Law & Society Blog

There is an animated discussion at PeaSoup in response to a post by Robert Johnson.

The standard view of Kantianism has been that it firmly denies that the right is grounded in the good. But recently it has become almost de riguer for Kantians to reject this priority of the right and embrace the good as the ground of obligation. … I think the standard Kantian picture … is so obviously right that I have difficulty seeing how this recent rebellion can be sustained. Against it is the idea that a necessary requirement — something you must do — is wholly inconsistent with the idea that the reason you must do it is that you will realize or produce some good. You can’t get a necessary requirement out of a value based theory. So if you think there are ethical absolutes — as do Kantians (I’m assuming) — then you can’t accept a value based theory of obligation.

I’m with Johnson. Kant expressly develops both a teleological theory of comparative freedom (Kant’s version of a theory of prudent action) and a deontological theory of transcendtal freedom. In the latter, he goes to extreme length to reconcile our experience of a causally closed universe with our independence from the principle of causality in moral actions. I act free in a morally relevant sense if and only if I act according to maxims (or reasons) that are

1. universalizable; and
2. desired because of their universalizability.

Obviously, the good — the desirability of ends — has no role in a theory of transcendental freedom.

Technorati Tags: Kant, freedom, moral theory

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.