Kant’s Argument for Radical Evil

Abstract

Kant's doctrine of radical evil - which holds that human beings, as a species, possess an innate propensity to evil - has long been viewed as a scandal to his admirers and a stumbling block to scholars trying to piece together his argument in favor of the claim. To his admirers, the scandal stems from Kant's apparent endorsement of the Christian view of original sin, with all of its allegedly misanthropic consequences. To scholars, the stumbling block comes from the indecisive way in which Kant attempts to establish the doctrine. For example, just at the point in the Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone where we would expect Kant to provide a deduction supporting his view, he changes course and claims, 'We can spare ourselves the formal proof that there must be such a corrupt propensity rooted in the human being, in view of the multitude of woeful examples that the experience of human deeds parades before us' (R 6: 33).1 Indeed, the alleged formal proof is not just 'spared' in the sense of postponed; it is 'spared' in the sense of left out of the text entirely. To many, this indecisiveness has suggested a general lack of confidence in the view on Kant's part, and has led to a willingness to regard his treatment of radical evil as an odd, perhaps even neglectable, exception to his overall ethical project. Paul Guyer is typical: 'In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone [Kant] seems to go too far by assuming that evil-doing is not just possible but even necessary.... This doctrine hardly follows from Kant's previous argument, and seems instead to rest on an odd mixture of empirical evidence and the lingering grip of the Christian doctrine of original sin. '2 In this paper, I will argue that despite the indecisiveness of Kant's argument, the doctrine of radical evil is in fact consistent with - and indeed is perhaps a natural extension of his established views on human freedom, the moral law, and moral culpability. To make this case, I will attempt to show that the doctrine of radical evil is grounded in what (following his own usage) I will refer to as Kant's anthropological analysis of the human person (see, e.g., R 6: 26). By an anthropological analysis, I mean Kant's account of the different capacities human beings possess - e.g., their capacity for reason, their capacity to be affected by bodily needs and inclinations, and so on - as well as the ways in which these capacities develop in human beings over the course of their lives (MM 6: 217). It is only in light of these anthropological facts, I will argue, that the doctrine of radical evil can be properly understood. Despite certain well-known passages in the Groundwork in which Kant groups together 'anthropological' and 'empirical' approaches,3 before proceeding it is important to recognize that in the majority of his work Kant carefully distinguishes