Freedom as the Guarantor of the Possibility of the Highest Good

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.

The Moral World

This chapter shows how central it is, for Kant, that the concept of God only comes downstream from, and after, the possibility of belief in the ‘moral world’. This moral world is the realm of freedom, wherein autonomy is possible. Only if (deterministic) space and time do not go ‘all the way down’, are freedom, and autonomy, possible. If space and time are ‘things-in-themselves’, Kant asserts, ‘then freedom cannot be saved’ (A536/B564). Only if there is a dimension of reality beyond mechanism, is end-setting, and so autonomy, and the highest good possible. Not even God could achieve the highest good in a universe without end-setting, and without freedom, because this universe would be a sort of ‘desert’ with no ‘inner value’. The sequence of thought we find, both in the second Critique, and in other texts is this: first of all, Kant identifies a need for happiness in proportion to virtue; then Kant identifies the obstacle to the realization of such happiness, which is the mechanistic and deterministic structure of nature; and then Kant moves to the solution, which involves leaning into the realm of freedom, which realm includes God. The significance of the third phase in the progression of thought (the realm of freedom) has not been sufficiently considered, it is argued, when considering the Kant’s ‘moral proof’, and the relationship, for Kant, between morality, the highest good, and God.

The Two Highest Goods

The chapter argues that we can construe the relationship between Kant’s account of the moral law and God as a type of concurring moral dependence, on the basis of formal causation, such that the very activity of willing the moral law is a type of participation in the uncreated divine mind. In the end, morality does require divinity, and, even, a (carefully specified) type of divine activity, albeit that we do not arrive at this commitment through a traditional acceptance of the categories of revelation and faith. It is argued that there is a defensible sense of the notion of ‘divinity’ that Kant can be said to have warrant to believe in, given his assumptions about freedom, although it is a rather different sort of divinity from the ‘divine being’ of philosophical (let alone Christian) theism. I suggest that in his final fragmentary writings, Kant might be said to show some awareness of this. This interpretation throws a new light on Kant’s conception of the Kingdom of Ends, whereby the happiness that constitutes the highest good can be construed as an enactment of divinity, through willing the moral law, rather than the contemplation of a divine being.

God as an All-Knowing Distributor of Happiness

This chapter investigates Lawrence Pasternack’s interpretation of God’s role in Kant’s philosophy, in relation to the concepts of morality, divine action, and grace. Pasternack praises what he finds to be a consistent strand of Kant’s soteriology, where God acts as a cognizer of our moral status, whereby God distributes happiness proportionately, when integrating and coordinating a moral world. It is conceded that such a role has two satisfactory features: it is something that God can do, consistent with our freedom, and it is something only God can do, it would seem, given God’s omniscience. Pasternack claims that even if Kant’s account departs from traditional Christianity, it nonetheless ‘offers us a coherent, consistent, unified, and intellectually mature way of thinking about sin, faith, salvation, and worship’. I argue that even if the coherence and significance of Kant’s soteriology is granted, we are still not yet presented with persuasive grounds for being required to believe in God, given all that is achieved by Kant’s noumenal intelligible realm, and given Kant’s principle of parsimony, which involves not believing in more than we need to, for the purposes of practical reason. For all we know, it still seems perfectly ‘thinkable’ that the noumenal moral realm of reasons, taken in itself and ‘without God’, is such that the highest good is possible. It is argued that this possibility could remain thinkable for Kant, even when reflecting upon natural evil.

Does Kant Need Grace?

This chapter examines the claim made by John Hare, amongst others, that Kant requires God to act in order to achieve our salvation/transformation to virtue, but that, for various Kantian reasons, God is unable to act. At the heart of this interpretation is a sense that Kant has a notion of original sin, or natural depravity, such that his system requires grace, in a doctrinally narrow and significant sense, but that, at the same time, Kant is unable to make use of this concept. So, the claim is that Kant is committed to, or requires, aspects of Christianity, but that tensions arise in his philosophy, owing to his account of freedom, in relation to morality and the highest good. Kant’s account of human freedom is such that he cannot make the use that he needs to of Christian theology. It is argued in this chapter that this is a mistaken interpretation, and that Kant has no need for a concept of ‘grace’, in the narrower doctrinal sense of that concept, where grace is required to restore us from original sin, and to bring us to the love and knowledge of God in the beatific vision.

God and the Good

This chapter studies Kant’s dramatic rupture, both with his own earlier position about the highest created good, and with any theological or philosophical tradition that he would have received (from scholastic or Lutheran sources). The unconditioned, that which is all-sufficient for practical reason and the will, is not, as it would be for traditional Christian theology, loving and knowing God. Pivotal here is Kant’s rejection of any ‘external object’ for the will and practical reason. Rather, the unconditioned, for Kant, is the will itself, in its activity of rational willing, or, as Kant puts it, the ‘good will’. Kant is convinced that only in this way is genuine human freedom protected.

Kant’s Consistency

This chapter dispatches and critiques a current vogue of identifying a variety of ‘phases’ in Kant’s articulation of his ‘moral proof’, and his thinking about the highest good, and happiness, in relation to morality: where, for example, in one text, Kant is thought to invoke happiness as an incentive, but, in another later text, to regard it as a consequence, and then, in yet another text, as a psychological prop, in relation to moral motivation. Kant’s consistent claim, it is argued, is as follows: that being moral is absolutely binding and motivating in its own terms, but that if there is no realm of freedom (which involves the postulation of God, for reasons to be investigated), there is no such thing as morality, and, therefore, simply no issue about moral obligation or motivation. Kant can be interpreted as having a consistent position across all his critical texts, where any variety in emphasis is most plausibly put down to Kant’s attention to different facets and aspects of a multifaceted claim. The consistent position ascribed to Kant is that belief in freedom, and in a noumenal intelligible realm, is the lynchpin of his philosophical-religious hope.

Egress and Regress

This chapter defends Kant’s claim that all the formula for the derivation of the categorical imperative are in some sense ‘identical’. I show that although Kant rejects the claim that the ultimate object of theology (God) can be a worthy object for us, nonetheless, Kant’s movement of thought still has a theological shape. This is because Kant is concerned with what would be a worthy object for a rational being, whose dignity is such that the object of attention must not be in any sense external. This is the oldest theological problem of all, reaching back through Aquinas, and back to Aristotle and Plato, gravitating towards a version of the perennial answer, ‘thought thinking itself’. Kant claims, not entirely perspicuously, that the different formulations are ‘three ways of representing the principle of morality’, and that although they are at ‘bottom only so many formulae of the very same law’, nonetheless ‘there is a difference among them…intended to bring an idea of reason closer to intuition’. Commentators have struggled to hold together Kant’s claims, with regard to the ‘sameness’ of, and the ‘difference’ between, the formulae, interpretative approaches tend to focus exclusively on either the purported identity or difference. It is suggested that if autonomy is a variation on the ancient theological problem of ‘thought thinking itself’, then we might find a fundamental unity underlying the different formulae, such that the will’s giving to itself its own self-conception is the single reality represented under different aspects, in the various formulae.

The Proper Self

The chapter explores the way in which transcendental idealism provides Kant with an ethically significant conception of transcendence. Kant’s conception of transcendence is distinct from that found in Christian theology, but is nonetheless capable of bringing a degree of spiritual, religious, and moral consolation, insofar as the way things fundamentally are (we can believe), may be quite different from how they appear. This is particularly relevant when we think about freedom and autonomy, and Kant’s notion of the ‘proper self’. The proper self is the noumenal and intelligible subject, and it is this subject who is capable of autonomy. At the heart of autonomy is our setting of ends, which involves our being free and purposive. The value of such end-setting is the ‘inner value’ of the world. End- setting is valuable, and is so absolutely and intrinsically, in that the value is not itself bestowed by an act of end-setting. That it is our nature to be purposive is, importantly, distinct from the more traditional assertion that there is a purpose which is our nature.

Searching for the Unconditioned

This chapter considers the extent to which Kant’s critical moral philosophy has some traditional theological features. First of all, it is argued that Kant continues to believe in God. Secondly, Kant engages, in the Groundwork, with the search for the ‘unconditioned’, which, in traditional terms, involves searching that which is all-sufficient, stable, true everywhere, freedom-preserving, and harmonious. In line with the traditional search for the highest good (the Summum Bonum), represented in this discussion by Aquinas, Kant does not find this resting place in a range of created and good-to-a-degree realities, such as passions, sensuous inclinations, gifts, and virtues. Allen Wood’s suggestions about the possibility of ‘innocent practical goodness’ are considered and refuted.