The Reciprocity Thesis in Kant and Hegel

Abstract

Following Henry Allison's terminology in his book Kant's Theory of Freedom I shall take the reciprocity thesis to be the thesis that morality and freedom are reciprocal concepts. To be free, the reciprocity thesis claims, is to be subject to the demands of morality; to be subject to the demands of morality is to be free.Despite quite different understandings of the domains of ethics and morality, Kant and Hegel both affirm versions of the reciprocity thesis. Kant's best known statement of the thesis can be found at the beginning of Chapter III of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: “a free will and a will under moral laws”, he asserts, “are one and the same. Consequently if freedom of the will is presupposed, morality, together with its principle, follows by mere analysis of the concept of freedom”. This assumption of reciprocity is an explicit premise in the subsequent argument that, since a rational agent must take himself to be free, he must consider himself subject to the moral law. And it reappears again in the Critique of Practical Reason's reversal of this argument, which claims that, since a rational agent has a sense of himself as subject to the moral law (the so-called “fact of reason”), he therefore has a consciousness of his freedom. Finally, it is worth noting that something like the reciprocity thesis underlies much of the argument of Chapters I and II of the Groundwork as well as the opening arguments of the second Critique: for in these texts Kant frequently moves directly from the proposition that the moral will must be determined independently of all of its desires and inclinations (it is free) to the conclusion that it must be subject to the moral law.