Kant’s Moral Grounding of Free Will

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter examines Kant’s deduction of noumenal freedom of will from the moral law in (chiefly) the Critique of Practical Reason. It argues against the common view that Kant allows only for rational faith (Glauben) that we have noumenal freedom of will: rather, we can know (wissen) with objective certainty that our will is transcendentally free. This is because we have normative-practical knowledge of the moral law as the foundational axiom of all practical cognition, and because we know that transcendental freedom of will is a necessary real condition for the existence of the moral law. Hence, we can knowingly infer that our will is transcendentally free. The chapter considers how Kant can defend the individual steps of this argument against various objections, such as the claim that Kant’s appeal to moral knowledge fails because it ignores the problem of moral skepticism. It further examines whether Kant’s view that we can know the existence of free noumenal causes is compatible with his critical epistemology and his appeal to noumenal ignorance. Although Kant’s position can be defended against some standard epistemological worries, it must face the concern that practical reason oversteps its boundaries when it posits free moral agents as the specific noumenal causes of natural events.