprise that we frequently get these judgements wrong. But actions nevertheless ensue. This approach to the argument also sheds a certain amount of light on the sense in which the moral law binds us. Looking back to the beginning of the Groundwork, we are reminded that the characteristic of rational action (as opposed to non-rational, not to irrational) is that it is action conceived as good. We may not judge our actions to be good in some conventional sense, or to be "objectively" for the best, but we judge them to be for a good. Were this not so of a given bit of behavior, we would not regard it "willfully" done. The question, then, is when are these judgements correct. The very same arguments that show the moral law to be the definition of the good and so the determiner of correctness in such judgements reveal the moral law to be the only possible constitutive principle of reason as a cause, that is, of a rational will. Thus, I suggest that the moral law's bindingness is its being at once constitutive of what we are as causes and determinative of the goodness of our actions. With this picture of the argument in hand (a bit, of thread to take into the labyrinth), I turn in Chapter 3 to thc texts themselves. After dealing (in § 17) with the argument for freedom's logical possibility as it appears in the Groundwork, I take the texts alternately, looking at the details of what Kant says, how he presents the arguments of these two works. If I am allowed the rather delicate extraction of the logical possibility argu-

12

The Metaphysics of the Moral Law

ment from the Groundwork, matters proceed without major surprises through the first two steps of the deduction (in § § 18 and 19). But in §20 I take up perhaps the most deviling topic connected with the practical deduction, the "fact of reason" and, with it, "a priori consciousness." In §21 I show how, notwithstanding the collapse of great chunks of the Critique of Pure Reason into a few brief paragraphs, Kant outlines in the Groundwork the very argument we have been given less concisely in the second Critique. In the final section of Chapter 3 (§22), I consider the significance of the deduction of freedom for Kant's moral theory, the "credential" it offers the moral law. I close the chapter, having arrived finally at the full explication of it, with a discussion of Kant's infamous footnote to the Preface of the second Critique: though freedom is certainly the ratio essendi of the moral law, the latter is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom. (C4n14)

NOTE ON SOURCES AND TRANSLATION Though I am using the standard translations, I have sometimes found it necessary to alter them. Since I am making use of the work of a number of different translators, I have primarily attempted to render them consistent with respect to Kant's technical vocabulary. (For example, 'bestimmen' and its cognates are always rendered by 'determine' and its cognates.) I have also removed virtually all interpolations by the translators; therefore, any words in square brackets may provisionally be taken to have been introduced into the quotation by me. When I have altered a translation in any way, that I have done so is indicated by an asterisk (*) following the page citation. One fully general problem recurs and that concerns Kant's language insofar as it has been translated with the cognates of 'to know'. Where translators into English have found this one term to use, Kant uses four and the differences are often essential to understanding him. Unfortunately, this is not to say that the differences are easily rendered in English translation. I have chosen to treat all four terms as, in effect, technical terms whose meaning must largely be garnered from immediate context and their overall use; thus, I've taken the most important consideration in translating them to be consistency in the use of distinct English expressions for Kant's distinct terms. The key I have used follows. Wissen: Translated as 'knowledge'. To know is to have grounds

Introduction

13

both subjectively and objectively sufficient for holding true; this is as close as Kant comes to meaning something on the order of "true, justified belief." Erkennen: Translated as 'cognition'. To cognize is to stand in a determinate thinking relation to an object-i.e., a determinate somethingby virtue of the "content" of one's thought, content that reflects the determination of the object as what it is. (The "content" in question is not propositional, but the matter of thoughts that are otherwise mere forms of thought-mere logical placeholders in consciousness, which in abstraction from or absent their matter are without relation to any determinate thing.) Kennen: Translated as 'acquaintance'. To have acquaintance is to stand (or have stood) in a direct or immediate relation with something. Bekennen: Translated as 'ken'. To ken is to have one's mind around a thing, understanding it, with connotations of acknowledgment (one understands and realizes that one does); often unbekannt, to be ignorant of-both or either in the sense of being unacquainted with and of being without any understanding of. All references to the works of Immanuel Kant are to Kants gesammelte Schriften, herausgegeben von der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften (formerly Koniglichen Preussichen Akademie der Wissenschaften), 29 volumes (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902-). Citations of the. Critique of Pure Reason use the standard A and B pagination of the first and second Prussian Academy editions. Akademie edition page numbers are followed by that of the translation (in the format #/#). Critique of Pure Reason (178111787), translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965). Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), translated by James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1977), cited as Prolegomena. Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (J 785), translated by H. J. Paton (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), abbreviated G. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), translated by James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985). "What is Orientation in Thinking?" (J 786), translated by H. B. Nisbet in Kant's Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), second edition. Critique of Practical Reason (1788), translated by Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), abbreviated as C.

14

The Metaphysics of the Moral Law

Critique of Judgment (1790), translated by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), abbreviated as CJ. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (179311 794), translated by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), cited as R; all references are to the Preface to the First Edition. Metaphysics of Morals (1797), translated by Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Logic (1800), translated by Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwartz (New York: Dover, 1988), cited as L. All quotations are from the Introduction and the relevant section as well as page numbers are gIven. Lectures on Philosophical Theology (1830, probably delivered in 1783 and 1784), translated by Allen W. Wood and Gertrude M. Clark (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). No Akademie page numbers are given.

PART I

Belief, Subjectivity, and the Epistemic Power of Practical Reason

CHAPTER 1

The Moral Argument for God's Existence

In this chapter I am going to begin by saying what I take Kant's argument for God's existence to be. I will then attempt to explain how the argument is intended to work and why it supports, in Kant's sense, belief but not knowledge. l To see why the argument supports belief but not knowledge, it will be necessary to explore Kant's distinction between Glauben and Wissen; this, in turn, will lead to investigation of the difference between subjectively sufficient grounds for a holding-to-be-true (Fiirwahrhalten) and objectively sufficient grounds for a holding-to-be-true. For the latter distinction marks the former difference; and even uninterpreted, this strongly indicates what turns out to be the case, that Kant's distinction between Glauben and Wissen is not our distinction between belief and knowledge. We cannot infer that practical reason is epistemically weak from the fact that it justifies only Glauben in God's existence. Finally, I round out the argument concerning the epistemic wherewithal of practical reason by considering the nature of the distinction Kant actually draws between the practical and the theoretical. Taken together, these considerations lead me to conclude that it is no shortcoming of practical reason that results in the claim that God exists being fit for

1 There is also a preliminary discussion of Kant's conception of law and the account of its role in this argument in §7; a fuller discussion and the defense of my reading of Kant on law takes place in Chapter 2 § 13. Along the way, there will be consideration of Kant's notions of real possibility, objective reality, and cognition.

17

18

The Metaphysics of the Moral Law

Glauben (belief) but not for Wissen (knowledge); indeed, that it is not with respect to justification of truth that Glauben falls short of Wissen. 2 This sets the stage for a detailed examination of Kant's practical deduction, which is the focus of the dissertation and the subject of Chapters 2 and 3. § 1 THE DISPUTED INTERPRETATIONS

When Kant characterizes the conclusion of the argument for God's existence as something we are to believe or have faith in, rather than something we know, he invites many a twentieth-century reader-particularly inasmuch as the context is one characterized as "practical"-to view his argument as something other than an epistemic justification. We sometimes call a justification "practical" where it is to be distinguished (from an epistemic justification) by the absence of any appeal to evidence taken (0 support the truth of the claim under consideration. Rather, what is argued for is that one ought to adopt some particular attitude (usually belief-in our sense) toward that claim. Thus a practical justification "rationalizes" the act of believing something by appeal to considerations other than evidence of the truth of the would-be belief. 3 For example, the 2 There is another worry for Kant's moral theory associated with the argument for God's existence, namely, that, depending on the precise role attributed to the moral law in that argument, the moral law might be vulnerable to attack through denial of God's existence. Or, to pose the matter in a somewhat weaker way, many of us would find it an unattractive feature of Kant's moral theory were it to turn out that God's existence is a necessary condition of the moral law. According to Kant, God's existence is not a condition of morality nor of moral actions. "The ideas of God and immortality are ... not conditions of the moral law, but only conditions of the necessary object of a will which is determined by this" (C4/4; cf 125-6/130 and L§IX 67-8n/75-6). On my reading it becomes clearer what his remark means, what remains of the worry, and what responses might be made to it. 1 will return to this matter in note 61 below. 3 This may make it sound as if the distinction can be made out in terms of formal differences; that, however, is not the case. There will be an argument, in the usual sense of reasons otfered in support of the truth of some conclusion, in both cases. Moreover, while the conclusion may, in the practical case, typically take some such form as 'You ought to believe that P', there is no reason to think that any conclusion of this form marks the argument for it as practical. I think perhaps the most accurate way to approach the matter is by considering (instead of formal structures) the fact that, in offering an argument, one typically aims at engendering belief in some proposition, P, in one's audience. Thus the question can be put, is the audience being offered reasons that support the truth of P or is it being persuaded on some other grounds to attempt to adopt the belief that P? Whatever the formal structure, it is in the latter situation that one might speak of a "practical" argument in the non-Kantian sense.

The Moral Argument for God's Existence

19

probable ill effects on one's relationship of not so believing may provide one a "practical reason" for believing one's spouse is faithful. Unlike evidence of the spouse's trustworthiness, the former fact does not support the truth that one's spouse is faithful. Similarly, Pascal's wager represents a "practical argument," in this sense, for believing in God's existence. But such a construal of Kant's practical argument could not be more at odds with his intent. 4 The central text of the argument appears in the section entitled "The Existence of God as a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason" from chapter II of the Dialectic in the Critique of Practical Reason. And even here the problem of how to construe the argument is imposing. Perhaps the simplest way to put it is by raising the question whether the conclusion of the argument is that God exists or that we ought to believe God exists. Although Allen Wood, who is the leading interpreter of this argument, would not put it so baldly, this is a useful way of marking the dispute over whether the argument is primarily about the truth of God exists or

Kant would take such a "reason" as the probable effect on one's relationship to be an incentive for establishing or maintaining the belief (so far as one is able), but not as a ground for the belief, the latter encompassing only those things that would tend to support the truth of that which was to be believed. A sketch of an interpretation along non-epistemic lines would look something like this. The departure point for this interpretation of the argument is a certain take on Kant's expression "need of pure reason" (which expression and its variants abound in connection with the argument). 4

The end we need to adopt is the highest good. We cannot adopt this as an end unless we believe that its realization is possible. -But we are required to adopt it, so we can adopt it; so we believe its realization is possible.- It's rational to believe that God's existence is a necessary condition of the possibility of realizing the highest good. Therefore, (rationally) we cannot believe that the realization of the end is possible unless we believe God exists. Since we are required (need) to adopt the end, we are required to believe that it is possible. Since we are required to believe it is possible, we are required to believe God exists. Therefore, we are required (ought) to believe God exists. Were this a reasonable argument in other respects, it would be implausible that Kant should be offering it because the second premiss appears to be a contingent matter of human psychology whereas he explicitly intends an a priori argument. Matters are worsened by the fact that the psychological principle (that we cannot adopt an end unless we believe it possible) is surely false. Keeping in mind that, in this context, the end of an action is what we would bring about by that action, it is clear that, particularly in the case of novel ends, agents often lack an affirmative belief that their ends are possible; indeed, they may seek, in part, to determine this in making their attempts.

20

The Metaphysics of the Moral Law

primarily about something we should do, viz., believe or have faith that God exists.s I will argue that it is about the former; Wood, in effect, argues that it is about the latter. As we will see, part of the problem for my view of the matter arises out of the way Kant expresses himself at key junctures, but for a sympathetic or even just charitable reader of the text the deeper problem is to make sense of the fact that Kant's interest in this argument is as a ground for religious faith. For Kant, it is perfectly clear that religion and science (as the investigation of what is empirically the case) are thoroughly distinct matters. Thus, anyone who wishes, as I do, to argue that Kant seeks to establish the truth of the claim that God exists must not be arguing that there is no special significance to the fact that the argument supports Glauben rather than Wissen. On my account, as on Wood's, this significance turns on the subjectivity of the former in contrast with the objectivity of the latter, but even here we again part company. Although there is a feature of practical cognition that will show up in truths only subjectively justified, i.e., in beliefs, it is not because, contra Wood, the argument for God is practical that it supplies only subjectively sufficient grounds. 6 (The argument is practical because of the role of the moral law in it, but the moral law is objectively real and (as far as its role in the argument goes) it provides objective grounds. That the additional necessary grounds are subjective in the case of God, for example, is precisely the difference between the ascription of objective reality to freedom-which rests solely on the

Allen W. Wood, Kant's Moral Religion, Ithaca and London: Comell University Press, 1970. See pages 28-31, especially page 29. 6 To anticipate, theoretical cognitions involve reference to an object by virtue of the fact that, in some way, the content of the cognition captures (part of) the nature of the object, in particular, the nature of the object as determined by natural law. Practical cognitions likewise capture something of the nature of the object, but as determined by practical (the moral) law. Where a thought lacks this kind of determinate relation to an object, it is not a cognition at all; where a thought lacks theoretical content, it has no role to play in natural science, because any nature it does capture is not related to the "natural" natures of things via the categories. Where we have merely subjectively sufficient grounds for claiming the existence of a thing (as in the case of God), our thought lacks any theoretical content; it lacks theoretical content, because it lacks objective content altogether. So, like a practical cognition it has no role in science (and for the same reason, only more so). As we might say, the subjectively justified claim is merely thought that an object exists, not thought of the object. 5

The Moral Argument for God's Existence

21

moral law-, and the ascription of it to God-which does not-whereby the latter is Glauben while the former is Wissen.)1 Wood (following Kant's Lectures on Philosophical Theology8) characterizes the argument as a reductio ad absurdum practicum, an argument to the effect that I must believe that God exists on pain of being committed not to obey the moral law. Apart from not sitting very well with the primary text of the argument (as we will see below), there are two significant problems with this interpretation of the argument. One concerns construal of the problem Kant intends to solve with the argument. The other is that Kant explicitly denies what Wood takes the argument to affirm. Wood offers the following as the central move of the argument: If I deny that I can conceive the highest good to be possible of attain-

ment, then I presuppose or imply that r will not pursue the highest good, or commit myself not to pursue it. But if I do not pursue the highest good, then I cannot act in obedience to the moral law. 9 In these two sentences are likewise captured the two central problems with Wood's interpretation. The first problem arises from Wood's contention that if one does not believe in God's existence then one denies "that one1can conceive the highest good to be possible of attainment." Surely Wood has Kant requiring more than is necessary here. If the problem were to avoid the consequences of being unable to conceive the highest good to be possible, no positive belief in God's existence would be required. The first Critique result that we cannot know that God does not exist would suffice; we do not need, in addition, to believe that God does exist. For if one cannot know that God does not exist, then that one fails to affirm that God does exist is not going to support the further denial that the highest good is possible of attainment. If I know that it can-

r

7 See the second Critique Preface: "Freedom ... among all the ideas of speculative reason is the only one whose possibility we know [wissen] a priori-though without understanding it-, because it is a condition of the moral law, which we know [wisscn]. The ideas of God and immortality are, on the contrary, not conditions of the moral law... ; hence, we cannot say that we cognize [erkennen] or understand either the actuality or even the possibility of these ideas" (C4/4*). 8 Lectures on Philosophical Theology, Allen W. Wood and Gertrude M. Clark (trans), Ithaca: Comell University Press, 1978, p. 122. 9 Op. cit., p. 29.

22

The Metaphysics a/the Moral Law

not be shown that God does not exist, then I cannot view the possibility of the highest good as inconceivable. 10 And then there is the second problem. Setting aside the implausibility of Kant's asserting that we must believe in the possibility of the highest good in order to be able to will it in the face of the fact that human beings seem capable of willing what they believe to be impossible (never mind what they are not committed to believing possible), there is the fact that Kant denies, in so many words, that belief in God is a condition of acting on the moral law: The ideas of God and immortality are ... not conditions of the moral law, but only conditions of the necessary object of a will which is determined by this [law] (C4/4; cf 125-6/130); But we do not need this [belief in God] for acting according to moral laws, for these are given by practical reason alone (L§IX 68n/75).11

But with that a look at the text of the argument itself is in order. 10 In taking the line he does, Wood may have in mind Kant's strict doctrine to the effect that there can be no concept proper, no cognition (or better, the concept's objective validity cannot be claimed), where the real possibility of the "concept" cannot be shown. (See the first Critique, Bxxvi(n)127; cf B31O-11I271-2.) But for that to be relevant in the present case, the claim would have to be that we don't know the real possibility of the highest good unless we already know the objective reality of God. But surely this is wrong, and would in any case be much too strong a demand for the would-be purposes either of Kant or of Wood. First, while it is fair to say that the concept of the highest good is not, properly, a cognition, this is not because we lack knowledge that it has real possibility. For the concept of the highest good is the concept of a way the world, as determined by the moral law, could come to be vis-a-vis rational beings, and this appeal to the moral law is enough to establish real possibility without knowledge of the objective reality of God coming into it (even though God's existence must underwrite the "could"). Indeed, the argument, as we will see, uses the real possibility of the highest good to establish the existence (and so, objective reality) of God. Second, surely the possibility of action does not depend upon concepts proper. Though Kant does not (to my knowledge) put it this way, the indeterminateness of the concept of one's own happiness means precisely that one has no cognition of it. For that is of a piece with there being no science of happiness, no commands, only counsels, of prudence. (See G417-19/85-6; there are also remarks suggestive in this connection made at CJ §83 430/317-8 and at A8111B839/639.) Moreover, if we can, as I think we can, act toward something we judge determinately to be impossible, surely we can act toward an object the concept we have of which is problematic. II Cf the third Critique, §87 450-1/340, including Kant's note to 450(n44)/340.

The Moral Argument for God's Existence

23

§2 KANT'S ARGUMENT FOR GOD'S EXISTENCE As I mentioned, I take the central text for Kant's argument for God's existence to be that in the Dialectic of the second Critique. There are, however, a number of versions of the argument in the critical works, most notably in the Canon of the first Critique, in an essay of 1786 entitled "What is Orientation in Thinking?", in §§87-91 of the Critique of Judgment, and in the Preface to the Religion. My focus on the second Critique text is primarily the result of my broader interest in the second Critique itself. But, arguably at any rate, this is also, from Kant's point of view, the definitive text on the relationship between the moral law and God's existence in the context of the moral philosophy. In any case, I take the other texts to support the main line of my reading rather than otherwise. In what follows, I am going to quote the second Critique at length, parsing it as I think it should be read. But before doing this it will be helpful to see what Kant has in mind when he speaks of the highest good. The highest good is a necessary object of our will (because it is an end required of us by the moral law ). At the opening of Chapter II, he characterizes it in this way: the highest good means the whole, the perfect good, wherein virtue is always the supreme good, being the condition having no condition superior to it, while happiness, though something always pleasant to him who possesses it, is not of itself absolutely good in every respect but always presupposes conduct in accordance with the moral law as its condition. (CIIO-IIIIIS; cf 129-301134)

Virtue is the worthiness to be happy, Kant says, and the highest good is that wherein all rational beings have attained virtue and happiness is exactly proportioned to their virtue, in response to that very worthiness. The argument for God's existence rests heavily on this conception of the highest good and falls into two parts, the first establishing that the highest good is possible. Here Kant appeals to the moral law and the relationship of the highest good to the moral law. Th~ second part of the argument goes to establishing that God's existence is a necessary condition of the possibility of the highest good. This part relies on the definition of the pighest good and on the possibilities, or rather lack thereof, of its being brought about through the workings of natural law. From the two subconclusions, God's existence follows. Kant then goes on to characterize God, on the basis of the foregoing conclusions, by analogy

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with our causality as rational beings, but this further move has rather different standing and should not be considered part of the argument proper. (I pursue this point below in connection with the relevant point in Kant's text. ) The text of the argument starts with why, given what the highest good is, there is neither a conceptual necessary connection between happiness and virtue in the highest good nor a necessary connection between them by way of the individual finite agent's acting on the moral law. (This I take to be a negative step in what I've called the second part of the argument.) Happiness is the condition of a rational being in the world, in whose whole existence everything goes according to wish and will. It thus rests on the harmony of nature with his entire end and with the determining ground of his will. But the moral law commands as a law of freedom through determining grounds wholly independent of nature and of its harmony with our faculty of desire (as incentives). Still, the acting rational being in the world is not at the same time the cause of the world and of nature itself. Hence there is not the slightest ground in the moral law for a necessary connection between the morality and proportionate happiness of a being in the world as one of its parts and as thus dependent on it. Not being nature's cause, his will cannot by its own strength bring nature, as it touches on his happiness, into complete harmony with his practical principles. (CI241l29*)12

Kant turns next to the first subargument, the argument for the possibility of the highest good: Nevertheless, in the practical task of pure reason, i.e., in the necessary endeavor after the highest good, such a connection is postulated as necessary: we should seek to further the highest good [the object of our will which is necessarily bound with the moral legislation of pure reasonJl3 (which therefore must be at least possible). (C124-51l29*)

12 In this section, though I've broken up the presentation, I quote the passage from this point in Kant's text in order and in its entirety. 13 This characterization of the highest good is offered parenthetically in the paragraph (CI241129) immediately preceding that presently being quoted.

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25

Since the highest good is possible, but our causality is not sufficient for the possibility, that which is sufficient for the possibility must exist. 14 The argument then closes with a characterization of the cause necessary for the possibility of the highest good-God. It is important to note here that the various aspects of this necessary cause are intended to be generated, not from a presupposed conception of God's nature, but from constraints imposed by the nature or inner structure of the highest good. Moreover, all that is strictly entailed by the argument, according to Kant, is the existence of some cause adequate to the possible effect; the characterization proceeds on analogy with our causality as rational beings. God must have the power to order nature in such a way that commensurate happiness is where there is also virtue and there is no happiness except where there is virtue. Therefore also the existence is postulated of a cause of the whole of nature, itself distinct from nature, which contains the ground of the exact agreement of happiness with morality. This supreme cause, however, must contain the ground of the agreement of nature not merely with a law of the will of rational beings but with the representation of this law so far as they make it the supreme determining ground of the will, thus not merely with the morality of their form but also with their morality as motives, i.e., with their moral intention. (C125/129*) Since our virtue is a matter of our acting on a certain conception of the law and since God must be acting both in response to our virtue and on the law in order that the apportionment of happiness be because of virtue, the only sort of cause we can take God to be is a rational cause, i.e., an intelligence. Therefore the highest good is possible in the world only if a supreme cause of nature which has a causality corresponding to the moral intention is assumed. Now a being whieh is capable of actions by the representation of laws is an intelligence (a rational being), and the causality

14 Inasmuch as the argument clearly turns on what is causally sufficient for what is said to be possible (the highest good), Kant's intended sense of "possibility" must be stronger than logical possibility, i.e., it must either be physical or real (metaphysical) possibility. As the former is merely empirical, I take Kant-and will be explicit in doing so hereafter-to mean real possibility by "possibility" in this argument.

26

The Metaphysics of the Moral Law of such a being according to this representation of laws is his will. Therefore, the supreme cause of nature, in so far as it must be presupposed for the highest good, is a being which is the cause (and consequently the author) of nature through understanding and will, i.e., God. (C1251129-30*)

On my reading, the argument provides grounds for taking it to be true that God exists. The long paragraph containing the argument closes this way. As a consequence, the postulate of the possibility of the highest derived good (the best world) is at the same time the postulate of the actuality of a highest original good, namely, the existence [Existenz] of God. Now it was our duty to promote the highest good; and it is not merely our privilege but, bound with duty as a need, a necessity to presuppose the possibility of this highest good, which, since it [the highest good] happens only under the condition of the being [Dasein] of God, inseparably connected the presupposition of the same [the existence of God] with duty, i.e., it is morally necessary to assume the being [Dasein] of God. (C1251130*)15

This is not, as my argument will show, a brief rehearsal of Kant's foregoing argument-to the effect that because we need to presuppose (believe in) the highest good, we, therefore, need to believe in God. It is, as the first sentence clearly indicates, an explanation of why, given the argument above, that God exists has the status of belief rather than of knowledge. The truth that God exists may seem to be in some tension with Kant's characterization of this claim as being established only as Glauben, not Wissen; for surely if true and justified belief, then knowledge (Gettier

15 The end of this passage has been variously translated; the German is as follows: Nun war es Pflicht flir uns, das hbchste Gut zu befbrdem, mithin nicht allein Befugnis, sondcrn auch mit der Pfiicht als Bediirfnis verbundene Notwendigkeit, die Mbglichkeit dieses hbchsten Guts vorauszusetzen; welches, da es nur unter der Bedingung des Daseins Gottes stattfindet, die Voraussetzung desselben mit der Pfiicht unzertrennlich verbindet, d.i. es ist moralisch notwendig, das Dasein Goltes anzunehmen. (Cl 25)

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aside).16 But the tension eases when one reviews Kant's distinction between Glauben and Wissen.

§3 CLAUBEN (BELIEF) Unlike our usual way of thinking of these things, for Kant, Wissen (knowledge) is not a species of Clauben (belief or believing), rather each is a distinct kind of "holding-to-be-true" (Fiirwahrhalten).17 Kant characterizes belief and knowledge, respectively, in the following ways. Belief Believing or holding-to-be-true out of a ground that is objectively insufficient but subjectively sufficient relates to objects of which one can not only know nothing but also have no opinion-nay, cannot even allege the probability, but can only be certain that it is not contradictory to think such objects the way one thinks them. 18 (L§IX 67174-5)

16 That God's existence has the status of belief and not knowledge is part of the force of calling the claim a "postulate" above and in the title of the section in which Kant gives the argument. But following shortly after the passage just quoted in the text, Kant explicitly characterizes the conclusion as Glauben (belief). He says there that the existence of a highest intelligence (God) is a hypothesis, i.e., a ground of explanation. But in reference to the comprehensibility of an object (the highest good) placed before us by the moral law, and thus as a practical need, it can be called belief and even pure rational belief, because pure reason alone (by its theoretical as well as its practical employment) is the source from which it springs. (CI261130-31 *) Cf also L§IX 67-8n175-6, Kant's note to Belief 17 This is what allows for the possibility of something's being a possible object of belief but not a possible object of knowledge. As he remarks in the definition quoted in the text below, the proper objects of belief and knowledge constitute disjoint classes. For us, only the trivial case of false propositions are possible objects of belief but not of knowledge. But Kant takes it to be true that God exists, notwithstanding his denial that God's existence is a possible object of knowledge. 18 The final clause governs the proper and narrow use of the term 'Glauben', which can cover only claims about such objects as God and immortality concerning which objectively sufficient grounds are impossible. "Matters of belief are thus I) no objects of empirical cognition (L§IX 68175) [and] II) no objects of rational cognition (of cognition a priori), neither of reason's theoretical cognition, as in mathematics or metaphysics, nor of its practical cognition in morality" (L§IX 68/76). Contrast this with the characterization of opinion, which may be usefully compared with our concept of belief, as when one says "she believes it but does not know it":

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Knowledge. The holding-to-be-true out of a cognitive ground that is both objectively and subjectively sufficient, or certainty, is either empirical or rational, according as it is based on experience-one's own as well as that of others-or on reason. (L§IX 70178)19

A problem to be taken up in what follows (§8) is the question of what it is for a ground to be either subjectively or objectively sufficient (or not).20 First, however, I want to finish laying out what I take the argument to be.

Opinion. Opining or holding to be true out of a cognitive ground that is neither subjectively nor objectively sufficient may be regarded as a preliminary judging (sub conditione suspensiva ad interim) with which we cannot readily dispense. Before one accepts and asserts, one must first have an opinion, being careful not to take an opinion for more than a mere opinion . . . . My holding-to-bc-true then is here both objectively and subjectively insufficient, although considered in itself, it may become complete. (L§IX 66-7173-4)

There is a looser sense in which people can be said to have belie/where simply they don't have objectively sufficient grounds but only (objective and subjective) grounds sufficient for taking action with respect to some matter (given that action must be taken even in the face of less than full information). On this, see Kant's footnote to the definition of Belief, L §§IX 67-8nJ7S. 19 Cf the first Critique Canon, section 3, A822/B850. It should be noted that Kant's notion of certainty as it occurs in these and related texts is also quite different from our own-having to do with the adequacy of the given grounds rather than with the chance of falsehood either in or given those grounds. (In particular it differs from ours in that the chance of error is usually irrelevant to certainty in Kant's sense; cf Descartes's use.) 20 As Houston Smit has emphasized to me, the difference between objectively and subjectively sufficient is quite likely to be intimately related to Kant's distinction between objective and subjective validity. And all of these notions seem to have undergone, the latter perhaps more obviously than the former, a certain amount of development over the critical period. I hope, for the following reasons, that these developmental mattcrs can be sidestepped in the present work. First, there is agreement across the critical corpus, commencing with the A edition of thc first Critique and continuing, through the second Critique, to at least the Religion that the holding-to-be-truc of God's existence is Glauben not Wissen. Second, there is similarly extensive agreement (among the A edition Canon, the second Critique, the Logic, and the third Critique, at least) that Glauben differs from Wissen in having only subjectively and not (possibly) objectively sufficient grounds. The similarity of the Logic (which may be a relatively early text on these matters) and the third Critique in their characterizations of this seems to be adequate license to appeal to the third Critique on matters of subjectivity (as I will), where Kant seems at his most clear and forthcoming about them.

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By far, the exegetically more difficult part of the argument is the first. And I shall argue that the ground lacking objective standing is introduced in this part, making the possibility of the highest good a subjective but not an objective ground of God's existence. So, before turning to the hard stuff, I will comment briefly on the second part of the argument.

§4 GOD'S EXISTENCE AS NECESSARY CONDITION OF THE POSSIBILITY OF THE HIGHEST GOOD There is no way of understanding this argument of Kant's whereby it fails to turn on the thought that God (i.e., God's existence) is a necessary condition of the possibility (i.e., of the possible realization) of the highest good. That this is so, given Kant's notion of the highest good,21 is likewise a fairly straightforward matter. The highest good, on Kant's account, is the perfect conditioning of happiness on virtue with virtue reigning. This is to say that the highest good would be that circumstance in which moral agents are virtuous and the virtue of every moral agent is the condition of that agent's being happy; in the highest good, happiness always (and necessarily) accrues because of virtue and never accidentally or in consequence of any other condition. (The latter is just what it means for virtue to be the condition of happiness in the highest good.) So, Kant's argument turns in no small part on the connection's being a necessary connection between happiness and virtue (whereby they jointly constitute the highest good). If our happiness were conceptually related to our virtue, as Kant takes the Stoics to have held,22 the obtaining of such a circumstance would be trivial. But Kant, reasonably, takes happiness and virtue to be conceptually (and as states of a finite dependent agent) wholly distinct. Virtue is the ongoing endeavor after the perfect fit of one's maxims with the moral law. Kant characterizes happiness numerous times and in different terms, but perhaps the most useful is when he says that happiness is the satisfaction of all inclinations "which can be brought into a fairly

21 And provided that we allow that any conception of God's nature is going to fall out of the argument, via certain analogies, rather than be presupposed by it. (See the second Critique, 136-71141-2 to this effect.) In this connection note also the last quoted segment of the argument (CI251129-30) in §2 above. 22 See the second Critique, 1111115, shortly following the passage quoted at the beginning of §2; also Cl121l16.

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tolerable system" (C7317S-6).23 Since it is not conceptual, the necessary connection between these whereby the former is the condition of the latter must be a causal connection. 24 The connection must be synthetic and causal, but this leaves open the question how the perfect and necessary accounting might come to be. Accordingly, the second part of the argument (on my division) establishes that the only way this could be achieved is via a causal connection that goes through an omnipotent rational being, viz., God. No finite agent can completely control the chance (relative to the agent's virtue) bestowing and withholding by nature of that which satisfies needs and desires. 25 But to make it the case that the ground of all bestowing and 23 Other characterizations of happiness include the follOwing. In the Groundwork Kant characterizes the idea of happiness as that in which "all inclinations are reconciled into a sum" (G399/67*). A bit earlier (G395/63) he suggests that a person's preservation and welfare make up the person's happiness. A bit later, we grasp under the name of happiness the total satisfaction of our needs and inclinations (G405/73). In the second Critique he says that "a rational being's consciousness of the agreeableness of life which without interruption accompanies his whole existence is happiness" (C22120). Both Andrews Reath and Stephen Engstrom have done significant work on Kanes conceptions of happiness and the highest good. Though I follow neither of them here, their work (see Bibliography) is the place to go for broader discussions of happiness in Kant. 24 See the second Critique, 1111115:

Two terms necessarily combined in one concept must be related as ground and consequence, and this unity must be regarded either as analytic ... or as synthetic ... according to the law of causality. The connection of virtue with happiness can, therefore, be understood in one of two ways. Either the endeavor to be virtuous and the rational pursuit of happiness are not two different actions but absolutely identical; ... Or that connection is predicated upon virtue's producing happiness as something different from consciousness of virtue, as a cause produces an effect. See also 113/117-18. This may not be as much a logical point as a consequence of the fact that virtue and happiness, while both "states" of the agent, are necessarily distinct states of which one (virtue) is not an empirical or sensible state. Certainly, it is the latter that forces the causal connection to be free rather than natural. 25 Hence, Kant says, there is not the slightest ground in the moral law for a necessary connection between the morality and proportionate happiness of a being which belongs to the world as one of its parts and as thus dependent on it. Not being nature's cause, his will cannot by its own strength bring nature, as it touches on his happiness, into complete hannony with his practical principles. (C 1251129*) (See also CI131l17-18, 1191123 and G418/85.)

The Moral Argument/or God's Existence

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withholding of happiness is in consequence of the agent's virtue, an intelligence competent to recognize the virtue behind actions and with the power to ensure nature's cooperation is required. Such a cause would have to be an intelligent cause (creator) of nature. 26 Thus the argument for God as a necessary condition of the highest good may be summarized as follows. 'The highest good is the happiness of all dependent rational beings perfectly and necessarily conditioned on their virtue, which virtue has been attained. Since happiness and virtue are wholly heterogeneous conceptually, this relation is not analytic; so it must be synthetic and, in fact, causal. But since virtue is not a condition in the sensible world, the causal connection cannot be natural but must be effected by freedom, i.e., by a rational will. 27 No finite, dependent rational will (nor all of us together) could be equal to bringing about the highest good. Therefore, if the highest good is possible, there is an infinite, independent rational will equal to bringing about the highest good, i.e., God exists. When Kant is, perhaps, being more careful about the distinction between what the argument achieves and how we take it given certain analogies with ourselves as causes, he says we believe that "the cause of the world ... works with moral wisdom toward the highest good" (L§IX 68n175).

26

In consequence, Kant says, the existence is postulated of a cause of the whole of nature, itself distinct from nature, which contains the ground of the exact agreement of happiness with morality. This supreme cau~e, however, must contain the ground of the agreement of nature not merely with a law of the will of rational beings but with the idea of this law so far as they make it the supreme determining ground of the will. (C 1251129*)

(See al~o C114-151119.) For Kant there are only two sorts of causes, natural ones and free ones. The former operate according to laws of nature and are heteronomous; the latter operate independently of laws of nature and are autonomous. Since a natural cause has been ruled out, only a free cause is left in this case. Free causes and rational causes are not distinct for Kant, but here we have distinct considerations leading to the two characterizations. Rationality is required by the condition that the cause understand the conceptual grounds of agents' actions; for these constitute agents' virtue. Freedom is required by the condition that no natural cau~e is able, in light of the moral Jaw, to bring about the state constitutive of the highest good. 27

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§5 PRELIMINARIES: THE POSSIBILITY OF THE HIGHEST GOOD AND THE EXISTENCE OF GOD When we look at the text of Kant's argument (quoted in §2), we find that it is largely addressed to the latter of the two parts of the argument. For the rest we are given the following. [I)n the practical task of pure reason, i.e., in the necessary endeavor after the highest good, such a connection is postulated as necessary: we should seek to further the highest good [the object of our will which is necessarily bound with the moral legislation of pure reason) (which therefore must be at least possible). (C124-51l29)

But how is it that to "endeavor after the highest good" is necessary (the topic of §6)? And how does the possibility of the highest good follow from the fact that we are required to seek it (the topic of §7)? The short version of what I take Kant's intended argument to be goes something like this: 28 the highest good is a necessary object of the

28

Cj Kant's own introductory characterization of the argument: This same law [the moral law ) must also lead us to affirm the possibility of the second element of the highest good, i.e., happiness proportional to that morality; it must do so just as disinterestedly as heretofore, by a purely impartial reason. This it can do on the presupposition of the being [Daseins) of a cause adequate to this effect, i.e., it must postulate the existence of God as necessarily belonging to the possibility of the highest good (the object of our will which is necessarily bound with the moral legislation of pure reason). (C1241l28-9*)

In keeping with my practice of translating different terms by different terms, 'being' translates 'Dasein', while 'existence' translates 'Existenz'. This translation might suggest that 'Dasein', as distinct from 'Existenz', refers to the nature (or properties) of a thing. The thought, however, is surely false. Not only is the present text suggestive of Kant's using them as synonyms, he clearly uses them interchangeably in his famous first Critique discussion of the proofs of God's existence. In all of the section titles of Chapter III, Book II of the Dialectic, it is 'Dasein' that Kemp Smith translates 'existence', but the German is as indicated in the following from Section 4: There is already a contradiction in introducing the concept of existence [Existenz]-no matter under what title it may be disguised-into the concept of a thing which we profess to be thinking solely in reference to its possibility. . . . Is the proposition that this or that thing . .. exists [existiert], an analytic or a synthetic proposition? If it is analytic, the assertion of the existence [Dasein) of the thing adds nothing to the thought of the thing; but in that

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(human or dependent) will given to it a priori by the moral law; the moral law stands to law in general (and natural law in particular) in such a way that what it makes necessary is really possible;29 thus, as the necessary object of the will given by the moral law, the highest good is possible. 3D From here, the argument of §4 that God's existence is a necessary condition of this possibility gets us God's existence. My confidence that the argument described above is the intended argument is bolstered by the following remarks from the section titled

case either the thought, which is in us, is the thing itself, or we have presupposed an existence (Dasein] as belonging to the realm of the possible, and have then, on that pretext, inferred its existence [Daseinl from its internal possibility-which is nothing hut a miserable tautology. The word 'reality', which in the concept of the thing sounds other than the word 'existence' ['Existenz'l in the concept ofthe predicate, is of no avail in meeting this objection. (A597 /B625/503-4) 29 As the sense of the argument indicates, the real possibility of the highest good must amount to the following: It is actually the case that the highest good would come about were agents actually to become virtuous. In more general terms, the real possibility of a thing (or the "real possibility of a concept," which phrase I will use elliptically for "the real possibility of the thing that would be the object of the concept") consists in the thing's being realizable as an actual object consistently with the pure metaphysical structure of the world as it is. 30 It will be striking to many readers that I do not take Kant to invoke the "ought implies can" principle in this argument. It is, perhaps, over this point that I will diverge from any "practical" interpretation of the argument. There are two primary reasons for my taking Kant this way. First, the principle itself is suspect in various ways. Second, the "ought" in question would have to be something like "take the highest good as an end," forcing the "can" likewise to be "take the highest good as an end." But it is surely, at best, a dubious psychological claim about us that we can take as an end only something the realization of which we take to be (really) possible. And, moreover, God's existence is not a necessary condition of our taking the highest good to be possible; at most our believing that God exists is necessary to that. Further, Kant does not argue that our believing God to exist is a necessary condition of anything. Kant argues that God's existence is a necessary condition of the possibility of the highest good. (Which is another way of suggesting that the text doesn't readily admit of being read as invoking the principle. "That I should seek to bring about the highest good implies that the highest good can come about" is not of a piece with "that I should x implies that I can x.") This is not to say that the latter argument could not be imbedded in an argument concerning what we ought to believe (ej footnote 4 on the "practical" interpretation of the argument), but it is very difficult to imagine Kant mistaking the latter sort of conclusion for its substantive analogue, and he clearly takes the argument to concem God's existence. That it is established only as belief and not as knowledge is a separate matter, as I hope to show.

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'How is it Possible to Think of extending Pure Reason for Practical Purposes without thereby extending its Cognition as Speculative?'. (Since this is what the argument for God's existence does-extends practical reason to objects beyond the bounds set on speculative cognition-, this is a reasonable place to find Kant rehearsing the outline of his argument.) In order to extend pure cognition practically, an a priori pUl]Jose must be given, i.e., an end as an object (of the will) which, independently of all theoretical principles, as practically necessary through a categorical imperative directly determining the will. In this case, that is the highest good; but it is not possible unless three theoretical concepts are presupposed: freedom, immortality and God .... Therefore, through the praetieallaw, which requires the existence of the highest good possible in the world, there is postulated the possibility of those objects of pure speculative reason whose objective reality could not be assured by speculative reason. By this then, the theoretical cognition of pure reason does obtain an accession, but it consists only in this-that those concepts ... are now described assertorically as actually having objects, because practical reason inexorably requires the existence of these objects .... Now through an apodietic practical law, they [freedom, immortality, and God], as necessary conditions of the possibility of that which this law demands be made an object, acquire objective reality. That is, we are instructed by this [law 1 that they have objects, though without being able to indicate how their concept relates [bezieht] to an object; and this is also not yet cognition of these objects, for we can thereby neither make synthetic judgments about them nor theoretically determine their application. (CI34-5/139-40*)

Thus, to reiterate, the argument seems to rely on its being the case that ~ necessary object of the will given a priori by the moral law is really possible, from which it will follow that any necessary condition of its possibility exists (though, given only this, we have no cognition of any such condition as an object31 ); that is, as the necessary condition of the possibility of the highest good, God exists:.)

31 Cf the definition of G/auben and Kant's comments on it discussed in §3 above. For more on cognition, synthetic judgement and theoretical determination, see § 10 and Chapter 2 §§ 11-13.

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§6 THE HIGHEST GOOD AS AN OBJECT OF THE WILL

Kant says that the highest good is "the object of the will which is necessarily bound with the moral legislation of pure reason" (C1241l29), or, again, that it is "an object (of the will) which, independently of all theoretical principles, is represented as practically necessary through a categorical imperative directly determining the will" (C134/139). Now, what Kant ordinarily means by "an object of the will" is just what any of us might mean by such a locution: the object of the will is that at which the will aims, the thing or state of affairs to be brought about through a particular action. Clearly, however, the highest good is not an object of the will in quite this ordinary sense. Let me leave aside for a moment the question why Kant conceives the highest good to be the particular object it is and consider just its being an object of the will. There are, according to Kant, two objects of the will that are necessary objects of the will, happiness and the highest good. They share the odd characteristics of being formally (or, we might say, conceptually) determinate but exceedingly indeterminate as to content (i.e., as to what objects or states of affairs would realize the concept) and of being concepts of totalities. For each of them, its standing as an object of the will, though not as the immediate object of any given action, is, I take it, largely the result of a way in which Kant takes rationality (at least in finite rational beings) to operate. I shall focus on happiness for a moment where the idea is somewhat less complicated (inasmuch as it does not, as such, involve the moral law). As noted above, Kant considers happiness to be something like a maximal, coherent satisfaction of one's needs and desires over the course of one's life. Put this way, it seems something one might wish for, but not much like an object of the will in the ordinary way. However, if we consider rational actions, we might think that their rationality consists not just in their being thought good or thought good for something, but in their admitting of the possibility of one's being able to pursue ("all the way down") the question in what way, or for what, the action is good. 32 Further, one might think that doing this would require, if not being able to say what its good was in one's life (so far as one could see), then at least being able to withdraw the judgement that it constituted a good in 32 The importance to Kant of both depth and closure in any accounting of something as good was originally brought home to me by Barbara Herman, particularly in discussion of the argument of Groundwork I.

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one's life in the face of evidence that it was affirmatively harmful to what one understood of one's life interests. But happiness (the satisfaction in some measure of my needs and desires) is a necessary, albeit conditional, part of my good as a finite, dependent rational being. Thus, rationality minimally requires that (subject to the further conditioning of the moral law) I think my action will not contribute to a significant failure to satisfy what I understand of the needs and desires I will have in life and, probably, that it be considered to contribute something positive. In this sense, my understanding of what would satisfy the needs and desires in my life (though unavoidably incomplete) provides an essential bit of conceptual background to rational deliberation concerning my ordinary actions; I look to this concept to decide among various alternatives, or at least not to defeat some proposed course of action, in deciding what to do. And in this sense, if I act rationally, I act with an eye to the larger satisfaction of my needs and desires in life, of which the needs and desires more particularly under present consideration are conceived to constitute a part. This is just to say that I act with an eye to the realization of my happiness, as Kant understands happiness, which is to say that happiness is an object of my will. Although given our finite capacities and the historical nature of our existence, we will never have a fully realized conception of our happiness, we nevertheless aim at it and would not consider ourselves to act rationally did we otherwise. Now, insofar as we act with an eye to the good, we further determine our actions to accord with the moral law, that is, we act with an eye to the complete good in the same sense in which we act with an eye toward that part of it that is the coherent totality of satisfactions in our life that is called happiness. 33 Though indeterminate in content, rational action directed towards the good requires the context provided by the concept of the highest good. But then how does the moral law determine what the highest good is, or, more to the point, how is it determined that the highest good is the happiness of finite rational agents perfectly conditioned on their (fully realized) virtue?

As with happiness, given the limitations on our agency, we mostly look to the realization of the highest good by taking the likelihood of undermining it to be defeating of any more immediately posed end. It should be emphasized that having the highest good as one's cnd in the relevant sense is in no way to take the imposing of ends on others as an end of one's own. 33

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§7 THE POSSIBILITY OF THE HIGHEST GOOD

To understand how the moral law determines what the highest good is, we must look at the moral law as a law, and consider the relationship of laws and objects, At this point, I want simply to describe enough of Kant's picture to make sense of this argument. In Chapter 2 (§ 13), I will develop and defend the account at greater length, Laws, for Kant, are the constitutive principles of things, the necessary coherent substructure of the world, I do not think that it would be misleading to say that what a form or essence is to a thing of a particular kind, according to Aristotle, a law (or laws) is to an object of a particular kind or species, according to Kant. 34 Laws govern the natures of objects in the world and, thus, the possibilities of objects and of actions and interactions among objects, (Just here, I use the terms 'actions' and 'interactions' very broadly to cover, e,g" what goes on with merely physical objects as well as what agents do,) The pure a priori natural laws, the laws of the categories, determine the nature of empirical objects; these laws define what it is to be an empirical object and, as such, determine (up to a point) the characters of the possible objects and their empirically possible actions and interactions, In this way, natural laws may be said to determine the nature of the empirical world. Because the moral law is a law of rationality-a rationality that is practical and so in the business of bringing objects into existence-, the story of the moral law in relationship to objects is somewhat more complicated than is that of empirical laws. As I will argue in Chapter 2, at bottom, the moral law defines (constitutes) that which we may, more or less indifferently, call rationality or (practical) reason or the will. This, though without the element of idealism, is the same constitutive relationship, obtaining in the same way, as that which holds between the pure a priori natural laws and the various empirical objects (whether considered separately, e.g., this piece of paper, or taken together, i.c., nature). But the moral law also defines the unconditional good; the unconditional good is the acting of a rational will on a representation of its own constitutive principle (i.e., acting only on that maxim which one can will to be a universal law). And the good is How specific the kinds are that laws determine on Kant's view is, fortunately, not something we need consider here. Pure a priori natural laws constitute objects as objects of possible experience: discrete items in space and time interacting causally, etc. 34

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also an object; in fact, it is the same object as the rational will, willing a certain way.35 Now, if we consider the kind of object a rational will is, viz., an intelligible cause that brings things about "in accordance with [its] representation of laws" (G412/80*), we will see that it must also have objects. 36 Through the actions of the will (which the moral law constitutes), the moral law determines (constitutes) objects of the will as objects that are good (or bad), in particular, it constitutes the highest good. The highest good, as a good object and as an object of our wills, is determined by the moral law. To see how this goes, consider first what we might call the virtuous world. Suppose that there are a number of rational wills around; most and perhaps all are dependent rational wills.37 As such they are, in one aspect, empirical objects, acting in, through, and upon the empirical world and subject to its natural laws. These are beings with both needs and wants, on the one hand, and the capacity for action-rational behavior, causing things in accordance with their conceptions of laws-, on the other. If these wills are, as they ought to be, virtuous, then all of their actions, everything they cause, will be caused in accordance with the moral law; all of the actions will be good actions. 38 Since these are dependent rational wills, some, perhaps most, of these actions will have as their material ends the satisfaction of needs and wants, but they will, given the virtue of these beings, all be good actions, determined by the moral law. This is not, however, to say that all of the outcomes will be good. Still, we may, thanks to the virtue of all of its wills, properly call this the virtuous world. That is, this world, supposing we were all virtuous, would be the virtuous world; for we act in the empirical world. So, while the moral law determines the actions, the laws of nature join in, in their own capricious way, to determine the effects. (Clearly, a certain-large, we hope-percentage of the effects will be as intended, but they won't all be.) The vir35

See Groundwork I, especially 393/61 and 402/69-70.

36 See C57-S/59-60. Human beings act in order to bring about some material effect or other; that effect is the object of the action. Whether that object is good is determined by whether the maxim of the action satisfies the moral law; thUS, the mora11aw determines the goodness of each object. See also, Groundwork I. 37 For the notion of a dependent will, see G413n1S1, 414/S1, 415/S3, 41S/S5 and cf G4341101. 38 Cf Groundwork III, 451-51119-23 and, on the Third Antinomy, A53S4I1B566-69/467-69 and A546-7/B574-5/472, especially the latter.

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tuous world would be good, but it would not be the highest good, There is the following room for improvement. Suppose the moral law "trumped" the natural laws and determined the outcomes as well; more, suppose it determined that no effect of any cause in the world were other than the outcome virtue would bring about had it power to order the world adequate to its wilL The object, namely, the world (this world, potentially) determined thusly would be the highest good. Insofar as the material ends we will are willed virtuously, the intended objects that are thereby produced are parts of the highest good. These objects will likewise be parts of a (subjectively) necessary object of our wills, namely, our happiness. But as parts of our happiness brought about under the determination of the moral law they would be good, and so too would the other parts of our happiness be, provided only that they have been determined to, and do, come about in accordance with the moral law. If the moral law perfectly determined not just our choices (whereby we would be perfectly virtuous), but the dispensation of everything that would be an object of choice for us were our causal powers equal to answering and guiding all our needs and wants (whereby we would be happy in perfect accordance with our virtue), a certain object, a certain world, would exist. 39 This is a world in which every good is located in accordance with, in which the dispensation of every individual object of possible choice is determined by, the moral law and it would be the complete or perfect good. In the Dialectic, when Kant explains his use of 'highest' in 'highest good', he makes the point this way: Inasmuch as virtue and happiness together partition the possession of the highest good for one person, and happiness in exact proportion to morality (as the worth of a person and his worthiness to be happy) makes up the highest good of a possible world; thus, the highest good means the whole, the perfect good ... (ell 01115*).

It is important to notice here that Kant is not simply making an observation about what is effected by the individual agent's acting with even perfect virtue; for, again, the actual outcome of this in the empirical 39 The notion here and in the quotation from Kant in the text below is not the contemporary one of a "possible world" in any of the ways that is more commonly understood. Rather, it is simply the notion of this world considered in a way it could come to be.

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world mayor may not be in accord with the moral law-nature can bring the trials of Job upon the virtuous and the life of Riley to the vicious. (And this can happen both through their particular virtuous or vicious acts or quite independently of any action of theirs at all.) The highest good is realized in that state in which not only is the moral law acted upon but all is as it would be were the moral law fully efficacious in determining all relevant outcomes (and the latter in light of the moral law, not just coincidentally). In his earliest mention of the highest good in the second Critique (outside the Preface), Kant draws our attention to this, remarking that the moral law transfers us according to its idea into a nature in which pure reason would bring forth the highest good were it accompanied by sufficient physical capacities (C43/4S*).

He then goes on to allude to the way in which, given the way rational deliberation refers itself to a totality (as I discussed above), the highest good is made the necessary object of our will by the moral law: and it determines our will to impart to the sensuous world the form of a system of rational beings. The least attention to ourselves shows that this idea actually stands as a model for the determination of our will. (C43/4S)

Whatever the immediate object of our will is to be, the moral law locates it for us in the world constituted by the highest good. 4o This relation of the highest good as an object to the moral law, the sense in which the former is determined by the latter, answers the final question we must ask about the highest good, namely, how this relation guarantees the possibility of the highest good. Again the focus must be on the moral law as a law. Allow me to recapitulate. 41 First, in relation to objects, a law, or several laws, constitutes the real nature of that object or objects. A law is the essence (or part of the essence) of a kind of object. For example, the deduction of the first Critique shows that the (natural) laws represented by the categories capture what is necessary to being an empirical object. It is of the essence of empirical objects that they answer to the categories; they would not be 4()

41

Cf the footnote to the Preface of the Religion quoted below in §8. See, for the textual support, Chapter 2 § 13.

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(or, better, there would be no) empirical objects did the categories not apply. Practical laws, on the other hand, determine objects (as good or bad) that are possible through the activity of rational beings. Second, on Kant's view, every pure a priori law is a necessity that makes its objects really possible. Thus, a pure a priori law constitutes a possibility in the sense that the objects a law contemplates might, if they don't presently exist, have existed in the past or come to be in the future. Consequently, a pure a priori law is consistent with other laws-in the strong sense that they are mutually realizable; together they constitute a world. 42 Thus Kant says, following shortly on the last quoted text, that through reason we are conscious of a Jaw to which all our maxims are subject as though through our will a natural order must arise. Therefore, this Jaw must be the idea of a nature not empirically given yet possible through freedom, consequently, of a supersensibJe nature that we give, at least in practical connections, objective reality, because, as pure rational beings, we regard it as the object of our will. (C 44/45*; emphasis added) The highest good is defined by the moral law in the indicated way, the real possibility of the highest good is imparted to it by the moral law, and we give it objective reality by making it an object of our wills, i.e., by acting to bring it about (insofar as we are able). There are worries one might have about the (metaphysical) cogency of this part of Kant's argument, but whether or not it is successful as an argument, the ascription of it to Kant is better justified than the "practical" interpretation: that where he says he has an argument for God's exis-

42 As regards this last claim, for some support, we might consider the universal Jaw formula of the categorical imperative and Kant's associated thoughts concerning the legitimacy of maxims. In the case of the lying promise, for example, Kant takes it that if lying promises were necessary given certain circumstances (i.e., if it were a natural law that that is what one did given the requisite causal situation), there could be no promises (in such circumstances), because to be what they are promises require that (ceteris paribus) their reCipients believe them, but if they were always false in the given circumstances, they would not be believed and, so, would not be accepted. This is supposed to be sufficient to establish that there could be no law of lying promises. But such reasoning would only go through if we can take it that a would-be law must be consistent with the rest of the actual laws (i.e., with all those not narrowly governing the domain at issue with respect to the would-be law in question). See C42l-3/88-90.

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tence, he really has only an argument for a certain state of mind in us; that where he says the highest good is possible, he means only that there is a way to think of it as though it were possible. From most contemporary points of view, it would seem rather odd of Kant to hold that the objective reality of the moral law exposes to consciousness (through the proffered argument) the existence of a supersensible object, viz. God, but it is not that odd if we reflect that already (as I will show in Chapters 2 and 3), within Kant's scheme of things, the moral law has done just that, i.e., it has revealed the actuality of the free moral agent. There are two issues remaining to be addressed. One is what the source of the "subjectivity" is in the above argument that makes it suffice only for belief (Glauben) and not for knowledge (Wissen). The other is what the operative sense of "subjective" in Kant's assessment is. Ironically perhaps, the latter is the relatively more straightforward of the two to resolve textually, so let me begin there.

§8 KANT'S CONCEPTIONS OF THE SUBJECTIVE AND THE OBJECTIVE There is a late twentieth-century impulse to read "objective" as "subject independent," "observer independent," "intersubjectively accessible," or something else in this vein. The complement, "subjective," is correspondingly read as "dependent on the subject or observer (considered as an individual of to some extent peculiar nature)," "not intersubjectively accessible," etc. Though differing in various other ways, in our parlance these terms have in common that they are used to characterize the relata to which agents stand epistemically according to the possibility (or lack thereof) of other agents standing in the same relations to them. Although there are metaphysical issues about what constitutes the things we call subjective and about whether they are "real," the primary force of calling something subjective is frequently to call into question its epistemic viability, or otherwise epistemically disparage it relative to the objective. In marked contrast, Kant's usage of these terms should be considered primarily metaphysical with their force vis-a-vis the epistemic left an open question. As agents and cognizers, we stand in the relation of subjects to the objects of our cognition, experience, and agency. Kant takes it that we can know in these cases the fundamental conditions on the relation's being the relation it is. This will fall into two parts: the necessary conditions on being an object in the relation and the necessary conditions on being a subject in the relation. For Kant, although we can

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be objects for ourselves in these relations, the necessary conditions on us as objects will not be the necessary conditions on us as subjects in the relations. This distinction between subject and object is irreducible and, in a more literal sense than one might initially suspect, unfathomable. 43 It is difficult in thinking (in the third person) of subject-object relations not to think them as object-object relations, but the latter sort of relation will not include that which is among the subjective conditions on the former, i.e., the conditions on the nature of the experiential or agential aspect of the relation. 44 The objective is, in the first instance, that which is so as a function of an object. The objectively necessary is that which is so as a function of the object's nature, of its constitution according to the laws that govern this, of, therefore, what is necessary in the object. In general, the objective is that which is determined by laws. (Thus, at bottom, the practically objective is objective in the same sense as that which is theoretically objective.) On the other hand, the subjective is, in Kant's terminology, not strictly the complement of the objective but rather is that which is determinative of the rational subject as subject. For present purposes, there is no problem with the same self being both subject and object; the crucial thing is that what determines it as the one is completely different from what determines it as the other. In general, Kant is not very interested in the merely subjective (including what is psychologically true of us), but the subjectively necessary is of significant interest to him. The subjectively necessary is that which must be so as a condition of the way we are as rational subjects, as subjects standing in moral (practical) and cognitive relations. The most telling independent use by Kant of "subjectively necessary" in the sense I have just attributed to him arises in the third Critique. 45 There Kant counts judgements of beauty as subjective, but also

Unfathomable because of the intimate way in which this distinction is related to Kant's distinction between noumena and phenomena. 44 Consider two people looking at each other. All the empirical relations between them will be objective. A complete specification of each,and of how they stand to one another as objects will say nothing about what it is for either to be a subject experiencing (conscious of) the other. 45 I will cite the relevant passages from the third Critique shortly, but for another interesting point at which Kant makes use of the distinction (in connection with the "foundation of all cognition of objects," the "subjective sources of the possibility of cognition of an object in general"), see the first Critique, A I 49!B 1881188. 43

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universal and necessary. To affirm that they are subjective is to deny that judgements of beauty are a function of the nature of the object experienced (and to which beauty is attributed); beauty is not a determinate of what the object is. For Kant to attribute universality and necessity to that which is subjective is for him to construe the subjective in a way pretty thoroughly at odds with the usual employment we make of the notion. Contrast the sense in which one of us might say that judgements of beauty are subjective; this would mean that such judgements are idiosyncratic, that they are grounded in peculiarities of the individual's response to the object, not in the object. With the latter (up to a point) Kant's usage agrees, but with the former it does not; for Kant, the point is not the idiosyncrasy of the judgement but that it is grounded in the universal and necessary conditions on being a subject of that kind of experience, and, in fact, on being a cognizer at all. That these conditions are the ground of the experience makes the judgement universal and necessary-it may be expected of every cognizer; it is no accident of particularity that gives rise to it. Universality and necessity are precisely the features that are not attributed to the subjective in our sense; the usual force of 'subjective' in our sense is to deny these, especially universality. (Thus, for example, the likes and dislikes of taste, for us, are subjective and, in the relevant sense, peculiar to agents.) By contrast, Kant is happy to say, must say, that judgements of beauty have both universality and necessity.46 Inas-

46

In particular, he says: Here we must note, first of all that a universality that does not rest on concepts of the object (not even on empirical ones) [as is the case with judgments of beauty] is not a logical universality at all, but an aesthetic one; i.e., the [universal] quantity of the judgment is not objective but only subjective. (CJ§8 214/58)

And on necessity, he says that we think of the beautiful as having a necessary reference to liking [i.e., necessarily everyone should like the beautiful]. This necessity is of a special kind. It is not a theoretical objective necessity, allowing us to cognize a priori that everyone will feel this liking for the object I call beautiful. Nor is it a practical objective necessity, where, through concepts of a pure rational will that serve freely acting beings as a rule, this liking is the necessary consequence of an objective law and means nothing other than that one absolutely (without any further aim) ought to act in a certain way. (CJ§ 18 236-7/85)

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much as they are so (for Kant), inasmuch as they are intersubjectively communicable,47 and are even about the object (semantically), they would be counted in our usual sense as objective, not subjective. 48 Judgements of beauty are made when an object occasions a feeling of pleasure in the subject that arises out of harmony in the activities of the imagination and the understanding with respect to presentation of the object in question. 49 It is this grounding in the subject that makes these judgements subjective in Kant's sense. This possibility of harmony between the imagination and understanding in response to the presentation of certain objects is a necessary condition of being a subject of beauty. More than that, it is a necessary condition of being a subject with the cognitive powers we have. The harmony is felt as pleasure in the experiencing of certain ohjects and no such pleasant experiencing would he possible absent the possibility of such harmonizing. True enough, it is a relation made manifest in a feeling, and this, someone might think, is the real source of the subjectivity. But what is subjective here. the judgement of beauty, is also universal and necessary, and these, together with that feeling, are rooted in something about the constitution and interplay of

47 That they are intersubjectively communicable means that it is possible for another to come to make the judgement on the very same grounds as those upon which it was originally made. Contrast, for example, the case of pain: I do not judge that you are in pain on the same grounds that you so judge. 48 As Kant pointedly remarks:

49

It would be ridiculous if someone who prided himself on his taste tried to justify [it] by saying: This object (thc building we are looking at, the garment that man is wearing, the concert we are listening to, the pocm put up to be judged) is beautiful for me. For he must not call it beautiful if only he likes it (Cl §7 212/55; final emphasis translator's). See the third Critique:

The way of representing in a judgment of taste is to have subjective universal communicability without presupposing a determinate concept; hence this subjective universal communicability can be nothing but [that of] the mental state in which we are when imagination and understanding are in free play (insofar as they harmonize with each other as required for cognition in general.) For we are conscious that this subjective relation suitable for cognition in general must hold just as much for everyone, and hence be just as universally communicable, as any determinate cognition, since cognition always rests on that relation as its subjective condition. (§9 21718/62*; final emphasis added.) Also see §21 238-9/88. quoted in part in the succeeding text.

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our rational faculties, the powers of reason that underlie not the nature of the objects of our experience but the subjective nature of our experiencing. It is being grounded in such necessary conditions of experiencing and agency that makes something subjectively necessary for Kant. [The attunement of the cognitive powers that is required for cognition in general-namely, that proportion suitable for turning a representation (by which an object is given us) into cognition] is the subjective condition of cognizing, and without it cognition as the effect could not arise .... [Moreover,] there must be one attunement in which this inner relation is most conducive to the (mutual) quickening of the two mental powers with a view to cognition (of given objects) in general; and the only way this attunement can be determined is by feeling (rather than by concepts). (Cl §21 238-9/88*; emphasis added.)

The object, observed given the faculties we have, will (under appropriate circumstances) necessarily give rise to the pleasure of this harmony.5o But the necessity will be subjective in Kant's sense, for it is not a necessity of the object (which represents one set of conditions on experience), but rather a necessity of the conditions on experience that are of the subject.

§9 WHY THE POSSIBILITY OF THE HIGHEST GOOD IS AN ONLY SUBJECTIVELY SUFFICIENT CONDITION FOR GOD'S EXISTENCE The subjectively necessary is what is necessarily so given the rational (moral and epistemic) agent as subject. What is relevant in our rational nature to the subjectivity of judgements of beauty are the possible interactions of our faculties of imagination and understanding. So, what is analogously relevant to subjectivity in the context of the argument for God's existence? What, in that argument, makes its grounds only subjectively sufficient so that the truth of the conclusion is a matter of belief rather than of knowledge? Consider the following from the long footnote to the definition of belief (Glauben) cited in §3 above:

50

See the third Critique, §22 239/89.

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we do need adoption of a highest wisdom for the sake of the object of our moral will toward which, beside the mere legality of our actions, we cannot but direct our ends. Although objectively this would not be a necessary relation of our choice, the highest good is yet the subjectively necessary object of a good (including a human) will, and belief in its attainability is necessarily presupposed. (L§IX 68n175)

Or, again, from the third Critique assessment of the moral argument for God's existence: As for objects that we have to think a priori (either as consequences or as grounds) in reference to our practical use of reason in conformity with duty, but that are transcendent for the theoretical use of reason: they are mere matters of belief [Glaubenssachen}. One such object is the highest good in the world that we are to achieve through freedom. (el §91 469/362)

If the moral law determines the highest good as an object, why is it only subjectively necessary? Prima facie, there are, I think, three possible answers. One is that the subjectivity arises out of the need we have for the highest good as an object. The second is that the source of subjectivity arises through the parl happiness plays in the highest good. Finally, there is the thought most strongly suggested by Kant's discussion of the third Critique version of the argument, that the subjectivity of the argument is one and the same thing with its being a practical argument. SI Though both of the first two of these might seem to be functions of our subjective character, properly construed, the subjective nature of the first plays no role in the argument;52 only the second is subjective in a sense material to the argument. The third thought is a different matter altogether; for it would have the argument be only subjectively sufficient even were the highest good objectively given. I will address this matter

51 This seems to be Wood's view, but with both the subjective and the practical construed somewhat differently from what I have argueq for here. See Wood, op. cit., pp.32-4, including the note on 34. 52 That as finite rational beings we need some concept of the highest good in order to deliberate competently is the source of the subjective necessity of the highest good as an object of our will. But it is that the moral law requires the adoption of this object which has a role in the argument, and that is an objective necessity.

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last, in connection with the question of the relation between the practical and the subjective. Although there is what appears to be a fair amount of textual support for the first, especially in the Preface to the first edition of the Religion, and for the third in the third Critique, I take it that the answer must lie with the second. As between the first two options, the issue is whether it is our need for the highest good, or happiness as a part of the highest good, that makes it a subjectively necessary object, an object the determination of which lacks objectively sufficient grounds. The decisive considerations seem to me to be as follows. First, it seems to me that the texts concerning the need we have for the highest good as an object are primarily addressed to the question of why morality does not "need" the highest good as an object, and never to the question of whence the subjective in the argument. Indeed, in his long discussion of what a need of pure practical reason is (in 'On Holding -as-True Arising from a Need of Pure Reason', see especially C143nI149), Kant stresses that the need in question is objective. Second, at least as I have construed the argument, it is not precisely the case that our need for the highest good as an object has a role in the argument. The need we have that is (indirectly) implicated is a rational need for the concept of the highest good for use in deliberation. However, that need does not make subjective the highest good's sufficient condition for being an object; again, insofar as the need is necessitated by the moral law, the sufficient condition of its being an object is objective. Were we not dependent beings, then the highest good would be virtue alone; but virtue is objectively, not subjectively, necessary for us. So, were it the case that virtue exhausted the highest good, the highest good would be objectively given in its entirety and its possibility would be objective. (Of course, it wouldn't be a possibility of which God was a necessary condition, but that is neither here nor there for present purposes.) Further, it is not this need that determines either what the highest good is or that it is possible. Our need for the highest good, coupled with the way in which the moral law determines (with reference to our dependent nature) what object it is, makes the highest good a necessary object of our will; but given that we need a certain kind of object for our will, it is the determination of the nature of this object by the moral law that makes the object what it is and possible. And it is the fact that the object-this particular object- is possible (a fact that we-merely- believe according to the above quotation from the Logic) that is crucial to the argument. These considerations rule out, I think, the first option.

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It is our worldliness (as Kant sometimes puts it), the fact that we are not pure rational wills, that gives us the necessary end of happiness, which in turn determines part of the content of the highest good. The way we are as rational agents is dependent; as agents we act on and through and only by means of the empirical world. Thus, necessarily, objects in, and states of, the empirical world are possible goods (or bads) for us. Pure rational beings do not have their own happiness as any kind of end, let alone a necessary one, because pure rational beings have no needs or desires and, so, have no happiness (in Kant's sense). In the Preface to the Religion, where Kant is less explicit about the cognitive relation in which we stand to the conclusion that God exists, he is clear about what piece of the puzzle is subjective: An objective end (i.e., the end which we ought to have) is that which is proposed to us as such by reason alone. The end which embraces the unavoidable and at the same time sufficient condition of all other ends is the final end. The subjective final end of rational worldly beings is their own happiness (each of them has this end by virtue of having a nature dependent upon sensuous objects ... ) and all practical propositions which are based on this final end are synthetic, and at the same time empirical. But that everyone ought to make the highest good possible in the world afinal end is a synthetic practical proposition a priori (and indeed objectively practical) given by pure reason (R Preface, second fnJ6n).53 The only real source of confusion here lies in the objective contribution of the moral law. One way of sorting things out is this. It is objectively necessary that we take the highest good as an end because the moral law ("reason alone") requires it. But reason alone is not what determines what the highest good is. Our worldliness has a part to play in the determination and to that extent the determination is subjective. Our grounds for taking the highest good to be possible have two aspects: the formal and objective aspect contributed by the moral law alone, which is that the highest good is a necessary object, and the material and subjective aspect contributed jointly by the moral law and the n-ature of our rational 53

Cf the following from the third Critique:

The subjective condition under which man (and, as far as we can conceive, any rational finite being as well) can set himself a final purpose under the above law [the morallawl, is happiness. (§S7 450/339)

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agency, which is that the highest good is the totality of the perfect conditioning of happiness on virtue. The possibility of that very object is grounded in both aspects. But the subjectivity of the one is neither mitigated nor compensated for by the objectivity of the other. Without what the object is there are no grounds for God's existence to be found here. The highest good is possible, but we have only subjective grounds for holding this to be true. It is a claim for which we cannot have objectively sufficient grounds (which, in turn, means that it provides only subjectively sufficient grounds for holding that God exists). Our grounds for holding that the highest good is possible include the highest good's being the object of the will given a priori by the moral law, where the highest good is the perfect and necessary conditioning of happiness on virtue (with virtue reigning in the world). But that this is the highest good stems from the subjective condition in which our rational agency finds itself: we are worldly, we exercise our agency under the condition of being a finite causal power, dependent on, and causally efficacious only through, the natural world. There is nothing in rationality itself to require this, yet it is an inescapable fact that as the subject who acts each of us finds herself, or himself, thus. Our concept of the highest good necessarily answers to what is subjectively an essential part of the good for us in view of this. But if that is at all correct, what of the relationship between the practical and the subjective? what of the third Critique's apparent suggestion that the subjectivity is somehow a function of the fact that the argument is practical?

§1O THE PRACTICAL AND THE SUBJECTIVE: THE LIMITS OF THE ARGUMENT In one way of looking at it, at the bottom of Kant's distinction between the practical and the theoretical is that between a practical use of reason and a theoretical use of reason. In another way of looking at it, the distinction rests, at bottom, on that between practical cognition and theoretical cognition. The former is perhaps more fundamental, but there is more to say about the latter. When Kant characterizes them, it is in the following way. A practical cognition is one that either expresses, or provides grounds for, "a possible free action by which a certain end is to be made actual." Theoretical cognitions are those that express what is and the nature of what is. Speculative cognitions express what is and its nature insofar as this is not grounds for action. Thus all speCUlative cognitions are theoretical and not practical, but some theoretical cognitions are

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also practical, while not all practical cognitions are also theoreticaP4 Naturally, given all this, a practical argument is simply one from practical premisses and/or to a practical conclusion. Now if one had already a conviction that the practical is somehow less sound than the theoretical, then it might be tempting to see the fact that the argument for God yields merely Glauben as a consequence of the fact that the argument is practical. And then one might find support for this thought in, e.g., the third Critique's discussion of the argument, say, in the passage quoted above in §9: As for objects that we have to think a priori ... in reference to our practical use of reason in conformity with duty, but that are transcendent for the theoretical use of reason: they are mere matters of belief [Glaubenssachen}. (Cl §91 469/362) 54 The characterization comes from the Appendix to the Introduction to the Logic, but compare. from the first Critique. A633-5/B661-3/526-7. The substance of the former follows.

A cognition is called practical as opposed to theoretical, but also as opposed to speculative cognition. Practical cognitions, namely, are either 1) imperatives, and in so far are opposed to theoretical cognitions; or they contain 2) the grounds for possible imperatives, and in so far are opposed to speculative cognitions. By imperative . .. is to be understood every statement that expresses a possible free action by which a certain end is to be made actual. Every cognition which contains imperatives must thus be called practical . .. in opposition to theoretical. For theoretical cognitions are those which express not what ought to be, but what is, and thus have as their object not an acting but a being . . . . By speculative cognitions, on the other hand, we understand those from which no rules of behavior can be derived or which contain no grounds for possible imperatives .... Speculative cognitions of this kind are always theoretical, but ... not every theoretical cognition is speculative; viewed in another regard, it can at the same time also be practical. Everything gravitates ultimately toward the practical; and in this tendency of everything theoretical and everything speculative in respect of its use, consists the practical value of our cognition. This value, however, is an unconditioned value only if the end to which the practical use of cognition is directed is an unconditioned end. The only unconditioned and final end (ultimate end) to which all practical use of our cognition must lastly refer is morality, which for that reason we also call the plainly or absolutely practical. And that part of philosophy which has morality as its object would accordingly have to be called practical philosophy .... although every other philosophical science may also contain its practical part, that is, a direction concerning the practical use of the theories set forth, for the purpose of realizing certain ends. (L 86-7/94-5)

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Against this thought the most decisive thing to say is that, were it the case that the argument yields Glauben because it is practical, then all practical arguments would yield Glauben, but they don't. Sound practical arguments, like sound theoretical arguments, will nearly always yield Wissen. In fact, as the above passage goes on to insist, the only objects that are matters of Glauben are the highest good, the immortality of the soul, and God. Further, even if this were not the case, Glauben, as we have seen, is a function of subjective grounds, not of practical grounds. 55 So what is the relationship between the subjective and the practical in these arguments? To get at the answer, the best place to start is with objects. When we are concerned simply with objects as such (what and whether they are, without reference to our actions), the relevant cognitions will be theoretical. Theoretical objective cognitions are cognitions, i.e., have content, by virtue of possible application (at least concept by concept) to objects of possible experience, i.e., to those that could be given in intuition. Where a concept is a priori, as in the cases at hand, the possibility of such application is anything but immediately evident. (This, for example, is the problem with respect to the categories that calls for the deduction in the first Critique.) The possibility of application to objects of possible experience is made real by understanding's synthesis of pure intuition using the categories; the unity thus created makes possible both the diversity of empirical objects and their co-existence, their fundamental connectedness (unity, again) in nature. 56 Because the categories are necessary conditions of anything that can be given in a possible intuition, given the foregoing, theoretical cognitions of objects are possible only in those cases where the categories are a necessary condition of the object in question. Because God is, if anything, a supersensible object of which no intuition is possible, there cannot be objective, theoretical grounds establishing one way or the other whether God exists. We cannot get from facts about God's nature, to which we have no direct epistemic access, to God's existence; we have no possible access to God via the nature of God as an object. Nor is there any way to get from the nature of any other

55 See §3 above for the definition of 'Glauben' and notes to that section for additional citations. 56 For further discussion of the deduction of the categories and its implications in this connection, see Chapter 2, §§ J 1-13.

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object to God's existence (e.g., it la the cosmological argument). This is the lesson of the first Critique in general and the Fourth Antinomy and the Ideal in particularY On the practical side, since God (unlike freedom) is not a necessary condition of the moral law and the highest good is constituted subjectively (even though the moral law has objective reality and so can ground cognition), the moral law cannot secure fully objective grounds for God's existence. In terms of the issue between Glauben and Wissen (see §3), this means that there are no possible objectively sufficient grounds for holding true either that God does, or that God does not, exist; it also explains why our (practical) belief that God exists is not a cognition. Now clearly, if we consider what was said about the subjective in §§8 and 9 above, no set of strictly subjective premisses will provide grounds sufficient for a theoretical objective cognition. In the arguments under consideration (the argument for immortality is largely parallel to that for God), the link between the subjective and the objective is provided by the practical premisses; given the subjective, the moral law posits an object and since, as a law, the moral law has objective reality, an existence (necessary to the possibility guaranteed by the law) can be postulated. And as far as things go to this point in the argument, there is no question of the truth of the conclusion provided the premisses are all right. 58

See the first Critique. chapters II and III of Book II of the Dialectic. but the remarks at A562/8590/481-2, A577-9/8605-7/491-2, A580/8608/493, A590118618-19/499-500 and A635-71B663-5/528 are among those particularly to the point. 58 One might, however. consider the following possibility. One difference between theoretical objective necessities and subjective necessities is, briefly, this. Where the former are a function of what is necessary to some object's being an object. especially an object of empirical experience, the latter are a function of what is necessary to the way in which. as rational beings, we are subjects, for the experience of empirical objects, and in our own agency. If this is on the right track, then perhaps the following is at least part of the story. Through transcendental synthesis, we construct the nature of empirical objects and must, according to Kant, be conscious of our activity-our spontaneity-in that construction; this places us in an immediate (quasi-)creative relation to objects and, thereby, in a very strong epistemic relation to their nature (their metaphysical structure). The necessary conditions on the subjective side of our experience and agency we find in reflection on experiencing and acting, and, absent the authority that comes with the creative act (for the spontaneous, noumenal self is not an object of our construction), this, it might be thought, makes for an epistemically weaker cognitive relation. 57

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So what "inadequacy" is a feature of the argument? why the distinction between Glauben and Wissen? between science and faith? Apart from satisfaction of the definitional difference (subjective sufficiency versus that plus objective sufficiency), the answer has, again, to do with use, with what use we can make of what the argument gives us. What the argument gives us is the existence of the necessary condition of nature's being related to virtue in the way that the highest good requires. Call this condition God. As Kant says in the second Critique and emphasizes at length in the third Critique, the ascription of positive content to this concept, the further inference to features of God's nature, is purely a matter of analogy with our own case. We don't have, and the argument doesn't give us, the conceptual wherewithal to infer facts about the nature of this necessary condition. Although the only means we have for thinking of the requisite "causality" is by analogy with our own moral causality, we have no reason to think that the features thus arrived at actually exhaust the relevant possibilities; they only exhaust the ones we can think. This means that insofar as the concept of the highest good has a practical use, the concept of God as its condition likewise has practical use. But nothing of use to theoretical reason, as such, can be squeezed out of this. If we could know the nature of God, then we might, for example, have reason to think that God had set purposes into nature, like, say, the evolution of rationality. This would have tremendous ramifications for the theory of evolution, but no such grounds are given by the argument. The existence of God has no objective content: though we are instructed by the moral law that the concept of God has an object, we cannot say that we cognize or understand either the actuality or the possibility of it. 59 -To do so would be to have knowledge of God's nature. The difference between religion and science from Kant's point of view is not that science concerns the truth and religion doesn't, but that science is a project of acquiring new theoretical knowledge and religion is not. Religion is a matter of Glauben, of faith, not because it doesn't concern the truth or isn't (so far as God's existence is concerned) adequately justified, but because while we can know that God exists we have

59 See the second Critique Preface, 4/4* (for the latter half of the sentence) and " ... extending Pure Reason for Practical Purposes ... ," 1351140* (for the first halt).

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no way of knowing what it is that exists. 6o Moreover, there is nothing to do in the way of acquiring further knowledge concerning God; there are no further cognitions that it is possible for us to have. We understand what God is precisely to the extent that we understand what the nature of the necessary condition of the highest good is, that is, not at all. This then is the answer to my original question: The source of the subjectivity in the argument for God's existence is not practical reason, but rather our finite dependent nature as rational agents. The subjectivity of the argument is, therefore, not material to the question of practical reason's epistemic wherewithal, which, in fact, there is no reason to suspect of any inadequacy. Practical reason, after all, is just reason. 61 Apart from various characterizations of the argument as subjective and as culminating in something we should believe but do not know, discussed above. There is one further feature of Kant's discussion of this argument that might seem to caIl into question my claim that the conclusion of the argument is that God exists and that the argument provides sufficient grounds for the truth of this claim. That feature is Kant's reiteration of the characterization of belief as "free holding-to-be-true." (See, for example, L §IX68/74 and 68n/76.) If the conclusion of the argument is true and the argument is sufficient to show this, how is the consequent holding-true free? The answer, once the question is raised, is fairly straightforward. That one takes the highest good as one's end is the free action of the moral person. The immoral agent freely does not take this object as an end. Someone who takes the highest good as an end is committed (rationally) to the implications of the truth that one ought to adopt the highest good as one's final end, in particular (as the argument reveals), is committed to God's existence. Someone who does not is not so committed. This is the sense in which, as moral persons, if we renounce God, "we renounce at the same time all prudence and honesty, and we have to act against our own reason and our conscious." (See the Lectures on Philosophical Theology, p. 122.) The moral person who doesn't believe in God, on this account, is in a rationally untenable position, which can be resolved only by either renouncing the final end or believing that God exists. The moral agent who is not so committed to God's existence is "a scoundrel" (ibid., p. 123), for this agent is not committed to the highest good as the final end of rational agency. If the argument were not, as Kant sees it, valid in the indicated way, there would no more be practical implications of one's renunciation of God than there would be rational ones. The only way my not believing that [J can reveal me to be a scoundrel is if what I morally should believe is [J or something that entails p. This is the point (I would suggest, contra,Wood) that underwrites Kant's characterization of the argument as a reductio ad absurdum practicum. (See § I above.) 61 Is there then another threat to the moral theory? Can we take it that God's nonexistence would terminally undercut Kant's moral theory (see footnote 2 above)? First, we must distinguish two things that Kant might be worrying about when he insists that morality does not stand in need of the highest good, nor, therefore, of 60

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God. One, he might be, and, I think primarily is, worried about the possibility that we will misunderstand the role of the highest good and take it, as (from Kant's point of view) it has almost always been taken, as that which "determines our will" toward the good. It is not needed for this. It is a mistake, from Kant's point of view, to think that anything but the moral law itself is required for us to act toward the good, to act morally. (See, for example, the paradox of method for practical critique, C62-3/65-6, and the opening of the Preface to the first edition of the Religion.) But two, he might be (and I think we are, but he is not) worried that morality is, in some logical or conceptual sense, committed to God's existence. In fact, on my reading of the argument, Kant does take his moral theory (given our dependency) to be committed to God's existence in this sense. If the argument that the moral law determines the highest good as the perfect conditioning of happiness on virtue goes through, then the relationship between that object (the highest good so understood) and the moral law establishes the real possibility of the highest good and thus shows the existence of any necessary condition of that possibility. Without such a strong connection, Kant could not, as he wishes, provide a moral foundation for religion. That this relation might provide a chink in the armor of the moral theory simply does not present itself to Kant, who takes himself to have independently shown (in the first Critique) the impossibility of any proof that God does not exist. So, what is to be said about this commitment? Or, to put it another way, is there any reason to think the argument fails (preferably on grounds not otherwise damaging to the practical philosophy)? Two things suggest themselves as possible problems. One is that it might be denied that the moral law determines the object Kant claims it does; virtue, it might be said, is not the worthiness to be happy, it is just virtue. The bits and pieces that make up happiness and unhappiness are, notwithstanding the tradition, outside the realm of moral goods and evils except insofar as they are the determinate objects of actual moral agents. The other problem may lie in the key move of the argument-to God's existence from the real possibility of the highest good. Minimally, the real possibility of a thing consists in its realizability in the world as it metaphysically is-a such and such is really possible if it, so determined, could be actual consistently with the metaphysical structure of the world. For example. various species that could (physically) have evolved from dinosaurs, had dinosaurs not been extinguished so summarily, would seem to be really possible inasmuch as there is nothing in the metaphysical structure of the world that makes them impossible forms of life. Nevertheless, it is (presumably) not now the case that any such species could come to be, since the necessary physical conditions no longer obtain and do not admit of ever obtaining again. It is not now the case that the satisfaction of any condition whatsoever would make some such species actual (cf footnote 14 above). The question is does this undermine the claim of real possibility? Assuming that the Cretaceous extinction was a contingency, it is a contingency, not a necessity, that rules out the possibility of such species ever being actual. It seems plausible that its being a mere contingency which blocks the potential for actuality means that the claim of real possihility stands. If so, then the question of

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whether a particular necessary condition of the realization of some real possibility might fail to obtain will turn on a prior issue. Namely, it will turn on the question whether that condition is itself a contingency or a necessity. As itself the constitutive principle of the will, the actuality of the moral law makes necessary one necessary condition of the highest good-potentially virtuous free wills. But the moral law, while constitutive of things (including God, if God exists) as wills, as practical reasoners, is not (on the face of it) constitutive of the creator of the world. But then (one might think),just as, say, an asteroid strike is contingent relative to the laws of biological evolution, meaning that the real possibility of a given species relative to those laws won't entail the existence of its essential dinosaur ancestors, the real possibility of the highest good relative to the moral law won't entail the existence of God-unless we have antecedent reason to think God's existence a necessity rather than a contingency. Of course, it has always seemed plausible to think that if God is extant at all, God is a necessary existent. But it is unclear that this can be invoked to help here, given that the argument is aimed precisely at establishing the antecedent.

PART II

The Deduction of Freedom: The Argument of Groundwork III and Chapter I of the Second Critique

CHAPTER 2

The Argument and Its Background

In this chapter I take up the deduction of freedom. I will begin by reviewing Kant's position going into the main argument (§§ 11-13). I will then try to say, in relative abstraction from the texts, what I take the argument to be-what it does and how it is supposed to work (§§ 14-16). This further sets the stage for a close examination of the texts in Chapter 3. It is untendentious to say that there is a practical deduction in both Groundwork III and the Critique of Practical Reason. Beyond that, not much is untendentious. I will argue, against the bulk of the tradition, that in each of these texts Kant gives us a deduction of ti'eedom; that, fundamentally, he gives us the same argument in both texts. The deduction of freedom, as I will present it, is simply this. (1) That our wills are under the moral law is one and the same thing as that we are free. (2) The moral law, as a law, has real possibility and thereby it establishes freedom's real possibility. (3) The moral law is the ultimate constitutive principle of our rationality and, as such, the law of our action. (4) Therefore, we are, in fact, free. Another way to put the third premiss and conclusion would be to say that the moral law has actual objects (i.e., us and all other rational beings) and that, therefore, freedom likewise is actual (i.e., in us and in all other rational beings). This result assures us of the objective validity of the concept of freedom (and even of the categorical imperative as a synthetic cognition). Before taking up the substance of the argument, I want to rehearse two worries about the project of the deduction given this characterization of it. The first I shall mention briefly just to set aside for now. The second is more intricate, and while I will have something to say by way of im-

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mediate response, this concern or set of concerns is among those to which my account as a whole must answer. So, first: Prima facie, the above argument would seem to contain a superfluous premiss, (I), (3) and (4) being a nice example of modus ponens with (2) having no role to play, since the applicability of the moral law to an actual object does not simply follow from its real possibility and if we have the former, then, as we would ordinarily think, we have trivially its real possibility. But we will see that Kant holds that nothing can count as supporting the claim of an a priori concept's actual applicability without a showing that the a priori concept in question has real possibility. Beyond that, consideration of the argument and examination of the texts will adjudicate the questions concerning the point of premiss (2), and whether Kant so argued. Second: If (as I will show) this argument (sketch) represents the deduction, the key argument in both of the foundational texts of Kant's moral theory, the question arises as to what its role is in the founding or justification of that moral theory. This is one facet of the large worry whether a single argument can fit both texts. It is natural, especially given a certain way of reading the Groundwork, to expect the argument following Groundwork II to be the one in which it is finally shown that the moral law really does apply to something, us or our actions, and that it does so by showing that we realize the necessary metaphysical condition on this being so, namely, that we are free. On this line of thinking, it might be reasonable to expect a deduction of freedom as a necessary step in a deduction of the moral law, with the result: no big mystery here. But, I argue, things don't work this way. (Which is not to say that we don't come to have insight, in the course of setting up and giving the deduction of freedom, into how thc moral law binds us.) There is no deduction of the moral law (with or without a deduction of freedom as a proper part), and, worse still, that the moral law has actual objects is a premiss (the third in my sketch above) in the deduction of freedom. So, there is something of a mystery. Moreover, there are the texts to deal with. At the close of Groundwork II, Kant has set as our project, "to prove that morality is no mere phantom of the brain" (445/112). This, again, not unreasonably, leads to the expectation that the point of III is to show us that the categorical imperative is true or that the moral law actually binds us, especially when the culmination of the argument comes in a section titled, 'How is a Categorical Imperative Possible?'. But then, in the Critique, the moral law is a "fact of reason" (31131, 42/43, 47/48) needing no proof, and the deduction of freedom provides the moral law

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merely with a "credential" (47-8/49). From this perspective it seems that we get a deduction of the moral law itself in the Groundwork, while in the Critique the deduction seems nearly a superfluity, providing only a "credential," whatever that might be. Of course, all of this, especially the Critique's deduction's being seen (albeit mistakenly) as a deduction of freedom in contrast to the Groundwork's, suggests that one story is true of the Groundwork and something else entirely is going on in the Critique. But on that score we should at least provisionally trust Kant when he tells us that we are going to get a deduction of freedom in Groundwork III. At the end of the first section, having just shown the equivalence claim (the first premiss in my sketch), Kant remarks that we cannot "as yet make intelligible the deduction of freedom from pure practical reason and so the possibility of a categorical imperative: we require some further preparation" (4471115; emphasis added).l Moreover, and most importantly, in Kant's system there is no possible source of real possibility for the concept of freedom except the moral law; this will leave Kant no option but to make what is basically the same argument in both texts. But we must also keep in mind the real difference between the Groundwork and the Critique: the Groundwork, unlike the Critique, does not assume the results of the Third Antinomy from the Critique of Pure Reason (nor any other of its arguments). This means that going into Groundwork III (in contrast to the second Critique), we do not know that it is even logically possible that we are free. So, if we accept the naive view that freedom is necessary for moral agency (and indeed, this is the onus-setting consideration of Groundwork III), from that same perspective, it will seem that we may (in the extended analysis of morality carried out in the first two chapters) have been investigating a thought without logical possibility, never mind reality, and thus a "phantom of the brain" (G4451112-J3). As we will see, once the Groundwork III concern with the logical possibility of freedom is distilled from it, the role of I There is, of course, no issue with respect to the Critique about what we are given a deduction of, but as far as I can tell, Kant's announcement of what he is up to in the Groundwork is generally overlooked. The question raised here, and, apparently, not in connection with the Critique, is what it is to make intelligible "the possibility of a categorical imperative" and what that has to do with giving a deduction. I take this up in a preliminary way shortly, and at greater length in connection with the texts, below. But the answer will prove to be that the possibility of a categorical imperative with which we are concerned is "How such a synthetic a priori proposition is possible" (G444!112; Kant's emphasis), not whether it is true. For further discussion see §§20 and 21 in Chapter 3.

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the moral law in the deduction of freedom is the same here as in the Critique. 2 Yet if so, this leaves us where we started worrying a page or so ago. Now we must ask even of the Groundwork the questions we would have asked anyway of the second Critique: what is (the point of) the credential? what is moral theory's need for a deduction offreedom? why, or in what sense (if any), is the problem of freedom prior, or necessary, to the account of the moral law's bindingness? Only the completed examination of these texts and their argument can fully support what I am about to claim, but I want at least to suggest why it is that we get, in both cases, a deduction of freedom. For as Kant himself comments in the Critique, it might have seemed more reasonable to expect a deduction of the moral law; after all, isn't it what we are after?3 What this will come down to is that we need to know not whether the moral law is true, but how it can be true. For this we need to know that we are free. The deduction of freedom will give us insight into how the a priori synthetic judgement expressing the moral law (i.e., the categorical imperative) can be true. But for now, consider the following. If we keep in mind that Kant is, in the first instance, a metaphysician, one who would teIl us how the world as we know it is put together, and that he thinks that a certain kind of understanding is what we seek in knowledge ("insight" as he often says), then we will begin to have some idea of the import of the deduction of freedom.4

See especially §§17 and 21, below. See C47/48-9. 4 Kant is a metaphysician in the sense indicated (ours), but he is also a metaphysician in the sense related to his own use of the word 'metaphysics'. For Kant, the Critiques are not a project in metaphysics (in his narrower sense), but in critique and, insofar as they yield positive results, in transcendental philosophy. Metaphysics is the kind of project represented by the Metaphysical Foundatirms of Natural Science and the Metaphysics of Morals. Metaphysics "is nothing but the inventory of all our possessions through pure reason, systematically arranged" (AxxlI4). Metaphysics is a priori science, the a priori part of our knowledge of nature and morals, and tells us not about the possibility of these things but relates substantive truths of them-how the world actually behaves and how we (actually) ought to behave. Attending to this distinction is important because we can be misled by Kant's language if we do not. The only metaphysics, by Kant's lights, in the Groundwork comes in the second chapter (roughly, 425-437/92-104), not in the third, which is critique. We, on the other hand, are likely to find the metaphysics in the third chapter. 2

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Consider the traditional motivation of the expected argument for morality from freedom. It is evident that our actions and their effects are in the natural world. As such, if the nature of their causal history were in no way distinct from that of other events in the natural world, there would be no more reason to attribute moral value to them, or moral responsibility to us for them, than there is to attribute it to the mountain for the landslide. Freedom from natural law in willing our actions is the only distinction of possible relevance here, for the simple reason that this is the only thing there is to talk about that would be talking about causes. Freedom is a necessary condition of moral agency; that we are free is the fact about our causality that permits moral attribution to our actions and our selves. If I am right that, as a law, the moral law defines a real possibility, still, that does not suffice to give us "insight into the sources of its truth." Freedom must be possible if morality is, but freedom is a condition which can make no sense of any kind if our understanding of the metaphysics of causality, of our actions and their effects in the world, is exhausted by what empirical science or theoretical philosophy can teach us. In this sense, it is crucial for an adequate moral theory (even if not for proof-i.e., certain justification-of the moral law itself) to account metaphysically (insofar as this can be done) for the place of morality in the empirical world of action. More than anything else, this is what the deduction of freedom does for moral theory. It locates morality in relation to the metaphysics of the empirical (while it also does something for speculative reason and faith, as we saw in Chapter 1). Soon, I will get to the deduction. For now, I simply want to stress that, in Kant's view, the need to provide a deduction of freedom is the metaphysical problem facing practical philosophy. It is a problem posed by our naive conception of agency and given its own credentials by the Critique of Pure Reason, and it is a problem shared by the Groundwork and the second Critique. To solve it is to provide the metaphysical heart of a practical philosophy; the solution constitutes the (underlying) metaphysics of, and gives us some philosophical understanding of, the fact of morality.

§11 A DEDUCTION, MOREOVER, A DEDUCTION OF FREEDOM As I pointed out in the Introduction, in the first two chapters of the Groundwork Kant has done everything we might reasonably expect of him as a moral philosopher, preparatory to taking up the concerns of the

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Metaphysics of Morals. And in the Preface to the second Critique, Kant incorporates the Groundwork "in so far as that work gives a preliminary acquaintance [Bekanntschaft] with the principle of duty and justifies a determinate fonnula of it" (C8/8*), i.e., he incorporates Groundwork I and II. But while we can readily appreciate the moral philosopher's interest in the reality of freedom (as morality's necessary condition) and easily ascertain that, in some way, freedom is the focus of Groundwork III, 'Passage from a Metaphysic of Morals to a Critique of Pure Practical Reason', and of the opening of the Critique, we are ill-equipped to understand much more about Kant's project in these texts unless we heed well these titles and remember that we are now engaged in critique. Through the critique of practical reason, we try to understand the extent, the limits of pure practical reason. More particularly, we try to get a grip on whether, and, if so, how, we can know a priori anything of what we ought to do. These are the analogues of the critique of theoretical reason's questions: how is it possible to have synthetic a priori (theoretical) cognitions in the face of our having no account of the application of a priori concepts to anything in the world? and, after all, why should they have application-being a priori "the world" is not their source? The second question is clearly the logically prior, since if a priori concepts haven't application, synthetic a priori cognition won't be possible. In the narrow sense taken from Kant's use of the tenn in titling the deduction of the categories in the first Critique and of freedom in the second, a deduction is an argument for the purpose of answering this logically prior question. 5 Which is to say, a deduction is the kind of argument Kant uses to show the objective validity, i.e. our right to the use, of pure a priori concepts. This right rests, one way or another, on showing the real possibility of the pure a priori thought in question. To see this, we start by going back to the first Critique and 'The Principle of any Transcendental Deduction' (A841B 1 16/120ff). Now among the manifold concepts which form the highly complicated web of human cognition, there are some which are marked out

If one looks carefully, however, Kant refers to many arguments as deductions, not all of which can be characterized in this narrow way. Indeed, he is happy in more than one place to speak as if providing an answer to the larger question were a matter of giving a deduction (and not just inasmuch as a deduction in the narrower sense is a necessary part of the larger argument). For my purposes, I shall stick to the narrower use in order to track unambiguously parallels between the practical arguments and the deduction of the categories. 5

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for pure a priori employment, in complete independence of all experience; and their tight to be so employed always demands a deduction. For since empirical proofs do not suffice to justify this kind of employment, we are faced by the problem how these concepts can relate to objects which they yet do not obtain from any experience. The explanation of the manner in which concepts can thus relate a priori to objects I entitle their transcendental deduction. (A85/B J J7/121-2*)

Thus, 'deduction' is a tenn of art for Kant; it refers to a kind of argument that is, in fact, the linchpin in the projects of each of the Critiques. (By "kind" of argument I do not here mean an argument of a certain given form, but rather an argument for a particular purpose.)6 "Deduction" does not mean, for Kant, just any sort of deductive argument from accepted premisses (although his may be deductions in this sense as weIl 7 ). A deduction is Kant's answer, for particular cases, to Hume's general problem of a priori concepts. s To answer Hume, Kant must show that the a priori concept in question has, as he puts it, objective validity. To do this, he must show that the concept is really possible (has objective reality). In most cases the question whether a concept is objectively real (really possible) will amount to the same thing as the question whether it is, properly speaking, a cognition. Let me review briefly Kant's terminology. An adequate showing of

From the first Critique, the basic notion is, and has been, clear enough. See A84-5/B 116- 171120-21. Dieter Henrich expounded the history of this in 'Kant's Notion of a Deduction and the Methodological Background of the First Critique, ' from Eckart Forster (ed.), Kant's Transcendental Deductions: The Three 'Critiques' and the 'Opus postumum' (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 29-46. Cf Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason' (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 170-71. 1 also found suggestive in this connection Onora O'Neill, 'Reason and politics in the Kantian enterprise' and The public use of reason', the first two chapters of Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially the former, pp. 3-27 and 2850, respectively. 7 It is fairly widely thought that Kant's deductions are not deductive arguments. To the extent that this view is significant, it is pari of a larger concern with what to say about transcendental arguments. Although 1 will not here presume to address this larger issue, it seems arguable that at least the practical deduction is intended to be such. (I might say, in all Kant's deductions, but fortunately the other two Critiques are, in this respect, beyond the scope of present concerns.) 8 See, in addition to passages discussed above, the Preface to the Prolegomena, especially 257-61/3-6, and A90lB 1221124 for the example of cause in particular. 6

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objective validity (legitimacy of use) for such a priori thoughts as the categories and freedom will involve a showing of real possibility, in part, because this is crucial to showing how they can have a use in synthetic a priori cognitions. The concepts of God, immortality, and the highest good are (as we saw in Chapter 1) exceptions to the rule that showing real possibility shows a concept to be a cognition; they even have actuality, i.e., actual objects (and so, presumably, objective validity, though Kant never applies that term to them), but they are not cognitions; for even practical reason cannot provide them with determinate content. A cognition is a thought about (a representation oj) an object; minimally, this means that its discursive content must be that of a real possibility. A concept that is shown by its content (contrast the case of God) to have possible application to the world compatibly with the way this world is, is shown to be really possible and to be a cognition. An a priori concept that is really possible has application to some object that can be shown to be compatible with the fundamental metaphysical structure of the world. In the deduction of freedom, we are after a showing of real possibility and actuality, i.e., we want to show that this concept is a cognition whose objects are actual. This will yield the account of how the moral law is possible as a synthetic a priori cognition. Notwithstanding the sceptical origin of the problem that calls for a deduction, it is important to keep in mind the larger issue also at hand: not just whether a priori cognitions are possible (outside of philosophy, we safely and reasonably presume them to be legitimate) but how there can be such a use; in other words, what we are after is not so much additional facts as understanding or insight. Inasmuch as they are not acquired from experience of objects, the application of a priori concepts to objects, even objects of experience, is such that no object presents itself to consciousness as an instance of the concept. This means that something must compensate for the impossibility of a demonstration of the object, if we are to grasp, first, the objective reality of the concept, and second, the possibility of employing the concept in synthetic a priori cognitions (where something more than is implied by the subject concept is attributed a priori to an object by the predicate concept).9

As Kant uses the term, a demonstration involves presenting the object in question for inspection; thus, among a priori proofs, it applies only in mathematics where proofs are both a priori and intuitive (since there the objects are given in pure intuition); see A734/B702/590. These are the "other," non-transcendental proofs that yield a priori synthetic cognitions.

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What distinguishes the proofs of transcendental synthetic propositions from all other proofs which yield an a priori synthetic cognition is that, in the case of the former, reason may not apply itself, by means of its concepts, directly to the object, but must first establish the objective validity of the concepts and the possibility of their a priori synthesis. This rule is not made necessary merely by consideration of prudence, but is essential to the very possibility of the proofs themselves. If I am to pass a priori beyond the concept of an object, I can do so only with the help of some special guidance, supplied from outside this concept. (A 782/8810/621 *) An argument to show that certain a priori concepts are not empty is what we get in the A and B deductions of the categories, and it's what we get, I argue, in the deduction of freedom. But, as I've already remarked, such proofs have, for Kant, a further point. The third rule peculiar to pure reason, in so far as it is to be subjected to a discipline in respect of transcendental proofs, is that its proofs must never be apagogical, but always ostensive. The direct or ostensive proof, in every kind of cognition is that which combines with the conviction of its tmth insight into the sources of its truth; the apagogical proof, on the other hand, while it can indeed yield certainty, cannot enable us to comprehend truth in its connectioll with the grounds of its possibility. (A 789/8817/625*; emphasis added in second sentence.) What is required in pure a priori argument is not just any argument whose premisses suffice for the truth of the conclusion, 10 but one that enlightens us as to how it is really possible that it should be true. The real possibility of the concept, shown in connection with its own discursive content, will be required to satisfy this constraint. For example, suppose it has been shown that the a priori concept of cause is, in this sense, not empty. We should now have at least part of the story of how we could have the synthetic a priori cognition that every event has a cause. The deduction of the category may not be the whole story, but we are assured

10 Though sometimes one has to settle; this is all that Kant could get in the way of arguments for God and immortality.

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that when we consider the question, we are not attempting to apply a concept (cause) to a domain (events) where it has no application. II The concept of morality, and all of its underlying concepts-freedom, obligation, the unconditional good-are pure a priori concepts. That we must, by Kant's lights, pin down the legitimacy of our employment of them somewhere along the line is beyond doubt. That we should require for the completeness of the practical philosophy a deduction of one or more of these concepts can't be a surprise. Thus, if I were to nominate a single consideration whose neglect has compromised more readings of Groundwork III and the second Critique Analytic than any other, it would have to be the fact that the capstone of Kant's argument in both cases is a deduction. The points I have just adduced show (or at least strongly suggest) not only that a key argument of Kant's practical philosophy will be a deduction but that the deduction will consist in important part of showing the real possibility of the concept in question. What they do not show is why the deduction will prove to be a deduction of freedom, rather than of, say, the moral law. I2 (That there should be only one-and of one or the other of these in particular-is not especially significant inasmuch as the concepts in question are not independent of one another; it is the base that matters and that, clearly, is either the moral law or freedom.) There are two aspects of the case for the practical deduction's being (in both texts) a deduction of freedom. The most decisive one is, of course, the textual. As we will see below, Kant says, in both cases, that he is giving a deduction of freedom; and that is what we will find (in Chapter 3) he does do. The other, however, connects up 'with the matters just under consideration. To succeed, the deduction will have to show that either the concept of freedom or the concept of the moral law (as expressed in the categorical imperative) has real possibility. The question then becomes what grounds there could conceivably be for this ascription to either concept. I contend that the only answer is that the moral law, as law, has real possibility, and, so, once we have in hand the equivalence (that is, the metaphysical identity) of falling under the moral law with being

II Kant announces the final (and general) result with his announcement of the "highest principle of all synthetic [theoretical] judgments [a priori]" at A158/B 1971194. 12 We might be tempted to say "freedom," because the moral law is not a concept but a proposition; but this would be cheating, since Kant's use of 'concept' (,Begriff) is not restricted to the sub-propositional case. See A320/B376-7/314.

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free, the moral law establishes the real possibility of freedom. There is, moreover, precedent for this in the deduction of the categories in the role of the a priori transcendental unity of apperception. A central indication that this is the way the argument must go is that there simply are no materials for providing freedom with the requisite real possibility apart from the moral law. (The contention that we are getting a deduction of the moral law instead does nothing to solve the problem because this way of looking at things makes establishing the real possibility of freedom an essential step in establishing the real possibility of the moral law-freedom being morality's necessary condition.) It is no aside when Kant says that the "moral law ... [gives] positive detenninatio/l [Bestimmung] to a causality thought merely negatively, the possibility of which was incomprehensible to speculative reason"; he is simply describing the key move of the deduction. 13 To make any more of this case, however, I must lay out what I take the deduction to be in order that we can consider directly what Kant has dealt us to work with. Still, be all that as it may, it is crucial to note that what a deduction is after in the first instance, one way or another, is the positive content for-something to exhibit the real possibility of-the concept in question.

§12 TWO PRELIMINARIES: A YET EARLIER PROBLEM ABOUT FREEDOM WITH MORE ON WHAT THE DEDUCTION IS, AND ISN'T As I will present Kant's argument, there are four points to be established, given which we have the deduction. The first, not represented in my sketch of the deduction proper, is the logical possibility of freedom, that the notion of a cause independent of natural law does not imply a contra-

13 C48/49*; emphasis added. Beck's translation of 'Bestimmung' is 'definition' and is particularly well-conceived: In this and other contexts where what is determined or given determination is a thought or concept, what Kant has in mind is, to all intents and purposes, Aristotelian (or metaphysical) definition. The concept is given determinate content such that it is consequently related to an object (becomes a cognition) inasmuch as it now captures at least part of the character of the object that makes the object of the kind it is. I have rendered 'bes(immen' and its cognates by 'determine', etc. throughout for the sake of consistency in the translations, It is important to note that whether it is determination as in this context or, say, the determination of an effect by its cause, the issue is always somehow connected with laws.

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diction. The second is the equivalence claim, the claim that a free will and a will under the moral law are the same. The third is that the moral law is really possible, that what falls under it could, compatibly with the way the world is, actually exist. The fourth is that the moral law is the (highest) constitutive principle of rationality (in particular, of our rational agency), i.e., that the moral law is actually binding, what it applies to does actually exist. From these it is inferred that the concept of freedom has actuality in us. I take the first point to be preparatory to the deduction because it seems to me a presupposition of attempting a deduction that the concept in question represents at least a logical possibility (and, ordinarily, there wouldn't be an issue anyway). But it is with respect to this point that the two texts differ perhaps most significantly. The argument for it is included in Groundwork III, though it does not come first; in the second Critique it is assumed from the Third Antinomy. What I've called the third and fourth points largely represent two different takes on the significance of a single argument. The real possibility of the moral law is a modal feature of it without the articulation of which it would be unintelligible to us how appeal to the moral law as a constitutive principle could be legitimate. (The problem, briefly, is that without the showing of real possibility we do not know that there could be an object for which the in- . formation at hand would be evidence.) But that it is really possible is implicit in the same considerations that reveal the moral law to be the constitutive principle of our rationality; that is to say, what shows the moral law to be a law shows it to be the law, the constitutive principle, of our rationality. 14 On the preparatory point: Freedom is logically possible. The most expansive version of this argument is that from the first Critique. The minimal conception of freedom (a characterization which, being by negation, does nothing to indicate real possibility 15), what Kant calls its 14 § 13 will make it clear that this way of putting the matter elides certain complications in the story, but they will emerge in due course (and be attended to in Chapter 3). 15 The absence of anything in a representation to determine (bestimmen) an object makes it impossible to say whether the "object" represented has a nature that is really possible. For example, Kant remarks as follows about thinking of objects of "non-sensible intuition:'

I thus merely indicate what the intuition of an object is not, without being able to say what it is that is contained in the intuition. For I have not then shown that the object which I am thinking through my pure concept is even so much as [really] possible, not being in a position to give any intuition

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"negative definition," is that freedom is the property of a cause whereby it brings about its effects independently of determination under natural laws. 16 Now, what must be established is whether freedom, so understood, is even a logically consistent concept (whether "cause independent of natural law" contains or implies a contradiction). What we understand of causal relations in nature is that their necessity rests in natural law (which is to say, in the categories); without natural law there is no content to the idea that one thing is necessalY to the coming to be of another thing. But is there any possible content to the thought of a cause whose necessity does not rest in natural law? That is, is it logically possible that there be a cause which operates independently of natural law? This is the question of the Third Antinomy; as Kant says at the close of the solution to it, "what we have alone been concerned to show, is that ... causality through freedom is at least /lot incompatible with nature."17 In the first Critique, Kant goes to some lengths to establish that there is objective reality to the a priori concept of causality as a necessary connection (between one thing and the coming to be of another) in the deduction of the categories. Doing so involves establishing that, in application to empirical objects, this objective reality derives from the constitutive relation the categories, including cause, bear to empirical objects, whereby an appearance in empirical intuition is given form by the categories resulting in an object conforming to the pure a priori natural laws. The appearance, the unformed (and unconscious) matter of sensibility, contributes reality to the real possibility constituted by the categories (as rules for the synthesis of pure intuition). 18 As cognitions of

corresponding to the concept, and being able only to say that our intuition is not applicable to it. (B 149/163) Also cf A241n/261 on real definition (Realdefinition) and real explanation (Realerkliirung) and see my remarks on 'Bestimmung' in footnote 13 above. 16 See G4461ll4, and C29/29, 33/33,42/44,47-8/49; cf A553/B581/476, A5556/B583- 4/477-8 and A557-8/B585-6/479. 17 A558/B586/479. See, in general, Chapter II of Book II of The Transcendental Dialectic (from A405/B4321384), but on the Third Antinomy in particular, see A444-52/B472-80/409-15 and A532-58/B56l-86/464-79. 18 What I have just described is the upshot of the argument rather than the argument itself, which is rather more complicated. It turns on the categories, together with [lure intuition, constituting what Kant calls an "object in general." This is the form given to the manifold of intuition whereby affection of our sensibility is formed up into an object subject to the (pure) laws of nature. For more on this, see §13.

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possible objects of experience, the categories have both meaning (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung) in virtue of the objects they constitute out of the matter of sensibility. At the penultimate moment of the B Deduction, Kant characterizes the two stages of the argument, one complete and the other just to be commenced: in the transcendental deduction we have shown their [the categories'] possibility as a priori cognitions of objects of an intuition in general .... We have now to explain the possibility of cognizing a priori, by means of categories, whatever objects may present themselves to our senses, not indeed in respect of the form of their intuition, but in respect of the laws of their combination, and so, as it were, of prescIibing laws to nature, and even of making nature possible. (B 159-601170) At the end, then, we can see that it is definitive of 'cause' in its application to empirical objects that it is a certain necessary connection holding between the objects of possible experience (possible empirical intuitions) according to natural law. It is this understanding of causality that gives rise to the antinomy. The antinomy (a "dialectical" opposition of reason to itself) arises from the fact that reason has equally pressing grounds for positing both freedom and the hegemony of naturallaw. 19 The antinomy is resolved by an appeal to transcendental idealism which reveals the logical possibility of truth in both posits jointly by showing that the domain of natural law is exhausted by appearances (phenomena), while there are, in addition, things in themselves (noumena).20

19 Speculative reason "was compelled to assume" freedom (C48/49) in order to resolve reason's conflict with itself. Antinomies arise because of the following principle. "For a given conditioned, reason demands on the side of the conditions-to which as the conditions of synthetic unity the understanding subjects all appearances-absolute totality..." (A409/B436/386). In the case of events intentionally brought about by human beings, one response to this demand is to find completeness in the regress through freedom; the other is to find it in nature's "law of causality." The solution to this antinomy is to see how, understood in the right way, both responses can be legitimate-for this, speculative reason assumes freedom. 20 A531-21B559-60/463-4). See Section 6, 'Transcendental Idealism as the Key to the Solution of the Cosmological Dialectic', and Section 7, 'Critical Solution of the Cosmological Conflict of Reason with Itself', of the Antinomy, A490/B518/439-A507/B535/449, but especially (from 'Solution of the Cosmological Idea of Totality in the Derivation of Cosmical Events from their Causes'),

A543/B571/470f.

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According to transcendental idealism, empirical objects, those things we can experience, are, as we might say, partially ideal: Given that we experience some thing, this piece of paper, say, we are affected by the noumenal and the understanding constructs out of that affection a phenomenon according to the categories. The piece of paper is given in intuition as a spatio-temporal object, having certain characteristics, actually and potentially related by pure natural laws to other objects of actual and possible experience. The noumenal is the material condition of the phenomenal whose logical and metaphysical conditions are the forms of intuition (space and time) and the categories (realized as the pure a priori elements of natural law). Thus, the noumenal, as ground of the phenomenal (and so logically and constitutively prior to the imposition of natural law), is independent of natural law. This circumstance opens up the logical possibility of the concept of cause, of something necessary to the particular given existence of an empirical object, having application independently of natural law: The causes we understand are such by virtue of natural law, but 'cause' does not mean 'necessary connection by virtue of natural law' , nor are natural laws or the objects related by natural law exhaustive of what is. One might say that 'cause' means something closer to 'connection between one thing and the coming to be of another by virtue of a law'; but if there isn't anything but empirical objects, there won't be any laws of things other than natural laws. Freedom is logically possible because there exists something (the noumenal) already standing in the necessary relation of ground to particular empirical objects. 2 ! It is therefore possible that this something could stand in some lawful relation to the coming to be of an empirical object, though it would not be by virtue of a natural law, for natural law holds only among empirical objects. The concept (strictly, thought) of cause has no necessary restriction to the objects constituted by natural law, although in the absence of natural law it lacks, as far as we know, any content, any determination, by which we could understand to what such non-natural causing would amount. In particular, what is missing is a given law to provide necessity to the connection between the cause and its effect; just what natural law does in the empirical case. Of course, due to this very lack, the observation contributes nothing positive toward answering the question whether the concept of freedom

It is important that the phenomenal is not independent of the noumenal, since, if it were, there wouldn't be any relation of law between them; one prior necessary connection evidences the logical possibility of others.

21

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has even real possibility. That a concept is not self-contradictory, and is not logically inconsistent with nature, does not, in Kant's view, ensure that there could be something to which that concept would be applicable. Appeal to that which admits the logical possibility of an application for the concept of freedom doesn't show that there is any actual or even only really possible object for such an application. 22 It is the need to show that there is a really possible use of the concept of freedom that leaves Kant, at the end of the first Critique, still in need, from a theoretical point of view, of a deduction of freedom.23 At this juncture one might reasonably wonder why, having established the consistency of freedom, Kant doesn't just get on with its deduction in the first Critique. But a further result of the theoretical philosophy is that freedom cannot be given a theoretical deduction-a deduction in the manner of that of the categories, which proceeds from conditions on the possibility of empirical objects. The only thing that would give the concept of freedom real possibility from the theoretical point of view is natural law; obviously, given the negative definition, this is not the source, if any, of freedom's real possibility; therefore, there is no possible theoretical deduction of freedom. The result that there can be no theoretical deduction of freedom has been taken to establish more than it does; in particular, it has been taken to show that, on Kant's view, we cannot know that we are free. This is wrong,24 As shown in Chapter 1, in Kant's scheme of things there is a distinction between the theoretical and the practical, but its force con-

22 See, for example, A296n!B624n!503. 23 "The reader should be careful to observe that in what has been said our intention has not been to establish the actuality of freedom as one of the faculties which contain the cause of the appearances of our sensible world ... .It has not even been our intention to probe the [real] possibility of freedom" (A557/B585/479-A5581B586/479). 24 See Chapter 1, especially §§3 and 10. Note that part of the problem here is

connected with the ambiguity of 'to know' as between erkennen and wissen. Kant claims that we cannot theoretically cognize our freedom, not that we cannot know (wissen) that we are free. In the present case, the main problem is with theoretically cognizing, rather than with knowing; freedom means, at least, independence from natural law, but (again) natural law (most fundamentally the categories) is what makes it possible that concepts have theoretical content, so, of course, we cannot have theoretical cognition of freedom. Against this the following might be cited: "Knowledge [Wissen], which as such is speCUlative, can have no other object than that supplied by experience" (A471/B499/427). The

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cerns neither truth nor adequacy of justification. For present purposes it may be viewed as a distinction between the two kinds of cognitions with which reason occupies itself, cognitions about the nature and existence of objects, on the one hand, and cognitions about actions, on the other. There are a priori as well as empirical cognitions of both kinds. Transcendental a priori cognitions are those invoked and shown in pure critique. Transcendental a priori cognitions of the theoretical kind will concern the necessary conditions of the possibility of objects being given in intuition. Transcendental a priori cognitions of the practical kind will concern the necessary conditions of the possibility of the will, of acting. In both, that they are a priori stems from reason and reason's relation to the being (nature) of objects and actions. Practical philosophy, as opposed to theoretical, concerns itself with a priori cognitions about actions. The first Critique's result as it bears on a deduction of freedom means that no appeal to anything about the nature or existence of some object considered theoretically can show that the concept of freedom has real possibility. We may, in effect, be able to get from freedom to something about an object (that remains to be seen), but we aren't going to get from any object to freedom. The deduction of freedom is thus not an appropriate topic for the theoretical critique. It is an open question following the Antinomy whether any appeal to actions might do the job, but a practical deduction offers the only remaining hope, one appropriately pursued in the practical philosophy. Deprived of the a priori natural laws, we need some other law. As we will see, the deduction of freedom turns on the moral law, as a law. Which brings me to one last issue before considering the practical deduction itself.

§13 KANT'S NOTION OF LAW (IN THE THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL DEDUCTIONS) Kant's notion of law is not the one that would come first to mind with most of us and is very much at the heart of the practical deduction. Although the subject was discussed to some extent in Chapter I (see §7), I

German, however, "weil das eigentliche spekulative W iss e n iiberall keinen anderen Gegenstand," says "because authentic speculative knowledge overall [can have] no other object." It is as speculative that it can have no other kind of object.

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want to address it again, more fully and together with some of its textual support. Unsurprisingly, Kant's notion contrasts most thoroughly with the core empiricist notion. In our usage there tends to be an ambiguity in the intended reference of 'law' between the representation and that (in the world) which is represented. 25 So far as empiricists are inclined to recognize any notion of law whatsoever, that notion would be of a representation asserting the generality of some kind of physical behavior or circumstance. Such "laws" are conceived as descriptive only, as characterizing the de facto situation, not the essence of anything. On the empiricist picture, laws express general (even universal) but, in themselves, contingent facts about the world. They are not necessities and they are not thought to characterize any particularly deep or immanent fact about the nature of the world or of things in the world. Indeed, the notion of something's nature is probably inapt on, if not incompatible with, this picture. Virtually the complement of the empiricist's, Kant's picture is basically Aristotelian. On the Kantian picture, the linguistic representations we often call "laws" instead express laws, i.e., necessary structures of the world (or better, the structures of the world necessary for the way it is and all the ways it can be). These will include the fundamental essential facts of physical nature (roughly, what are counted as the most basic and general facts picked out by the theories of physics, chemistry, etc.). Laws, that is the fundamental metaphysical structures of things, have in common two important things. First, they are necessities; second, they constitute the nature or essence (in whole or part) of what falls under, realizes, or instantiates them. For example, various physical laws constitute the essence of objects insofar as they are made of matter (in the physicist's sense); thus, part of what it is to be a material object is to fall under the law of gravity (F=G(m]m/r2», assuming we have discovered the truth in this connection).26 Unfortunately for his reader, Kant shares this ambiguity, but in his case it is because of his idealism. Consider the case of nature. Laws, as what determine the natures of objects and thus in the world, are put there by understanding as it constitutes the empirical world according to its a priori concepts (the categories), which are representations. But they are not representations distinct from what they represent, viz., the pure a priori laws of nature, the very natures of empirical objects. 26 See, e.g., A665/B693/546-7: 'Thus the idea of reason is an analogon of a schema of sensibility; but with this difference, that the application of the concepts of the understanding to the schema of reason does not yield cognition of the 25

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According to transcendental idealism, the pure a priori natural laws represented by the categories are the "form," while the affection of our sensibility (that is, our synthesized intuition insofar as it's being acted upon) is the "matter," of an object: 27 "an object is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united" (B 137/156).28 When the issue is real possibility, the element of idealism can make exposition confusing, but if we ask what it is we know about the transcendental constitution of ordinary empirical objects-this piece of paper, my water bottle-by the completion of the Deduction of the categories, it is this. The object is an appearance. Its fundamental

object itself (as is the case in the application of categories to their sensible schemata)" (emphasis added); also A670/698/550, "There is a great difference between something being given to my reason as an object absolutely, or merely as an object in the idea. In the former case our concepts are employed to determine the object." Laws capture what is necessary to the objects satisfying them. In the case of the categories this is so at the highest possible level of generality for empirical objects. Again, consider Kant's reply to the suggestion that the categories are not themselves laws of nature, but "a kind of preformation-system of pure reason" (B 1671175): "I would not then be able to say that the effect is connected with the cause in the object, that is to say, necessarily" (B 1681175). As for the cases of such empirical laws as that of gravity, note the relationship of these laws and the categories: AI26-7f148, BI64-5/172-3 and A159fB198/195, especially B 165. (Part of A 126 is quoted in the text below at the end of the present section.) 27 By my use of these terms (,form' and 'matter') I mean to convey an Aristotelian idea about objects that shows up regularly in the first Critique. Kant himself makes liberal use of these terms in various contexts, but I believe always with the Aristotelian metaphor in mind. In comparing what I say here to the texts, in particular of the A and B Deductions, it is crucial that one keep track of whether Kant is talking about objects or about cognitions; in the Deductions, it is more often the latter. When he is distinguishing between cognition and the logical form of thought, it will be the object as the matter of cognition that is missing from the thought; e.g.: We demand in every concept, first the logical form of a concept (of thought) in general, and secondly, the possibility of giving it an object to which it may be applied. In the absence of such object, it has no meaning [Sinn] and is completely lacking in content, though it may still contain the logical function which is required for making a concept out of any data that may be presented. (A2391B298/259) Contrast this with the passages cited in footnote 28. 28 See A86/B 1181121, Al 26-71147-8, B 150- 11164, Al 56-71B 1961193 and A234/B286/252, but also note A266-8/B322-4/280-l.

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character, simply as an object, is given by the concept of an object in general, which is to say, by the natural laws represented by the categories. At bottom, the categories (as rules of synthesis) are nothing but our understanding's way of imposing its own transcendental unity on our intuition (and so, ultimately, on our experience). This synthesis gives not an object of perception, but the object in general: a unity achieved by the categories-as form applied to the matter of pure intuition-, which union provides the form of any object possibly given to a being with our forms of sensibiIity.29 Some actual affection of our sensibility (by the understanding itself in the case of mathematical objects) gives us a particular (actual) object (of cognition), an object of perception. The only intuition that is given a priori is that of the mere form of appearances, space and time. A concept of space and time, as quanta, can be exhibited a priori in intuition, that is, constructed, either in respect of the quality (figure) of the quanta, or through number in their quantity only (the mere synthesis of the homogeneous manifold). But the matter of appearances, by which things are given us in space and time, can only be represented in perception, and therefore a posteriori. The only concept which represents a priori this empirical content of appearances is the concept of a thing in general, and the a priori synthetic cognition of this thing in general can give us nothing more than the mere rule of the synthesis of that which perception may give a posteriori. It can never yield an a priori intuition of the real object [realen Gagenstandes], since this must necessarily be empirical. (A 720/8748/581)

The affection of our intuition (our sensibility) introduces the real and actual, the matter of an actual object, into the process of its constitution by the understanding (and it is by virtue of this that we say something real and actual appears to us). Reality, in the pure concept of understanding is that which corresponds to a sensation in general; it is that, therefore, the concept of which in itself points to a being rein Sein] (in time) .... Since time is merely the form of intuition, and so of objects as appearances, that in the objects

29

Cf the 8 Deduction §24 and §26.

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which corresponds to sensation is the transcendental matter of all objects as things in themselves (thinghood, reality). (A 143/8 1S211S4*),0 In the case of actual affection, the result of understanding's synthesis is reality appearing to us as organized by the understanding according to the categories. Since anything which would appear to us is and must be organizable in this way by the understanding and thereby introduced into our single consciousness, any possible object of our experience is subject in this way to the categories, i.e., the categories are the form of nature in general; its matter is our sensibility insofar as it is affected (intuitions), and the material condition of its actual existence is things in themselves (potentially) affecting us. Looked at from this perspective, it is clear that any object's being actual in nature is a function of the noumenal for its (mere) existence, and of the pure a priori natural laws (the categories in the synthesis of pure intuition) for the determination of the kind of existent it is (viz., empirical, an object in nature). It is by virtue of being necessities that constitute the essence of what realizes them (plus one other characteristic I will discuss in a moment) that all of the things counted by Kant as laws are laws, without equivocation or ambiguity.3l And it is in consequence of these features of it, that the moral law is a law in precisely the same sense as are other laws. 32 The Kemp Smith, with Wille, interpolates a "not" so that what cOlTesponds to sensation is "not the transcendental matter" etc. The result is replacement of a sentence we can fit with others of Kant's (cl A 167/B2091202, A 175/B217120S, and A223/B270/24, for example) by one that we cannot. Moreover, the resulting sentence is not only a non-sequitur, it contains no information. 31 On this, note A666-7 IB694-5/54 7-S, especially "since neither of these princi pies is based on objective grounds, but solely on the interest of reason, the title 'principles' is not strictly applicable; they may more fittingly be entitled 'maxims'." Laws properly so called are objective principles. This use of 'maxim' is, of course, the narrow use of that term as well; see CIS- 19/17*: "[Practical principles1are subjective, or maxims, when the condition is regarded by the subject as valid for his own will. They are objective, or practical/aweS, when the condition is regarded as objective, i.e., is cognized as valid for the will of every rational being." 32 It has become commonplace for us to recognize two types of laws, the descriptive and the normative, so-called. According to this scheme, moral laws (however conceived) together with positive laws (laws promulgated by humans upon humans), fall on the side of normative; only natural laws-universal, exceptionless, "mechanical"-fall on the side of "real" laws, the descriptive. By Kant's lights, were there any split of metaphysical significance, it would lie between positive laws and everything else (there is, in effect though not legitimately, such a thing as a positive law that does not have the form of law). 30

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moral law is, according to Kant (as I will show), a necessity constituting the nature of (practical) rationality, reason, the will. But this is to get ahead of ourselves a bit; the point at the moment is that, for Kant, the sense in which the moral law is a law is precisely the sense in which the law of gravity is a law. (Most apparent ditferences between them have to do with what they are laws of-physical matter as cause in contrast with rationality as cause-, rather than with the kind of necessity each is; the remaining differences stem from the fact that the moral law is a pure a priori law, while such special laws as that of gravity are partly empirical in their content.) Some of what I have just said will crop up explicitly in the argument below, but all of it is useful for appreciating what Kant is doing in the practical deduction. There is, however, a further point, and this one is crucial. The reading I oifer depends, in addition, on the following thesis about laws. For Kant, to say that something is a pure a priori law is to say that it detemllnes a real possibility, something that could be or come to be in this world. 33 Inasmuch as pure a priori laws determine-at the metaphysical level-the kind of existent an object is, the possibility of its coexistence with other objects in the world is a function of its being constituted, at the most fundamental level, according to these laws and these laws being co-realizable. When we think or are conscious of these laws, we represent the real possibility of something. To claim that some principle is a law is (in effect) to assert, minimally, that it is compatible with all pure a priori laws, in the sense that it could be co-instantiated, or co-realized, with them. In the case oflaws of nature, Kant's explicit ordering of the special laws under those of the categories makes this condition obvious: Although we learn many laws through experience, they are only special determinations of still higher laws, and the highest of these, under which the others all stand, issue a priori from the understanding itself. They are not borrowed from experience; on the contrary, they have to confer upon appearances their conformity to law, and so make experience possible. (A 126/147-8)34 Now, just as the pure a priori laws represented by the categories determine what it is to be an empirical object, other laws may, in principle, 33

Cf Chapter I §7.

34

Cf B 1651173 and the third Critique Introduction, §IV 179-80/19.

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determine other essences and so constitute the real possibility of other objects. But the problem, especially from the theoretical perspective, is that there is no reason to think that such laws have anything to do with us: Even if such a law were actually given to us a priori, that whieh it determines could not be given, since ex hypothesi it would not be a law for the determination of our sensible intuition and so for the objects given consequent on affection of it (i.e., for the possible objects of experience). More to the point, without the a priori relationship to some pure intuition (and we have only the sensible), it couldn't-on the face of it-be shown that, possibly, there are real objects determined by any such law. Although we might have reason, on the basis of a given law, to think that there is some object really possible by virtue of this law, without showing (as with natural laws) what the relationship of the law to its objects is, there would be no philosophical insight into the real possibility in question. (Indeed, this is precisely what we saw in Chapter 1 to be the situation with respect to the highest good and God in relation to the moral law.) The solution, we will see (in outline below and at some length in Chapter 3), is that given the postulation of noumena, the moral law provides-and can be shown to provide-the (partial) form of an intelligible world just as the pure a priori natural laws provide-and can be shown to provide-the form of the empirical, sensible world. 35 This will seem more feasible if we anticipate and keep in mind two things that will emerge in the solution. First, the object (the will) whose real possibility is at stake here is not an appearance; consequently, exhibiting the constitution of this object out of a priori concepts and a priori matter (some analogues of the categories and pure intuition) is not in the cards, for we, in no sense, bring about this object. Second, the noumenal is to the moral law as pure intuition is to natural law. However, since the noumenal is in no way given to us as things in themselves, it must (in the order of philosophical exposition) be "already" available to account for the matter of a law of which (like the moral law or the transcendental unity of apperception) we are a priori conscious as a "fundamental power."36 Only with some way to indicate a priori the matter of such a law could invoking the law actually count as shedding light on the real possibility of an a priori concept-freedom being the concept of present concern. Which brings up another point. To avoid a possible source of confusion, note that it will not do in this connection to be thinking of the 35

36

See G4541122 and section II of Chapter I of the second Critique 50ffl52ff. The expression comes from C47/48.

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intelligible world "given" in our consciousness of the moral law (see §§20-21, below), as the highest good, the sensible world as it would be under the full force and effect of the moral law wielded by the creator of the world (see §§4-7). The point is not that they are different (see C423/43-4), but that thinking of the latter might suggest that the sensible world itself is to the moral law as pure intuition is to the pure a priori natural laws, and this is not the case. To put the point in the terms of this discussion, the very reason that the moral law ensures the real possibility of the highest good is that the intelligible world, simply as the noumena, is the ground of the phenomenal world. 37 The issue above all others that would serve to make one doubt this solution (however things go in the practical texts) is the role of sensibility and, more narrowly, of pure intuition in the deduction of the categories. More than once, Kant insists that (showing) the real possibility of the categories turns on the availability of sensible intuition to show that the concepts are not empty, "mere forms of thought." Without intuition we cannot "judge of their objects whether or not they are possible" (B148/163).38 But it is the concepts that determine the objects (make them what they are), so why don't the categories alone, say through appeal to their origin in the original transcendental unity of apperception, suffice for their own real possibility-given their origin, they are, after all, necessarily coherent, indeed more, a unity? Putting the question this way, suggests the answer: mere conceptual coherence, coherence of thought (as opposed to cognition), shows only logical possibility, not real possibility. Real possibility requires the possibility of something real realizing the logical possibility in question. And that, in turn, requires three things: (1) unity over and above the coherence of the thought, for an object is a one; (2) a nature, i.e., some content to the thought that determines the object; and (3) some matter to realize that determinate unity. Whether there is actually something real is not an a priori question in Kant's view; particular existence is always given a posteriori. Given an a priori concept, the issue is whether it is possible for any actuality there might be to be an object for that concept: Do our a priori concepts

37 See the solution to the Third Antinomy and §21 below. Indeed, this point seems to be the entire topic of §23 of the B Deduction, BI48/163ff. But note also A94/127, A95/129, AI19/143, AI29-30/150, B 150/1 64, the example of self-cognition at B157-81168-9, and B 165-6/173-4 including the footnote to B166, and so on. 38

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relate to any object? Is it possible to show what this relation to our a priori concepts is? The form of sensibility (time, primarily, but also space) as the form of anything that can be given in intuition provides an affirmative answer to these questions in the case of the categories. Pure intuition itself constitutes a matter for the form imposed by the understanding in synthesis, i.e., for the categories (yielding, in the logically first place, the concept of time as an object).39 Since a priori our intuition is sensible and synthesized by the categories, something could be given us as object and as object it would necessarily satisfy the categories. Therefore, a priori, our a priori concepts of the understanding (the categories) relate to objects. But where does this leave us with respect to laws? The easiest way to see where we are is to proceed with the story toward the pure a priori laws of nature. So, take the concept cause. The deduction tells us that this concept has application in the case of all possible objects of experience; this concept together with the other categories prescribes laws to nature (B 1631172). The Schematism and the Principles spell this out. The former tells us that such application is effected through an object's affection of our sensibility which, necessarily, is organized by the synthesized formes) of (space and) time-making it (them) that which is shared by ("homogeneous with") the category and the concept. This, in turn (according to the Principles), shows that the universal application of the categories to possible objects of experience makes experience itself possible by prescribing rules (the natural laws) to the several objects in possible experience, which rules unify it and make it thereby a possible object, viz., nature. That is to say, nature is the object (the "third something" A1551B 19411 92) in which, perhaps better, in the "production" of which, the synthesis of judgments that express natural laws takes place: the concept of cause applies to every possible object of experience by falling under the rule "is caused by some object" which, together with the laws prescribed by the other categories, unifies the objects of possible experience into nature. Thus, there are laws of nature when pure intuition is synthesized in such a way as to guarantee a system of discrete inter-acting objects, co-realizable as the object of experience, nature. Even in the first Critique, laws represent the necessary content, the essence, of the really possible. If this is so, then a law (as a possible synthetic a priori cognition) presupposes a really possible object (matter as well as unity plus the de-

39

See §26 of the B Deduction, but especially B 160nlI70-1.

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termination provided by the discursive content of the iaw).40 In the case of laws of nature, we show this and show how synthetic cognition is possible by showing the transcendental construction of the "third thing." The understanding uses the categories to synthesize pure intuition and the result is laws of nature. So, now consider the moral law. Suppose we're presented with it as the necessary condition of (rational) activity. We know it's a law, but we know it's not a law of phenomena, because it isn't prescribed by the categories. From the point of view of any attempt to understand how this law could constitute the real possibility of any object, we would be at a dead end, lacking intelligence of its relation to its own matter, were it not for the fact that we have already established a priori the difference between phenomena and noumena. Happily (as we will see), when the problem arises in the practical philosophy, the difference has already been established a priorV' and that leaves noumena as the possibly-so-determined matter (the important thing being that there is something whose a priori credentials can be, or, as here, are already, established to play the role). Given that I am conscious of my (bare) existence in the "I think," and conscious of this law in my activity (which is the law of no object/or me, i.e., of no natural object), it must (partially) determine (an object in) an intelligible world, the existence of which I am conscious of in acting; indeed, of which I am conscious in the "I think". In brief, the moral law constitutes a determinate unity, which, being given in a priori consciousness of our activity and given the distinction between phenomena and noumena, determines a kind of object including that object's real possibility. With this law and the a priori credentials of noumena, we have in hand the promise of practical insight into the real possibility of an object. If this is right, then the moral law is available to provide the a priori concept of freedom with the three things required for showing its real possibility-an a priori unity, specifically determined, and the a priori

Which, thinking now of the moral law, isn't to say that once we have a law in hand there is nothing for philosophy to do. On the contrary, with the law only, we lack the insight that it is philosophy's job to produce. Cf the case of mathematical principles; they are apodictic, but we still require, philosophically, an account of how they're possible (A 149/B 188-91189). 41 That is, at the opening of the second Critique it has been established. At the opening of Groundwork III, it has not, and it must be before the deduction can be pursued. This is yet another feature accounting, in part, for the differences in presentation of the deduction between the Groundwork and the Critique. 40

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possibility of matter to realize that determined unity. Moreover, there is nothing else available to do so, and if we were to propose the moral law as the item among Kant's a priori practical concepts requiring a showing of its real possibility, say via that of freedom, there would be no way at all to proceed. But perhaps that just leads us back around to the worries with which I opened this chapter. If so, we must, nevertheless, suspend further reflection on that matter until §22. In the meantime, we will have to examine the texts of Kant's practical arguments to bear out my contention that the moral law, as a pure a priori law, has in these three respects (necessity, essence, and real possibility) precisely the same status as the pure a priori natural laws. And that the moral law is, therefore, that to which Kant appeals, indeed is the only thing to which he could appeal, to establish the real possibility of freedom. To some extent, however, we have already seen it borne out in the argument for God's existence. If one considers what it is to be a necessity and what it is for pure a priori laws to constitute the metaphysical natures of things, the view is surely coherent. Actual laws are metaphysical necessities which must cohere in such a way as to constitute a worId;42 the pure a priori laws, being the most fundamental, constrain all the others. Moreover, as pure and a priori, the moral law is a principle of reason, just as the categories are, and, as such, all of them must be manifestations in keeping with reason's own ultimate unity. In general, the possible variations in any given law are constrained by all the laws with which it would be instantiated, but absolutely so by the pure a priori laws among which it is, or of which it is only a "special determination." For example, it is quite unlikely that the gravitational constant could take just any value consistently with the other laws of physics, although there may be more than one possihility in a case like this (i.e., in the cases that are a posteriori with respect to some content). "[A]ll empirical laws are only special determinations of the pure laws of the understanding, under which, and according to the norm of which, they first become possible" (A127-8/148). As one ascends in the hierarchy of laws to the more fundamental, to those of most general scope, the possibilities for variants reduce accordingly. The moral law, as (partially) constitutive of reason itself, is perforce the a priori law to which all other laws, including the categories, must conform:

Cf.: "There are certain laws which first make a nature possible and these laws are a priori" (A216/B263/237) and the third Critique, §76 401-2/284-5.

42

88

The Metaphysics a/the Moral Law The concept of freedom, in so far as its reality is proved by an apodictic law of practical reason, is the keystone of the whole architecture of the system of pure, even speculative, reason. (C3/3*)

This is a natural view for Kant to have, given his conviction that all laws are, or are functions of, a priori principles of reason and that reason is a unity. But further support of this view as such is not my present concern. My present concern is rather to show how, in conjunction with a couple of other premisses, this view provides a solution to the problem of proving the objective reality of the concept of freedom. So let me turn now to the deduction.

§14 THE ARGUMENT FOR EQUIVALENCE In both the Groundwork and the Critique, the first result beyond the identification of the moral law (indeed, even before its articulation in the latter) is the equivalence claim: "a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same" (G447/114) or, again, "freedom and unconditional practical law reciprocally imply each other" (C29/29). Presentation of the argument in the two texts is superficially different (see § 18, below), but in both it comes down to the following relatively straightforward observations. If a rational cause is free, i.e., independent of natural law, then what law will govern it? (That there will be one, if some rational cause is free, is a consequence of the actual entailing real possibility and law being what is constitutive of real possibilityas well as of law being what constitutes the cause as a cause.) By the absence of a material condition in any case of freedom, the only possible a priori law of a free rational will is that expressed by the categorical imperative, the moral law; for it is the only possible law without a material condition. 43 And if a rational cause is governed by the moral law, then it is independent of any material condition; so it is independent of natural

The alternative is heteronomy. Taking natural law as our model, it is natural to think that, given "man merely as subject to a law (whatever it might be), the law had to carry with it some interest in order to attract or compel, because it did not spring as a law from his own will: in order to conform with the law his will had to be necessitated by something else to act in a certain way" (G432-3IIOO). Containing a "something else" as the source of determination is for a law to contain a "material condition." This is what Kant calls 'heteronomy': If the will seeks the law that is to determine it anywhere else than in the fitness of its maxims for its own making of universal law-if therefore in 43

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law, i.e., such a will is free. Thus, as Kant says, freedom and morality "are one and the same." Notwithstanding the straightforwardness of the argument, we now know two important things in the light of which the deduction will reveal the significance of certain already established points. First, we know the positive definition or nature of freedom; it is, simply, being subject to the moral law. Second, we have now established the metaphysical condition of moral agency: the moral will is free. From this point in the argument, we are no longer driven by our naive assumption that freedom is necessary for morality; we have shown it to be (and sufficient as well). On a certain formal level, this argument is as unsubtle as it appears: being moved unconditionally is to be determined by a law that is unconditional, but to be moved unconditionally is also to be free, so to be free is to be determined by a law that is unconditional. But this is the place where, if we haven't already, we must come to terms with the notion of a rationl\l cause. "Everything in nature works in accordance with laws. Only a rational being has the power to act in accordance with his representati'On of laws-that is, in accordance with principles-and only so has he a wilf' (G412/80*). "Will is a kind of causality belonging to living beings so far as they are rational" (G446fl14). A rational cause is reason itself as cause, and reason, unlike any other cause, has the capacity for being "self-reftexive"-reason acts on its conception of itself as acting. Rational causes act on "representations of law." In one respect, any representation will do, whether veridical or not. That is, a rational cause requires a principle to act on-there must be something it takes itself to be doing and something it takes as sufficient for doing that; but, assuming that we have this sort of cause, it needn't be right about the sufficiency of its principle. Actual sufficiency is needed only to constitute a cause that works this way in the first place. Maxims, if they exist-that is, assuming that there is any such thing as a rational principle of action-, exist as the sort of thing which can be thought to be a principle (can be thought to be objective) without actually being so; what is subjectively a principle can fail to be objectively a principle. But any maxim which isn't objective, isn't, of course, a law, is not a constitutive principle of the will. The trick of finding the actual principle of a rational cause is to find

going beyond itself it seeks this law in the character of any of its objectsthe result is always heteronomy. In that case the will does not give itself the law, but the object does so in virtue of its relation to the will. (G441 11 08) See also G4441111-12.

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the principle that is itself a law and so constitutive, but constitutive of a cause that of itself can fail to act on (that is, on a representation of) that law because it acts on representations. If there were no law of the will, no constitutive principle of a rational cause, then those thoughts (beliefs, rational dispositions), supposing there were any, which we take to be the maxims of our actions (a) would not be maxims (would not, even subjectively, be the principles of our actions making them to be what they are), and (b) would merely (as on Kant's view they do additionally) conform to the conditions on being "thoughts" or "beliefs," i.e., to the neurological (and/or psychological) laws of human beings.

§15 THE ARGUMENT FOR THE MORAL LAW As we saw above (in § 11), from Kant's point of view, an essential step in proving the actuality of an a priori concept is that of ascertaining its real possibility. In the deduction of freedom, the real possibility of the moral law is what secures the real possibility of freedom. The question of real possibility for the moral law is about whether that to which the principle applies could exist. Can there be a will under moral laws? By the equivalence claim and the fact that there is no theoretical deduction of freedom, this question cannot be answered by appeal to facts specifically about objects (or about some object). So, how can it be answered? Suppose that the view of laws sketched above is correctly attributable to Kant; might it help? The problem of real possibility for a pure a priori principle or concept is the problem of whether that which falls under it could exist (in this world, constituted as it is)-whether it is, in that sense, possible. If laws constitute real possibilities in the sense that some pure a priori principle is a law only if it is co-realizable with any other principle that is a pure a priori law, then, given that the moral law is a law, what falls under it is really possible. The telling question then becomes, how does Kant get that the moral law is a law. In the Groundwork, Kant argued (in each of the first two chapters) that the categorical imperative expresses a law, once from the unconditional good (G40 1-2/69-70) and once from the notion of a universal principle of rational agency (C420-l/88).44 In the Critique, the opening The conclusion might seem more familiar if we think of him as arguing that there is a law, expressed by the categorical imperative, that is the definition of the unconditional good (Groundwork I) and is the universal principle of rational agency (Groundwork II).

44

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argument is set up to lead to an identification of the law that could be the law of pure practical reason, i.e., pure reason in its practical use. The common threads in these arguments are two, that the principle being sought needs to be pure and unconditioned, i.e., a priori (which will be part and parcel with its necessity), and the fact that we are after a principle for rational agency, which is to say, for willings. What is required is a necessary and universal connection between the agent's willing (the conception of its action that is its maxim) and its behavior. Such a connection can be specified by giving a necessary, universal condition on acting on any conception of any action whatsoever. This is done when we see that taking the material end of one's action-or any contingent end-as its sufficient condition must be rejected (because doing so cannot be universal or necessary) in favor of taking the maxim's itself having the form of law as the sufficient condition (this being the only possible universal condition). And, as Kant says, that is just what the categorical imperative expresses: "Act only on that maxim which can at the same time he willed a universal law." This principle is a law because it is universal and necessary; this principle captures the condition on an agent's conception of its action that provides a necessary connection between n;ason and what is done. If Kant thus succeeds, as he takes himself to have done, in establishing that the categorical imperative expresses an a priori law, then it is consistent with all the other laws that what falls under it exists and, moreover, the law itself constitutes the nature of the thing that thus might exist. Since that for which the moral law is definitive of its nature is rational action or reason as agency (the will), the foregoing shows that the will is really possible. Moreover, by the equivalence claim, the will is possible as that to which the concept of freedom would apply. This solves Kant's major metaphysical problem. That is, it shows that freedom has real possibility, and because of this there is a possible legitimate use of the a priori concept of freedom.45 Freedom is not some incoherent,

45 We know this by virtue of the arguments which show that there is an a priori law of rational willing and that the equivalence claim obtains. That is, we know it as of §7 (30/30) in the Critique or as of 447/144 (the establishing of the equivalence claim) in the Groundwork. This is completely straightforward in the Critique, but complicated in the Groundwork by the fact that, although the arguments showing that there is an a priori law have been completed (at 402170 and at 421/1\8), the logical possibility of freedom is up in the air and, lacking any account of the noumenaphenomena distinction, there is no matter available to be given form by this law.

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impossible creature of mere thought and neither is morality. It remains to be seen that freedom and morality are not possible mere creatures of thought.

§16 THE ARGUMENT FOR THE CONSTITUTION OF THE WILL How does Kant show that the moral law has anything actually falling under it? This, of course, is a problem. Obviously, the fact of being free or (indifferently) of being a will under the moral law is not an empirical fact. What is worse, it is not appropriately related to any empirical fact(s) to provide theoretical purchase on the problem of demonstrating its objec-

What seems initially puzzling if this is so, however, is that (apart from covering for the absence of the first Critique in the Groundwork) there should at this point be further work to do (especially if one has, as Kant will claim, a priori consciousness of this law). The response, I believe, goes like this. Kant mostly ~eems to suggest that (especially when one must act) conditions subjectively sufficient for holding something true may be easier come by than those objectively sufficient. But in a priori matters the situation is reversed, and this is, perhaps, the main reason why, in the end, the synthetic rather than the analytic method must be followed in such matters (why, in other words, we need Groundwork III or the balance of Chapter I after §7 in the Critique). It is true that an actual a priori law of morality entails its real possibility and, therefore, its logical possibility. This result can be obtained analytically; however, such argumentation provides no insight into the real possibility entailed. Just as in empirical science an experimental result can tell you that something is possible without being of much use in revealing how it is possible (what mechanisms or laws or whatever allow for the result), there is no reason to expect in the a priori case that an analysis that reveals a certain logical relation (say, that the moral law is the constitutive condition of morality) will lay bare enough to give us an understanding of the possibility we are analyzing. Further, in the latter case, in the absence of such understanding we should be wary of the sort of error on which insight provides a check. Even in the empirical case, one may be mistaken about the nature of what one has experienced in a way that can be corrected by an understanding of its possibility, but here, at least, there is clearly a something that is possible. In the a priori case of analysis, working with a concept rather than an actuality, one must needs be more cautious. Contrary to the twentieth-century tendency in such matters, Kant was, I believe, painfully well aware that concepts are not at all transparent to their holders, that proper analysis may involve a great deal of difficult (and so perhaps error-prone) effort. The only check on this is to have enough pieces of the puzzle to have a picture. The synthetic method, which aims to produce the picture from its elements, trivially ensures enough pieces in succeeding; for without them it simply fails.

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tive reality.46 So what kind of grounds could there be for affirming a connection between it and something extant? The claim is that the essence of rational action, its law, is that expressed by the categorical imperative. In other words, the moral law constitutes the nature of rational action; absent it, no kind of rational agency, good, bad, or indifferent, is possible. Wc have the result that the moral law is constitutive of the will when we have it, by the argument just examined in § 15, that the categorical imperative expresses the definition of the good and the law of rational Willing. Kant takes it that we know from the first Critique that we cannot determine theoretically whether or not some object (in the sense that rational beings are objects-things of a specific kind) falls under the concept of freedom. As an a priori concept, necessarily not applying to any empirical object as such, the resources of theoretical reason to establish so much as freedom's objective reality run out when the incompatibility of empirical nature with freedom is established. Any investigation, empiricalor a priori, of our nature as objects will reveal only conformity to the natural laws that are, as laws of one and the same domain, inconsistent with ffeedom. This appears in the Groundwork as the (fairly ordinary) worry that free actions (as by common sense and the equivalence claim moral actions must be) are unintelligible in a world governed only by natural law. We can begin to understand Kant's response to this worry by considering that we are rational beings and our rational activity, that is the activity that we undertake consciously and deliberately, is a product of reason. What a rational heing is, by Kant's lights, is evident from the various places in which Kant describes maxims and rational willing, especially;47

46 Recall that theoretical reason, in Kant's sense, is the exercise of reason to determine the nature and existence of objects; thus, in his sense, my present efforts at theory interpretation and construction are not an employment of theoretical reason. Because the theory I am here interested in concerns action rather than objects, I am presently engaged in an exercise of practical reason. Similarly, the question whether there is something that the moral law is a law of is a practical, not a theoretical, question. What will establish the actuality of the moral law, and so of freedom, if anything will, is reflection on the a priori conditions of rational action. 47 See also G400nl69, 413n181 and 460nl128 as well as CI8-19/17 and 79/82. Note that against the apparent implication of the opening definition of the Critique, I follow Kant's more general use according to which a maxim may be either subjective or objective, being merely a maxim in the former case, (an instance of) a law in the latter.

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The Metaphysics o/the Moral Law Only a rational being has the power to act in accordance with his representation of laws-that is, in accordance with principles-and only so has he a will. Since reason is required in order to derive actions from laws, the will is nothing but practical reason. (G412/80*)

And the opening sentence of Groundwork III: Will is a kind of causality belonging to living beings so far as they are rational. (G446/l14) A rational being is one whose characteristic behavior is consequent on judgement. Rational action, i.e., the actions of rational beings-us, for example-are what they are in virtue of, and are the effects of, the agent's conception of the given action broadly construed: what is the nature of the bodily movement undertaken? what is its intended effect (the "material end" of the action)? what is the nature of the causal relation between the two? what are the circumstances that call for the effect, make the action feasible, fail to militate against the action or its effect? and, finally, what consideration does the agent take to be sufficient for proceeding in this way? Starting from the remarks quoted above and taking Kant's footnote quoted below into account, this is what one might naturally call an agent's representation of its action and is what is captured in the (most particular) maxim of a particular actual action. A maxim is a subjective principle of action and must be distinguished from an objective principle-namely, a practical law. The former contains a practical rule determined by reason in accordance with the condition of the subject (often his ignorance or again his inclinations): it is thus a principle on which the subject acts. A law, on the other hand, is an objective principle valid for every rational being; and it is a principle on which he ought to act -that is, an imperative. (G421 nl88) A maxim is what a rational agent takes to be the case about its action, whether articulately or not (and whether veridically or not), when it acts-as contrasted with its responding non-consciously or non-intentionally to some stimulus of one sort or another. We do not take a person to be acting, in any proper sense of the word, unless the person has such a conception of why his or her bodily movements are as they are; this is the difference between actions and movements such as reflex knee jerks or sitting up out of a sound sleep when startled by a sudden noise. That

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there is, in fact, some maxim in the case of any rational action is demonstrated by the possibility, in principle, of an agent's providing some kind of answer to questions about what it is doing. If we took some behavior to be a case where, in principle, such questions as those mentioned above could not be answered, we would take the behavior to be something other than rational action. (The "in principle" here is meant to deal with cases wherein, for whatever reason, articulation of answers would be problematic; what is covered are cases wherein the agent in fact had a conception of what it was doing, whether or not it could actually "say" what that conception was. The reasons for my "takes to be" locution are similar; I do not wish to suggest that rational action always involves occurrent, articulate, self-conscious thought.)48 This being the case, there are at least two distinguishable types of "principles" implicated, by virtue of certain judgements the agent makes, in the acting of any rational being: (I) the principle capturing whatever is

48 Needless to say, similar outward behaviors by the same agent at different times or by different agents can have very different maxims, but what exactly will be in any given maxim is entirely a function of what the agent conceives itself to be doing. What the agent would take to be the answer to one of the above questions in a particular case will usually interact with what would be taken to be the answers to others. Thus, for example, what one takes one's action to be in waving one's hands in the air will depend, in part, on what sort of causal connection is conceived to hold between the motion and the intended effect (consider painting a wall as we take this to be done and "painting" by magic; in the former case the agent will take itself to be holding a paint brush and whether or not one actually is will partially determine whether one is painting the wall, regardless of what happens with the wall). Such connections will, in effect, determine whether other things one may know about one's action, e.g., that it is taking place in the twentieth century, are things we should take to belong in the maxim. Facts that, though known, are not taken by the agent to be relevant to what the action is or to why it is being done are not part of the maxim. How determinate the nature of a maxim is, I think, is not a very significant issue and, in any case, will tum mostly on how careful, broad, and insightful a deliberator the agent is. (Where this issue has struck people as wOlTisome is in connection with the CI procedure, so-called, but that is not the present concern. On maxims and the CI, see Barbara Herman's 'Moral Deliberation and the Derivation of Duties', in Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p.132.) In any case, an agent who is honest can elicit a reasonable articulation of its maxim by consideration of such questions as those mentioned above and of various counter-factual hypotheses (depending on what issues arise: other things being equal, would I have done what I did had the following been different-e.g., had I not been in the twentieth century).

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taken to be the general nature of the causal connection between the action and its effect and (2) the principle expressing the consideration that whatever is so taken is to be taken to be sufficient for the acting itself. 49 If the possibility of such a characterization must be conceded in any picture of what it is about, say, human action that makes it the action of a rational being rather than not, then Kant can be seen to be claiming the following. The necessary element in all of this for volition is the judgement (invoking (2)) that such and such is sufficient for my so acting. (Such a judgement is also sufficient for a willing given that it is not made merely in contemplation of conditions for acting that don't at the moment obtain.) But if the only would-be principles of type (2) appealed to either or both the intended effect of an action or any other contingent end of the agent (i.e., if there were no possibility of the sufficiency judgement being true), then we wouldn't have a will and so no particular rational volitions. For such principles cannot be objective, which is to say that such principles cannot be the law of a rational will. And without a law, which is the constitutive principle of the thing, there is no will, no rational cause of action; there is nothing making it the case that one's conception of one's action is connected in any way, let alone necessarily, with what one does. In which case, to say that one "does it" would be to invoke exactly the same kind and degree of agency as to say in connection with an avalanche, "the mountain killed them." Kant's argument does not proceed by considering whether, in the hypothetical absence of rationality, agents might act on contingent, heteronomous principles (merely su~jective maxims). It proceeds by showing that the rational agency presupposed in actions, even those from necessarily subjective maxims (i.e., ones contrary to the moral law) can't exist absent the moral law, because no merely contingent principle could be the constitutive principle of such rational agency (called the will). The possibility of rational action in any sense is a function of the possibility of good rational action, rational action realizing the moral law. This is the force of Kant's saying, for example, that "freedom [and so morality] is the only [condition] on which we can make use of reason

And, indeed, sometimes the latter is what Kant seems to be thinking about in making a certain, slightly narrower, use of the term 'maxim' for the general rule of action being applied by the agent to the particular case, e.g. a maxim of selflove. 49

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in our conduct" (C455/123). If there were no principle that counted as a law of wills, as specifying the nature of a rational cause, then there would be no necessary connection between thought and willing; there would be nothing that was the willing of an action. Indeed, there would be no object, no kind of thing, the wilpo There might be thought and there might be outward motions, but there wouldn't be actions, there would be no motions that are what they are, constituting the actions they do, hecause of the agent's conception of the action as would be articulated in the agent's maxim. In a conception's being a maxim, a willing, is the necessary connection between thought and action. That necessary connection is defined by the moral law. In virtue of what other necessary connection could it be, when we have argued that there is no other necessary connection? when we have said that there is no principle that could be the principle of any rational being's action? In this way, the moral law as constitutive principle of the will is the necessary condition of rational action even when the particular action does not accord with the law. What is argued when "bad" maxims, maxims taking something other than the moral law as sufficient for acting, are deemed inadequate is not that such maxims cannot be acted upon (assuming we are rational agents), but that they cannot be laws of rational willing, they cannot represent the nature of will. But if nothing did, then we would not be acting even on these maxims; for there would be nothing that was the kind of cause that does this, there would be no wills. Admittedly, there is something seemingly odd here if one conflnes one's attention to certain cases of natural law. It might seem reasonable to think that a thing not governed by the law of gravity, in the sense of not behaving in accordance with it, was not a material object, that whatever it was, it was not matter properly speaking. But consider a case that is, in fact, a proper part of the case at issue; consider some norms of good reasoning, for example, the valid rules of inference. Reasoning is the attempt to get to unknown truth by principled consideration of known truth (as willing is the bringing about of action in consideration of the agent's representation of said action and its circumstances). It is only by reference to the possibility of our thoughts being

Against the worry that we got here via arguments whose content is "normative"-what is the good? what ultimately could justify a rational action?--consider that it is the features of the moral law (among rational principles, unique features)-necessity, universality, unconditionality-that make it the law of a free (a rational) cause, as is shown by the argument for the equivalence claim. 50

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related in a way that necessarily preserves truth that we are able to characterize the failed attempts as sti II reasoning. If we try to imagine a "reasoner" for whom there is no possibility of getting from truth to truth except accidentally, we can only do so by covert appeal to the case we know. We can think of this as a reasoner because we can think of it as attempting, though failing, to associate its thoughts by means of truth-preserving rules. If we could not characterize its thinking by reference to this possibility, there would be no way at all to characterize what it is doing as reasoning-good, bad, or indifferent. Except by reference to the possibility of using a truth-preserving rule, there is no way to distinguish the case of using only invalid rules from the case of thoughts randomly associated in time (which is not reasoning at al\). Whether or not something is reasoning depends on the possibility of its appealing to truth-preserving rules in getting from one thought to the next. In this sense, the valid rules of inference are partially constitutive of reasoning-even in the cases that (though they should) do not actually accord with them. This is to say that the faculty of, or capacity for, reasoning is itself constituted by the law expressed or implied by these rules.5l Further, it is by being definitive of good reasoning that they are normative for the relevant range of instances, that we properly say someone ought to have reasoned in accord with them even where they have been violated. Except by reference to the possibility of acting on a maxim that is objectively sufficient for acting, there is no way to distinguish the case of acting on a maxim that is not objectively sufficient from the case of thoughts that happen to be followed by motions (i.e., from not acting at all). The moral law provides the condition upon which a maxim is sufficient for acting and thereby for the possibility of any rational action. If we could not (because there were no principle of so doing) attempt to think and act for the good, there would be no sense to characterizing our reasoning and acting as rational; there would be nothing immoral or irrational because there would be nothing moral, nothing rational at all. The moral law, being the principle or definition of the good, is the

When Kant says that the moral law is the supreme principle of reason (C3/3 and 'On the Primacy of the Pure Practical Reason in its Association with Speculative Reason', C1191124ff, especially 1211 125), I believe that his claim amounts to saying that the law implied by these rules is, in fact, the moral law; the moral law, according to Kant, is constitutive of reason, not of practical reason as distinguished from speculative. This issue is, however, beyond the scope of our present concerns. 51

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highest, the most general, principle of rationality in this sense. In it is articulated the fact that the ultimate rational constraint on good reasoning, and so on reasoning about what we would do, is that what we think and do must be in keeping with the world and not opposed to it. So, by the same argument as that discussed in the previous section, we know that the categorical imperative expresses an a priori condition of rational action. This means not only that no action is truly judged good, judged to be what one ought to do, except by appeal to the moral law. It means that without this principle there is no rational action at all, not even of a mistaken kind. But there is rational action, at least of the mistaken kind. So the moral law has objective reality and actuality. And given that this is so, by the equivalence claim, freedom has objective reality and actuality. Thus (given transcendental idealism), the deduction is completed. Setting aside its studious avoidance of the role of "consciousness" and of the noumenal-phenomenal distinction in making the moral law's claim to objective reality, 52 the foregoing, I take it, is the best available account of Kant's practical deduction. Given it, we are in a position to appreciate what are probably the two most opaque aspects of Kant's argument. First, we can see that, the key issue for Kant being real possibility, the moral law itself must be the linchpin of the argument. Second, we can see that the moral law's role as a constitutive principle not only makes the will or practical reason pmsible, it makes it the kind of cause reason is: namely, something capable of both good and bad actions, something that acts on principle-be those principles good or bad, COfrect or incorrect. But in the final analysis, only the support of the texts themselves gives any reconstruction of the argument claim on our assent. So, it is to the Groundwork and the second Critique that I will now turn.

52 That's

"consciousness" as in "the moral law is ... a fact of which we are a priori conscious" (C47/48) or from the idea of freedom arises "consciousness of a law of action" (G449/l J6). It will be addressed at length in §§20 and 21, in Chapter 3 below.

CHAPTER 3

Texts: Groundwork III and Second Critique I

§17 THE LOGICAL POSSIBILITY OF FREEDOM IN THE GROUNDWORK The already mentioned fact that the Groundwork, unlike the Critique, stands outside the cycle of the three Critiques has important implications for reading Groundwork III and comparing its argument to that of the second Critique. As the foundation for a relatively "popular" work on the normative content of the system of morality (the Metaphysics of Morals), the Groundwork does not presuppose the arguments of the Critique of Pure Reason (though the particular concerns of Groundwork III and the terms in which they are articulated are thoroughly rooted in the first Critique). This fact explains much of what is puzzling about Groundwork III. For to make the deduction as he there offers it intelligible, (at the very least) something must be done to make plausible as much of the doctrine of transcendental idealism as is crucial to the argument. I And the point that is most fundamental is resolution of the apparent incompatibility of freedom with causation according to natural laws, in another guise, resolution of the Third Antinomy. Thus, before any comparison of the main arguments of the two texts can make sense, the aspects of the Groundwork text that address what the second Critique ca(1 take for granted (because already established in the first Critique), especially this question of

1 Which is not to say that one is in a very adequate position to appreciate the force of these elements of the text in ignorance of the first Critique.

]0]

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the logical possibility of freedom, must be identified and dealt with on their own terms. But the seam in Kant's argument between the issue of freedom's logical possibility and the larger problem of Gmundwork III is not always easy to see. At the end of Gmundwork II, Kant has in hand the only principle that can be that which binds us morally, i.e., that which determines both that there are things we ought and ought not to do and that we have a will. He knows that this principle, the categorical imperative, expresses a law (although nothing has yet been made of the implications of this). He has in hand many important conccptual connections: between this principle and the good, and between this principle and other notions central to an adequate moral theory. And he has a conception of rationality. These points are evident in the closing remarks of Gmundwork II. An absolutely good will, whose principle must be a categorical imperative, will therefore, being undetermined in respect of all objects, contain only theform of willing, and that as autonomy. In other words, the fitness of the maxim of every good will to make itself a universal law is itself the sole law which the will of every rational being spontaneously imposes on itself without basing it on any impulsion or interest. (G444Ill2)

But he says that what he doesn't know is how that principle is possible: 2 How such a synthetic a priori proposition is possible and why it is necessary-this is a problem whose solution lies no longer within the bounds of a metaphysics of morals. (G444-45/112 *)3

2 Even at the penultimate stage of the second chapter argument for the categorical imperative, this was announced as the ultimate problem: "We shall thus have to investigate the possibility of a categorical imperative entirely a priori, since here we do not enjoy the advantage of having its reality given in experience and so of being obliged merely to explain, and not to establish, its possibility" (G41920/87). The implied contrast, I would suggest, is with natural laws (or nature itself), whose reality is given in experience, but whose real possibility can be shown or explained only by appeal to the a priori conditions provided by the categories and pure intuition (ultimately the transcendental unity of apperception). (Cf G4551123, quoted beloW.) 3 It should be remarked that 'metaphysics' in this passage is used in Kant's narrower sense; see Chapter 2, footnote 4. By a 'metaphysics of morals' Kant has in

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This question is not seeking demonstration of the moral law as the sole principle of morality nor is it the question whether the categorical imperative expresses (if anything) an a priori condition on rational volition-issues already dealt with, as the first of the above quotations from Groundwork II suggests. The question to be taken up in III is not whether this principle is such a condition, but, again, how, as a synthetic a priori proposition, it is possible. At key junctures as the argument develops, the problem is reiterated; for example, just after the equivalence claim is made: we [cannot] as yet make intelligible the deduction of the concept of freedom from pure practical reason and so the possibility of a categorical imperative: we require some further preparation. (C44711IS) And again, before getting down to the argument in the third section (,The Interest Attached to the Ideas of Morality'): But on this basis we can as yet have no insight into the principle ... that we ought to regard ourselves as free in our actions and yet to hold ourselves bound by certain laws .... We do not see how this is possible nor consequently how the moral law can be binding. (C4S01l17-18; emphasis added in first two instances) Perhaps the best initial take on this is to see it as the question of an attentive and appreciative reader of chapters I and II, who nevertheless feels nagged by what we would call the metaphysics of the situation. 4

mind the systematic, a priori theory of morality in potential application-the complete (a priori) story of the requirements of morality; hence his work, The Metaphysics of Morals. 4 It should be noted that whatever question it is, there is some sense in which it has already been asked and answered with respect to the hypothetical imperative: This question does not ask how we can conceive the execution of an action commanded by the imperative, but merely how we can conceive the necessitation of the will expressed by the imperative in s,etting us a task. How an imperative of skill is possible requires no special discussion. Who wills the end, wills (so far as reason has decisive influence on his actions) also the means which are indispensably necessary and in his power. So far as will is concerned, this proposition is analytic: for in my willing of an object as an effect there is already conceived the causality of myself as an acting cause-that is, the use of means; and from the concept of willing an end the

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This reader agrees that, if there is morality, the categorical imperative expresses its fundamental principle. This reader agrees that, if we are rational agents whose reason is practical, the ultimate constraint on use of that reason is the moral law. Still, the reader worries, how can all of this be real in a world governed by natural law? Isn't freedom incompatible with nature; doesn't the concept of freedom lack (real) possibility? More, mightn't the concept of a cause that causes independently of natural law be a contradictory concept? Pre-theoretically, most people share the conviction that freedom is a necessary condition of morality. If freedom is, in some sense, compatible with nature, what exactly is the relation between freedom and morality? And, given that relation, can the possibility of synthetic a priori moral judgements be explained? Can we have any philosophical understanding of morality's possibility? I take it that the question of the possibility of an a priori concept has two parts for Kant: First, is the concept logically possible? (Though this may be trivial in some cases, in the present case there is a significant prima facie problem.) And second, is the concept really possible? Thus, there are three questions that may be implicated in Kant's query concerning the possibility of a categorical imperative or how it is possible that we are bound by the moral law. As the necessary condition of morality, freedom's logical and real possibilities must be established before we can understand how morality is possible; these are the first two. The third is how the a priori synthesis of moral judgements is possible. Our immediate concern (that is, in this section) is with the first of these. Freedom is a kind of causality; but the only kind of causality we understand is causality according to the laws of nature. Freedom is, if anything, causality independent of the laws of nature. Why shouldn't we take this very formula, the "negative definition" of freedom, to be a contradiction, since causality is a necessary connection and necessary connections require laws and (at least in the empirical case) natural laws

imperative merely extracts the concept of actions necessary to this end. '" when I know that [some] effect can be produced only by such [and such] an action, the proposition 'If I fully will the effect, I also will the action required for it' is analytic; for it is one and the same thing to conceive something as an effect possible in a certain way through me and to conceive myself as acting the same way with respect to it. (G417/84-5; emphasis

added.) See the end of §21 below for the upshot on this point.

Texts: Groundwork III and Second Critique I

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constitute the necessary connections of causality? Clearly, one thing that must be done is to show that, in spite of this, freedom is logically possible. And we must keep in mind that showing a concept to be logically possible does not show how it is possible; the question of its real possibility is a further question and beyond that is a question about the possibility of moral judgement, to which parts of the story we will come in due course. In the texts setting up the problem insofar as it is particularly about freedom, Kant does not distinguish the question of logical and real possibility. Only when the deduction is complete (in the fifth section, 'The Extreme Limit of Practical Philosophy'), does he finally (explicitly) distinguish the more basic part of the problem, that of logical possibility. At that point he connects it to the problem of a "dialectic of reason" and thus, implicitly, to the critique of theoretical reason and to the Third Antinomy;5 All men think of themselves as having a free will. ... This freedom is no concept of experience ... On the other hand, it is just as necessary that everything which takes place should be infallibly determined in accordance with the laws of nature; and this necessity of nature is likewise no concept of experience ... From this there arises a dialectic of reason, since the freedom attributed to the will seems incompatible with the necessity of nature .... (G4551123)

How does the solution go in the Groundwork? Is there, in the Groundwork, an argument which shows that (as Kant goes on to say in the above passage) "no genuine contradiction is to be found between the freedom and the natural necessity ascribed to the very same human actions" (456/123-4)? In fact, shortly following the material just quoted, Kant rehearses the argument, hut it is, in effect, a reiteration of one aspect of what has already been shown in the notorious third section. What it comes down to is this. Freedom is logically possible because there is something standing in a necessary relation to my actions (just as to all phenomena) that is prior to and independent of natural law (viz., the noumenal); thus the domain of natural law does not necessarily

5 See A444-52/B472-80/409-15 and A532-58/B561-86/464-79, especially A53237/B560- 65/464-67.

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exhaust the domain of causality (although the present point does not go to show that it does not, actually, exhaust it).6 In the third section, Kant had given us just enough argument (or perhaps not quite enough without some sense of the first Critique, but be that as it may) to make plausible the distinction between the sensible, with its determination (according to natural laws), and the ground of the sensible as something prior to that determination: One observation is possible without any need for subtle reflexion. .. that all representations [Vorstellungenl coming to us apart from our own volition [Willkiir] (as do those of the senses) enable us to cognize objects only as they affect ourselves: what they may be in themselves remains unkenned [unbekanntl. Consequently, representations of this kind, even with the greatest effort of attention and clarification brought to bcar by understanding, serve only for cognition of appearances, and never of things in themselves. (G450-11118*) That natural laws govern the causal sequence among objects only insofar as they are appearances, appearances of something that occasions them but that does not constitute their empirical nature nor any of their empirical relations, is the element of transcendental idealism essential to the logical possibility of freedom. That this is the force and point of the above brief passage can be seen by comparing it to remarks of Kant's in the solution to the Antinomy. Consider, for example, the following from Section 6:

To be a cause is to be necessary to the coming to be of an object, and given appropriate background conditions to be that which is sufficient for bringing it about (see, e.g., AI44IB 1831185, although allowance must be made here for the fact that he is defining the schema; in general, a cause has an effect in time, but provided it is, as a cause, "subject to a rule," the cause itself need not be in time). It should be noted that I'm relying here on the charity of my (and Kant's) readers to permit the vagueness concerning "sufficiency." The cause is something like, that in particular but for which the actual object in question would not have come to be and given which, in the presence of any of various possible background circumstances, the object would have come to be. It is a familiar point that (setting aside the ex nihilo case) the notion of cause, which involves some notion of sufficiency (it is out of the cause that the effect comes to be), does not presuppose the strictly logical notion of sufficiency (although causal sufficiency and logical sufficiency will collapse in a closed, perfectly deterministic causal system). (Kant, by the way, tends to cover all of this ground-unhelpfully-by talking of necessity in various ways.) 6

Texts: Groundwork III and Second Critique 1

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We have sufficiently proved in the Transcendental Aesthetic that everything intuited in space or time, and therefore all objects of any experience possible to us, are nothing but appearances, that is, mere representations, which in the manner in which they are represented, as extended beings, or as series of alterations, have no independent existence outside out thoughts. This doctrine I entitle transcendental idealism. [[Footnote:] "I have also, elsewhere, sometimes entitled itformal idealism, to distinguish it from ... the usual type of idealism which doubts or denies the existence of outer things themselves."] The realist in the transcendental meaning of this term, treats these modifications of our sensibility as self-subsistent things, that is treats mere representations as things in themselves. (A490-911B518-19/439)7

In neither of these passages do we get an argument that natural law determines the appearances; that is the business of the theoretical deduction. But we do get the point that, assuming such determination, if we take empirical objects to be appearances, there will be something that is a necessary condition of such appearances and that something is not so determined. On the other hand, we get no more than this; we get from this nothing about what, if anything, might actually determine the relation between some such ground of appearances and the appearances (let alone any particular appearance).8 What the first Critique Deduction shows is that to be an empirical cause is to be a necessary antecedent under the laws of nature of the eom-

7 Cf A537/B565/466-7, from the solution to the Third Antinomy (,Solution of the Cosmological Idea of Totality in the Derivation of Cosmical Events from their Causes', Section 9): "If ... appearances are not taken for more than they actually are; if they are viewed not as things in themselves, but merely as representations, connected according to empirical laws, they must themselves have grounds which are not appearances." 8 The official argument for the existence of things in themselves as affecting our outer sensibility is, on one reading, the Refutation of Idealism. But the existence of a subject logically and constitutively prior to experience is an implication of the proof that the self of introspection is mere appearance (the transcendental subject is a necessary condition of experience and is given in the "I think"); see especially §24 of the B Deduction (B 150ftJl64ff). At bottom, however, I am inclined to think that all of this rests on (must rest on) an a priori consciousness of the sensibility of intuition (consider for example A 15/B29/61, A 19/B33/65 and B67-72/87-90); fortunately, investigation of this is beyond the scope of the present endeavor.

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ing to be of a possible object of experience. We do not understand the nature of any causality that is not so related to its effect, for the understanding we have consists in our grasp of the laws as defining the necessity of the causal relation. But more importantly for present purposes, if the objects of possible experience exhausted what there is, then this definition of empirical causal connections would exhaust what it is to be a causal connection; there would be no logical possibility of a cause independent of natural law. The distinction, however, between the noumenal and the phenomenal provides demonstration that objects of possible experience do not exhaust what there is; hence it is not logically necessary that every causality is necessarily related to its effects according to laws of nature. (If this remark suggests some tell-tale ambiguity in 'definition' or rather that it is here used in a sense having no proper bearing on a question of logical possibility, it must be remembered that, for Kant, without content for the necessity---content provided in the empirical case by natural law-the term 'cause' is little more than the empty place-holder for a thought actually applicable to the world; roughly, that is, what Burne thought it was. 9 Returning to the Groundwork, it is the above observation that permits him to rehearse the point, in the fifth section, to the following effect: there is not the slightest contradiction in holding that a thing as an appearance (as belonging to the sensible world) is subject to certain laws of which it is independent as a thing or being in itself. (G457Jl25)

Thus, just as in the first Critique, the logical possibility offreedom turns on transcendental idealism. Natural laws do not necessarily exhaust the possible causal necessities, because "appearance" does not necessarily characterize all the things which might stand in relations oflaw to my actions. The ground of appearance is prior to it in precisely the sense of being independent of natural law and thus provides for a possible nonsensible relatum (namely, the will or reason itself as cause) to bear a necessary relation to action.

§18 THE EQUIVALENCE CLAIM We can now begin looking at the arguments from the two texts which go to support the deduction itself. Though there are many parallels between 9

See Chapter 2 §§ 11-13 for more on this issue.

Texts: Groundwork III and Second Critique I

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the texts, perhaps the most striking is that the crux of the argument offered in both is the case for the equivalence claim. In the Groundwork, the argument for the equivalence is posed as follows: Will is a kind of causality belonging to living beings so far as they are rational. Freedom would then be the property this causality has of being able to work independently of determination by alien causes ... . . . The concept of causality carries with it that of laws in accordance with which, because of something we call a cause, something else-namely, its effect-must be posited. Hence frcedom of will, although it is not the property of conforming to laws of nature, is not for this reason lawless: it must rather be a causality conforming to immutable laws, though of a special kind; for otherwise a free will would be nothing rein UndingJ. Natural necessity ... is a heteronomy ofefficient causes; for every effect is possible only in conformity with the law that something else determines the efficient cause to causal action. What else then can freedom of will be but autonomy-that is, the property which will has of being a law to itself? The proposition 'Will is in all its actions a law to itself' expresses, however, only the principle of acting on no maxim other than one which can have for its object itself as at the same time a universal law. This is precisely the formula of the categorical imperative and the principle of morality. Thus a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same. (G446- 71114*)

Rational action is action on the agent's conscious conception of the action (its empirical nature-c.g., speaking, pushing, cooking-, its intended effect and circumstances, plus whatever makes it the thing to do by the agent's lights); call this conception the principle of the action, that is, its maxim. Assuming rational agency, the maxim will be the willing, the rational cause, of the action; that is to say, when wc describe an agent's maxim in acting, we are describing the will of that agent insofar as it caused the action. Where there is cause, there is necessity, and as with any cause, the necessity obtains by virtue of some law. Now, one possibility, so to speak, is that the law in question is a natural law, but, if so, the action is not free because causation under natural law presupposes the prior determination of the cause (the will) "by alien causes." The alternative is that this cause is a "law to itself." That is to say, the only detelmination the will is subject to is the law which makes it what it is and this law is invoked in and through the very action of the will, so

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that nothing but this cause itself is a necessary condition of its causing. This law must be such as not to presuppose any prior determination of the cause (on pain of being just a natural law after all). Since maxims constitute the causality of thc will in willing, the only such law for rational action will govern those very maxims. Thus, it must be one which takes the lawfulness of the maxims themselves to be that which determines the will (which is to say that it is something about the cause itself, not something alien, that makes it cause the action): It must be "the principle of acting on no maxim other than one which can have for its object itself as at the same time a universal law." To say that an action is free is to say that its law, the law that constitutes the will as a cause, is the moral law. 10 When we compare the text of the second Critique with that of the Groundwork on this point, we find that while the language of the argument is, in each case, taken from the earlier discussion of the text in question, the key features of the argument remain the same. The Critique version approaches the necessity and sufficiency of freedom for the moral law separately, the former first. If "the mere law-giving form of maxims is the sale sufficient determining ground of a will," then: Since the mere form of a law can be thought only by reason and is consequently not an object of the senses and therefore does not belong among appearances, the conception of this form as the determining ground of the will is distinct from all determining grounds of events in nature according to the law of causality, for these grounds must themselves be appearances. If, however, no determining ground of the will except the universal law-giving form can serve as a law for it, such a will must be conceived as wholly independent of the natural law of appearances in their mutual relations, i.e., the law of causality. Such independence is called freedom in the strictest, i.e., transcendental sense. Therefore. a will to which only the law-giving form of the maxim can serve as a law is a free will. (C2S-9/2S*) Recall that in the Critique, Kant opens the argument via the question whether reason, of itself alone, can be practical, and that, if it can, this will be reflected in the possibility of a pure principle of practical rational10 Nota bene, this is not to say that the maxim (i.e., the subjective principle) of every action satisfies the moral law. The maxim (whether it satisfies the moral law or not) makes the action what it is, but only given the will as a rational cause, which requires an objective principle, the moral law itself.

Texts: Groundwork III and Second Critique I

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ity. A pure principle of rationality admits of no grounds sufficient for the determination of the will other than reason itself. By the argument to this point, Kant has shown that such a principle must rely purely on the form of law for the determination of the will. Thus, determination by "the universal law-giving form" points to the same characteristic of the moral law that is rehearsed in the Groundwork through the contrast between autonomy and heteronomy. Independence of determination by the material, by the empirical, is entailed-given determination by the form of law alone-, and that is what freedom is. Turning to the sufficiency of freedom for such a principle, Kant gives us the following. If a will is free, then: Since the material of the practical law, i.e., an object of the maxim, cannot be given except empirically, and since a free will must be independent of all empirical conditions (i.e., those belonging to the world of sense) and yet be determinable, a free will must find its ground of determination in the law, but independently of the material of the law. But besides the latter there is nothing in a law except the law-giving form. Therefore, the law-giving form, in so far as it is contained in the maxim, is the only thing which can constitute a determining ground of the will. (C29/28-9*)

Which means, since the "law-giving form" (the form that makes something a law) of our maxims is the moral law, II that if we are free, we are bound by (constituted by) the moral law. Hence, the equivalence claim. There are two potentially significant differences between the two versions of the argument: the appeal to autonomy in the Groundwork and the appeal to law-giving form (gesetzgebende Form) in the Critique. Is either significant? I think not. Although the expression 'law-giving form' does not occur in the Groundwork's text of the argument for the equivalence claim, the notion of the moral law as constituting the form the having of which makes a rational principle a law (objective) is essential to the argument that the categorical imperative is a law (and so, one might say, is implicitly invoked in the argument). With respect to autonomy, much has been made of the fact that 'autonomy' is the name for the "positive" conception of freedom. But this is the argument which licenses that use, not one relying on it. The inference to the sufficiency in the

II

This is the point articulated in the very next section (§ 7) of the Critique.

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Groundwork relies on exactly what the Critique relies on, namely, that freedom as a causality has a law and that law (which can't be a natural law) must be the law that appeals only to law-giving form; i.e., the law of looking to lawfulness itself ("the universality of law as such") as the condition of action; i.e., the law that 'Will is in all its actions a law to itself'; i.e., the moral law.

§19 THE REAL POSSIBILITY OF FREEDOM Under the present interpretation, the central aim of the argument is to establish the actuality of freedom in us (and thus in all rational beings). As Kant says at the close of the first section of Groundwork III, we need a deduction of freedom. But given this, the equivalence claim can in no way be brought to bear to show the real possibility of freedom unless in showing the moral law's necessary constitutive relation to freedom, freedom is shown to have, through that relation, real possibility. (This is precisely a function of the fact that the equivalence claim is just that-logically, the relation is a bi-conditional, rather than a conditional. Once it is established, what we have at our disposal must already be available through one side or the other of the bi-conditional or be such that it can be shown of either; for we now see them to be one and the same. That it should be available already through the concept of freedom or such that it can, independently of the moral law, be shown applicable to the concept of freedom would ohviate the need for the equivalence claim. Yet, the equivalence claim is by far the most salient feature of Kant's argument.) If, as a law, the moral law captures a real possibility, then its constitutional relation to freedom will show that freedom has real possibility. So how did we get that the moral law is a law? that "I ought never to act except in such a way that J can also will that my maxim should become a universal law" (401-2/69-70) expresses a law? Even though relatively little has been made of it, it is clear that we already have the result to hand when the Groundwork argument for the equivalence claim opens. The articulation of the law under discussion in the argument for the equivalence claim in the Critique is a relatively trivial point to be made as the culmination of the opening argument that there is a principle (law) of pure practical reason (§ 7, C30/30).12 12 Doubtless it is just here that Kant is, as he said he would, relying on the much more expansive discussion of the Groundwork (I and the first half of II) "in so far as that work gives a preliminary acquaintance with the principle of duty and justifies a definite formula of it" (CS/S). Not that we haven't got the gist of it sufficiently rehearsed at the end of the previous section (§6 of the Critique).

Texts: Groundwork III and Second Critique I

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Looking at the Groundwork first, consider, for example (from the end of II), that "the fitness of the maxim of every good will to make itself a universal law is itself the sale law which the will of every rational being spontaneously imposes on itself' (G4441112; emphasis added). How did we get here?!3 There are, in the Groundwork, two arguments to the conclusion that the categorical imperative expresses the moral law. In both cases, the argument proceeds initially by elimination of the class of would-be principles that might be thought to be candidates. Elimination is based upon certain conceptual criteria concerning what could be the moral law (primarily, unconditionality). It then proceeds to articulation of the one principle that can satisfy these criteria. Overall, the argument depends on analysis of moral concepts and is in this respect lacking existential commitment. However, the only (and only implicitly, cf G389/57) initially acknowledged grounds for skepticism prove not to be forthcoming, namely, that nothing coherent should answer to our basic moral concepts. And subsequently, in III, it will be shown (see § 17 above) that we have not, as we might have worried, been dealing with a principle whose necessary condition (viz., freedom) is logically impossible. Together, this shows that the moral law is indeed the constitutive principle of our actions, of which we are a priori conscious in acting. 14 Behind all of these arguments, as I have urged above, lies Kant's conception of rational agency. Articulated many times, one of its more elegant expressions appears in the argument for God's intelligence (see Chapter 1, §2): Now a being which is capable of actions by the representation of laws is an intelligence (a rational being), and the causality of such a being according to this representation of laws is his will. (CI25J130*)15

13 And if we are here, why aren't we done? In a way, the answer is that, equivalence claim in hand, we are done, we just don't know it yet. But see Chapter 2, above (especially §11), and §§20-21, below: The philosophical objective is as much to achieve insight into the fact-how it is possible-as to establish the fact simply as fact. 14 See §§20 and 21. 15 Ct, again, G412/80*: "Everything in nature works in accordance with laws. Only a rational being has the power to act in accordance with his representation of laws-that is, in accordance with principles-and only so has he a will. Since reason is required in order to derive actions from laws, the will is nothing but practical reason." Also note G400-J/68-9.

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This is to say that an essential feature of rational agency is the capacity for reflection. The way in which a rational being acts on the laws to which it is subject (as rational) is through the representation of those very laws. With this in mind, we turn first to the "negative" part of the argument from Groundwork I. And we can begin with a properly trivial observation. Moral actions are good actions, actions for the good. Kant opens the Groundwork by considering what could be the ultimate good: What, if anything, could be the condition of any conditional good's being good, which condition is good of itself and independently of any condition? "It is impossible to conceive anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without qualification, except a good will" (393/61). But in what does the goodness of the good will consist? "A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes-because of its fitness for attaining some proposed end: it is good through its willing alone-that is, good in itself' (394/62). A will acts. What makes a willing good? What, if anything, ultimately makes the good will's actions truly choiceworthy, truly to be done, truly good? That the purposes we may have in our actions, and also their effects considered as ends and motives of the will, can give to actions no unconditioned and moral worth is clear from what has gone before. Where then can this worth be found if we are not to find it in the will's relation to the effect hoped for from the action? (G400/68; emphasis added)

Only, he tells us, something in the act itself, something in the act as it is chosen, something in the act as it is willed: It can be found nowhere but in the principle of the will, irrespective of the ends which can be brought about by such an action; for between its a priori principle, which is formal, and its a posteriori motive, which is material, the will stands, so to speak, at a parting of the ways; and since it must be determined by some principle, it will have to be determined by the formal principle of volition when an action is done from duty, where, as we have seen, every material principle is taken away from it. (G400/68)

No material principle can be the ultimate condition of the will's willing being unconditionally good. We can sketch the argument to this point as follows.

Texts: Groundwork III and Second Critique I

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It is the agent's maxim that is captured by the description of the "action as it is willed."16 The maxim is the agent's conception of what it is doing and why it is doing so. Consequently, what, according to the agent, makes the action choiceworthy will be captured in the maxim. If there is something which could make it true that the action is choiceworthy, the unconditioned condition of the goodness of that action, it would have to be something that could be captured in the agent's maxim. If there is no such thing, no ultimate, unconditional good, then there could be no truth to an action's claim to choiceworthiness; there would be nothing that could make the action good. What we need is a definition, in Aristotle's sense, a principle capturing the essence of the unconditional good. l7 When we consider the things an agent might take to be making its action choiceworthy, i.e., good, we can quite quickly see that most of them are not even prima facie unconditional. The easiest way to see this, perhaps, is by noting that unconditional implies universal: If something were good for me and not for you, good for one rational agent and not for another, good in one circumstance and not in another, it could not be ultimately and unconditionally good, for some condition is restricting it to my case or your case or the kind of case at hand. Something unconditionally good is good wherever it is found, whatever the circumstances (and, moreover, this is so necessarily; the universality is not merely contingent). The most helpful example here is to consider what many would think of as standard grounds for taking an action to be choiceworthy. Suppose that I want something, a glass of wine, say. I might take the fact that I have this desire as sufficient reason for getting up and going to the kitchen for a glass of the red wine that is there. Under other circumstances this might even be a plausible account of what I took to be sufficient for getting myself the glass of wine. But tonight I am tired and writing against a deadline, and I know that the last of my ability for work

16 The phrase is Barbara Herman's from the reading she gives of Groundwork I in "Leaving Deontology Behind" from Barbara Herman" The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p.217. As will be evident to anyone familiar with it, in the present treatment of Groundwork I, I am heavily indebted to Herman's work. 17 Note that this sense of 'definition' corresponds to one of Kant's uses of '8estimmung', which I have rendered everywhere as 'determination', but which often expresses just this notion of definition. See footnotes 13 and 15 in Chapter 2.

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would be gone with the drinking of that wine. Tonight I could only go pour the wine and drink it in a fit of (tempting) irrationality. I would have to give up my aim of finishing these changes (not a live option given the deadline) or "forget" that, when I am tired, red wine makes me sleepy. These circumstances condition the possibility of taking satisfaction of my desire for wine as a good, sufficient to make my going and getting it a choiceworthy action. Now, even though we account, perfectly adequately in many circumstances, for the fact that someone went for wine by noting that she wanted wine, a little reflection shows that desire or satisfaction of desire is not, and could not be, an unconditional good. Albeit usually only implicitly, we always subject our actions to a complex net of conditions on what is sufficient for acting in the contemplated way in the given circumstances. (When we accept as a reason for action such remarks as ''I'm going to the kitchen because I want a glass of wine," we standardly take ourselves to be in agreement with the agent that this complex of conditions is satisfied in the circumstances, so that the action is permissible; we wonder only what occasioned it.) Kant's thought is that there will be no truth in any such judgement absent an unconditional good, and no contingent state, desire, or end of an agent's is a candidate unconditional good; no principle appealing to any contingent "good" can define the unconditional good if there is one. Only a law, a necessary universality, which moreover neither rests on nor contains any further condition, can define the unconditional good (if there is one). Only something which is conjoined with my will solely as a ground and never as an effect-something which does not serve my inclination, but outweighs it or at least leaves it entirely out of account in my choice-and therefore only bare law for its own sake, can be an object of reverence and therewith a command. (G400168) To say, in Kant's phrase, that an action is "done from duty" is to say what it is about the willing of the action that makes it good. Only if that which determines the action is the unconditional law, is the action actually good, actually choiceworthy. It is this, then, that is being explicated. Now an action done from duty has to set aside altogether the influence of inclination, and along with inclination every object of the will; so there is nothing left able to determine the will except objectively the

Texts: Groundwork III and Second Critique I

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law and subjectively pure reverence for this practical law, and therefore the maxim of obeying this law even to the detriment of all my inclinations. (G400-40l/68-9)

In Groundwork I, these considerations lead to the following: Therefore, nothing but the idea oftlte law in itself, which admittedly is present only in a rational being-so far as it, and not an expected reSUlt, is the ground determining the will--can constitute that pre-eminent good which we call moral, a good which is already present in the person acting on this idea and has not to be awaited merely from the result. But what kind of law can this be the thought of which, even without regard to the results expected from it, has to determine the will if this is to be called good absolutely and without qualification? Since I have robbed the will of every inducement that might arise for it as a consequence of obeying any particular law, nothing is left but the conformity of actions to universal law as such, and this alone must serve the will as its principle. That is to say, I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my ma.'(im should become a universal law. (0401-2/69-70) A "particular law," say, given that this would (probably) contribute to one's happiness, act so as to bring it about, or given that one is affected in this way, one will act thusly, makes the action, makes the "goodness" of the action, conditional on the specified particular (material end or inclination). In such cases the law that would determine action is itself subject to the particular condition. Act only "in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law" is an unconditional condition on the choiceworthiness of action. Neither my desires, nor the immediate effects of my action, nor any further consequences of it constitute the final determination of what I do; only the form of the action, including the very principle of its determination, determines what one does when one acts from duty. And, by the earlier part of the argument, the above principle is the only principk that could do this as an unconditioned condition on rational action; any "material principle," as Kant calls it, any principle which appealed to something other than the form of the agent's maxim itself, would thereby be condi-

tioned. In Groundwork II, Kant gives a closely parallel argument which cul-

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minates at 420 in the same final set of moves. He has proceeded this time by considering the possibility of a principle of rational action that could be the principle for any rational being; a fact appeal to which would provide any rational being with justification. Again, the necessary universality, the unconditionality, required for being such a principle gets us to what Kant now names the categorical imperative: if I conceive a categorical imperative, I know at once what it contains. For since besides the law this imperative contains only the necessity that our maxim should conform to this law, while the law, as we have seen, contains no condition to limit it, there remains nothing over to which the maxim has to conform except the universality of a law as such; and it is this conformity alone that the imperative properly asserts to be necessary. There is therefore only a single categorical imperative and it is this: 'Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law' . (G420-21/88) Now, we know by these analyses that there is a law that is the definition of the unconditional good which moral agents strive to satisfy in acting for the good, and that this law is the one principle upon which any rational being as such could act. That these arguments show the categorical imperative to express a law may be further addressed by the following reflection on the Groundwork II version of the argument. If we notice the slightly odd construction of the central claim on 421besides the law this imperative contains only the necessity that our maxim should conform to this law, while the law ... contains no condition to limit it, there remains nothing over to which the maxim has to conform except the universality of law as such -we might ask: Since the reference is not anaphoric, what is "the law"? what does it mean to say that "the law ... contains no condition to limit it"? And we might consider the possibility that "the law" here, this peculiarly empty, perfectly general law, is simply the most general, formal condition of law (of being, even), something like the fact that everything must be such as to conform to law, that everything must be such as to cohere with all the necessities. (Hence, the necessary "universality" of law.) And this, being without "condition to limit it," applies to our max-

Texts: Groundwork lJI and Second Critique I

II9

ims as to everything else. ls The effect is that the structure governing . maxims of our actions simply makes them instances of what is true in general. Thus, the categorical imperative expresses a law: the law that our maxims of action are subject to law. (This would, of course, be a wholly pointless observation to make in any context but that of rational agency, since, though trivially true, it would be without significance absent the more specific laws to which other kinds of things are subject. In our case-that of rational agents-, the law is acted upon by our having a representation of it to which we can conform, or not, the material of our would-be undertaking. With respect to its behavior vis-a-vis other masses, a rock, say, conforms to law by conforming to the law of gravity and no reflection is required on the part of the rock to get it to do so; there is no representation the content of which can be affected by reflection on the law that this representation must have the form of law.) Although in the Preface to the second Critique Kant says that he relies on the Groundwork to establish a "definite formula" (e8/8) of the moral law (i.e., the arguments of Groundwork I and II), in effect, the second Critique begins where the first Critique leaves off (rather than where

18 The natural worry to have at this point has perhaps (l hope) been allayed at least somewhat by Chapter 2 above. Nevertheless, it is as well to keep in mind the prima facie mysteriousness of saying that the principle we seek is one which says that everything must conform to the conditions of being while it is to be invoked precisely to censure certain things which are (viz., our merely subjective maxims) on the grounds that they do not-in the relevant way--