Taking Freedom Seriously: Kantian Ethics versus the Ethics of Kant

ABSTRACT

No understanding of morality has more zealous or influential defenders among academic philosophers than Kant’s. Yet as Michael Rosen demonstrates in The Shadow of God, there is a sense in which Kant’s critics take his conception of freedom more seriously nowadays than his defenders. As a result, contemporary versions of “Kantian ethics” often end up challenging what Rosen calls “the ethics of Kant,” not just the claims of rival moral theories. Rosen supports this surprising conclusion with some powerful arguments, showing that we cannot make sense of Kantian moral philosophy or its extraordinary impact on modern philosophy while detaching it from Kant’s conception of transcendental freedom. But Rosen overstates the continuity between Kant and the Idealist philosophers that he inspired. Thinkers like Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel took Kant’s concept of transcendental freedom far more seriously than defenders of Kantian ethics do today. But precisely because they did so, they felt compelled to address a whole new set of problems, which could be solved only by radically transforming the conception of freedom that they received from Kant.

Keywords:

• Hegel
• Kant
• Michael Rosen
• alienation
• morality
• philosophy of history
• transcendental freedom

Notes

1 Far from being filled with awe at the exalted condition that Kant attributes to freed beings like ourselves, “the only moral emotion” that this image inspires in Wood’s breast “is outrage—that anyone could think supernaturalist superstition a necessary condition for moral decency” (Wood 2008, 138; quoted in Rosen 2022, 106).

2 As Rosen (2022, 232) aptly comments, Kant could never accept an argument like Schiller’s because, for Kant, “morality . . . actually works against nature.”

3 I develop this account of the German reaction to Kant in my book The Longing for Total Revolution (1986 [1992], Berkeley). See, in particular, ch. 3, “The Social Discontent of the Kantian Left,” as well the brief outline of my arguments in Yack 2021 (“Revisiting The Longing for Total Revolution”).

4 At one point, however, Rosen (2022, 67) alters the metaphor, describing Kant’s God as an “enlightened despot,” rather than a constitutional monarch, which, I believe, weakens his point.

5 I should probably note that I am currently completing a very un-Kantian defense of moral pluralism in a book, tentatively titled: The Faces of Moral Pluralism: Five Portraits from European Literature.