KANT. Kant (1724-1804) stood in awe of the starry heavens above and the moral law within. But the mechanism of the one seems to conflict with the freedom of the other.
Since empiricism results in skepticism (q.v.), as Hume so clearly showed, knowledge is possible, Kant held, only because sensory content is molded or formed by a priori categories. One of these categories is causality. Therefore whatever we see, whatever occurs in time, must be causally determined. Scientific law is inviolable and human bodies are as mechanical as the starry heavens.
However, morality, obligation, or duty is as irrefragable a fact as any scientific law. Moral imperatives are also categorical. To explain:
Moral law is a priori and cannot be deduced from experience. An empirical morality would be hedonistic (cf. Hedonism). But if pleasure were the end of action, the end would justify any efficient means. Yet means as much as and even more than ends are subject to moral praise or blame. Further, if doing right depends on calculating future consequences, only the most intelligent would have a chance of being moral. Even they would have little chance; and surely morality ought to be within the reach of all. Therefore moral laws must not be degraded into the hypothetical imperatives of prudence, calculation, or science. They cannot be empirical. Moral laws are categorical imperatives.
The test of a moral law is necessity and universality. Suppose someone, in order to avoid embarrassment, considers making a promise with the intention of breaking it. This is wrong because it involves a logical contradiction in our will. If all broke their promises, there could be no promises because promises depend on the universal principle that they are made to be kept. The contradiction is that this man recognizes the universality of the principle (since he makes a promise) and yet intends to make an exception. Moral law therefore is categorical, a priori, universal, and necessary.
The fundamental law of morality is, "Act in conformity with that maxim and that maxim only which you can at the same time will to be a universal law." Particular duties, like telling the truth, are special applications of this fundamental law.
The motive of a moral act must be reverence for law. The only think that can be absolutely good is a good will. Other things, money and even health, may sometimes be bad. A will is good if it is motivated by reverence for law. A will motivated by pleasure, by a desire to produce some result, or by anything other than reverence for law is not a good will, even if the act is objectively moral.
This system of morality requires the transcendental presuppositions of God, immortality, and freedom. Though desire for happiness is immoral, a good world must find them combined; and only God can guarantee the coincidence of virtue and happiness. Next, moral progress to the goal of perfection is an infinite process; therefore man must be immortal. But the more serious problem for morality is freedom.
The category of causality, an a priori form of the mind, compels us to construct out of chaotic sensations a world in which every temporal event is the effect of a cause. Not only bodily motions but desires, inclinations, psychological events also are subject to mechanical law. In such a world freedom is impossible.
But the categorical imperative of morality is an undeniable, a priori fact. And from this fact freedom can be deduced. Here then is the problem: Are not mechanism and freedom contradictory? The very possibility of knowledge requires mechanism. The very possibility of morality requires freedom. Must not Kant discard one or the other?
Kant's solution lies in the existence of two worlds. The mechanical world of space and time, the world we "see," or, rather the world we construct by imposing our forms of perception on sensory stimuli. In this world there is no freedom.
However, there must be another world. Since what we perceive are phenomena or appearances, since the sensory stimuli must come from somewhere other than our minds - only the forms come from the mind - the must be a world of noumena, a world of things-in-themselves, of things as they do not appear. To these things the category of causality cannot apply, for the categories are imposed only on appearances. This implies, to be sure, that we cannot know things as they are in themselves, for knowledge is a composite of form and content. The things-in-themselves have no form.
God may also be a resident of the noumenal world; though there is some doubt here. Kant had said that God, or at least the idea of God, is necessary to morality. On the other hand, he also said that God is not a constitutive idea (an existent component of the universe), but a regulative idea. That is, God is a rule of conduct. At any rate, God cannot be known; and someone has quipped, We cannot know there is a God, but we must live as if there were one.
Another resident of the noumenal world is the more closely connected with ethics, namely, ourselves. Hume has described the empirical self, not as a soul-entity, but as merely a collection of images. Kant insisted that a collection requires a collector. Therefore behind the empirical self stands a self-in-itself, a transcendental self, a noumenon. Unknowable, of course.
Now, if freedom and mechanism were both attributed to one world, we would be enmeshed in contradiction. But no contradiction arises if the empirical self in the world of space and time is mechanically determined, and the noumenal self is free.
But though this is not a formal contradiction, a difficulty in application arises. A particular act of theft, i.e., the visible, temporal motions of surreptitiously putting your friend's credit card in your pocket, is a mechanical necessity of the causal world. It is inevitable; it cannot be otherwise; it is devoid of freedom. This, however, is only the appearance or phenomenon of theft. The theft-in-itself, the noumenal theft, could occur only in the noumenal world where we are free. Hence the theft-in0itself could have been avoided, but the appearance of the theft could not have been avoided.
Kant sagely concludes: "While therefore it is true that we cannot comprehend the practical unconditioned necessity of the moral impulse, it is also true that we can comprehend its incomprehensibility; and this is all that can fairly be demanded of a philosophy that seeks to reach the principles which determine the limits of human reason (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morality, Chap. III, end).
Gordon H. Clark
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