Freedom as the Guarantor of the Possibility of the Highest Good

Abstract

The chapter articulates the following problem: given all that Kant’s notion of freedom, and the intelligible realm can achieve, what precisely is the role of God? That is, what do we need God for? And then, even if we have identified a role which God is expected to fill, there is the further question of whether God can fulfil this role, consistently with Kant’s wider commitments. It is suggested that God either seems to be ‘too much’, or ‘not enough’: ‘too much’, in that God can seem redundant, given all that is achieved by the notion of freedom, and ‘not enough’, in that, were God needed to make up some sort of deficit in our moral status, this would seem to violate Kant’s restrictions on human freedom, which is always ‘all or nothing’, such that all our free actions must come as a first cause from ourselves, and ourselves alone. This is a problem that threatens the cogency of Kant’s ‘moral proof’, which is to say, his understanding of the relationship between the highest good, happiness, and the existence of God.