Kant and the struggle against evil

Abstract

Kant held that the moral vocation of the human species was to strive toward moral perfection. But in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, he at least entertained as part of the human condition a rationalist version of the Christian doctrine of original sin: that human beings have a universal, innate and inextirpable propensity to evil. Are these two Kantian doctrines inconsistent, or at least in tension with each other? If they are, the tension is a creative one. This chapter will explain the Kantian doctrine of the radical human propensity to evil and relate it to Kant's theory of the acquisition of virtue and the struggle toward moral perfection. We will see that this struggle for Kant must be social, not merely individual, and that it involves both the development of moral character and the cultivation of empirical inclinations that harmonize with morality.