In Book 3 of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Moral, Kant gives a metaphysical account of the world that seems to contradict his moral system. The contradiction rests specifically on the issue of free will: in Kant’s metaphysical account, free will cannot exist, but in his moral account, free will is an indispensable part. The solution, according to Kant, is the concept of noumenal freedom, which reconciles both accounts and combines them. In this essay, I will explore Kant’s metaphysical account and defend this solution as a plausible account of free will by arguing that noumenal freedom is already integrated into our notions of free will and choice.
In order to understand how Kant arrives at the concept of noumenal freedom, one must first understand how Kant views the natural world. To Kant, the natural world operates under the laws of causality: “for every effect as possible only in accordance with the law that something else determined the efficient cause” (Kant, 63). For example, when I push a glass off the table, it drops on the floor and breaks. I am the efficient cause of the glass’ breaking, and the law that describes this causal relationship is the law of gravity. Kant conceives of the human will in the same way: as a type of causality, for it is our will that causes us to do certain actions. And as a kind of causality, Kant believes that the will must also be governed by laws. From an empirical perspective, the will is governed by the laws of nature. After all, human beings are part of the natural world, and we are subject to the same laws of physics that a glass is subject to. And since the will is a human causality, it must also be subject to the laws of nature.
However, Kant’s view of the natural world appears to contradict his moral system because if our will is governed by laws of nature, it is not its own law-giver. And if the will is not its own law-giver, it cannot be the author of actions. Instead, the will now must act under an alien influence, namely, the deterministic law of nature. But a heteronomous will—a will that is not its own law-giver—is not a good will in Kant’s account because a good will must be autonomous. If a will is not its own law, deliberation of all kinds, moral or prudential, loses its meaning. For how could we engage in real deliberation if the will can’t govern itself? And if we cannot engage in deliberation, how can our actions have moral worth? After all, what gives an action its moral worth, according to Kant, is that the action must be done out of respect for duty. How can our actions have any moral worth when they are not done out of respect for duty, but done because they are already determined without deliberation?
Kant solves this contradiction by distinguishing between things as they appear and things in themselves. Things as they appear make up the reality that we perceive, a reality of the senses. Appearances of things only give us “representations that come to us without our choice (like those of sense)” (Kant, 67), and we can recognize them insofar as they affect us. And insofar as they affect us, they naturally fall under deterministic laws of nature, because we cognize the world in causal terms. On the other hand, there are things in themselves that lie behind appearances, but “they can never come any nearer and can never become known to us except as they affect us” (Kant, 67). In other words, things in themselves can never be empirically known, because objective reality independent of our perception is impossible. From the distinction between things as they appear and things in themselves, Kant establishes another distinction: the world of sense and the world of understanding. The world of sense consists of things as they appear, and the world of understanding consists of things in themselves. Our perception of the world of sense is necessarily causal, because we can only see things as they affect us. Thus, free will does not exist in the world of sense because we must represent this world in causal terms.
Deterministic laws do not apply in the world of understanding, however, because this world is not an empirical reality. The world of understanding is purely conceived in reason, and as such, totally a priori. And natural laws cannot exist without any empirical basis. From these two worlds, Kant derives two standpoints that a moral agent has: one in the world of sense and one in the world of understanding. He has a standpoint in the world of sense because he is part of nature, and he has a standpoint in the world of understanding because he has rationality. It is through his reasoning capabilities that he can even distinguish between things as they appear and things in themselves. In the world of sense, the agent thinks himself as subject to deterministic laws; but in the world of understanding, the agent “can never think of the causality of its will otherwise than under the idea of freedom; for independence of determinate causes of the world of sense is freedom” (Kant, 69). The idea of freedom agrees with the nature of the world of understanding, because laws of nature do not exist in the purely conceptual world of understanding. And to Kant, freedom simply means the will is free from such laws and can issue its own imperatives. He gives this condition of the will operating independently the name of noumenal freedom.
Kant then derives his account of morality from the concept of noumenal freedom. First, noumenal freedom, as it exists in the world of understanding, is not the freedom to do anything. In the world of understanding, the will issues its own laws without any alien influences. In other words, the causality of the will is not due to the deterministic laws of nature, but simply due to the will itself. Therefore, in the world of understanding, the law that governs the causality of the will is the will itself. Kant points out that “the proposition ‘the will is in all actions a law to itself’ designates only the principle of acting in accordance with no other maxim than that which can also have itself as a universal law as its object” (Kant, 63). Once noumenal freedom is established in the world of understanding, the concept of categorical imperative (and hence morality in general) follows. Therefore, it appears natural to Kant that “a free will and a will under moral laws are the same” (Kant, 63).
From noumenal freedom, Kant also argues that one can derive practical freedom in the world of sense because “the world of understanding contains the ground to the world of sense” (Kant, 70). When a person is faced with a moral decision, he can take the standpoint of the world of understanding and appeal to the categorical imperative. Such an appeal is not governed by deterministic laws because the world of understanding is based on pure reason. By taking the standpoint of the world of understanding, the agent calls upon the will, free from deterministic laws, to be the legislator of its own actions. Consequently, the agent “must regard the laws of the world of understanding as imperatives and the actions that accord with this principle as duties” (Kant, 70). Noumenal freedom therefore confers practical freedom upon the agent because he can choose not to act merely on inclination and impulses, but can choose to act out of respect for the categorical imperative, thus giving his actions moral worth. Moral deliberation is once again possible because one can use reason to figure out the right thing to do. Therefore, noumenal freedom allows one to resolve the contradiction brought up at the beginning of this essay.
But one might raise an objection against this view: why must people be committed to noumenal freedom before they can truthfully speak of possessing practical freedom? Why can’t we accept practical freedom by itself? And indeed there seems to be compelling evidence for accepting practical freedom alone. After all, we are bombarded with many choices everyday, ranging from the trivial to the significant. Kant’s view seems counter-intuitive because we feel that we have practical freedom in life regardless of noumenal freedom. This objection is misguided because the presence of choice by itself does not mean freedom. Suppose there is a chess-playing computer: on any given turn, the computer makes a choice for its next move. Here we have a situation in which a machine is faced with choices, and it does indeed choose, but would anybody call this freedom? Would we attribute free will to this machine? No. The machine is not free because its will, insofar as it has one, is not governed by itself, but by certain deterministic laws such its programming logic, mathematical properties, electricity, etc.
Therefore, true freedom isn’t automatically derived from the presence of choice alone, regardless of how immediate or abundant those choices are. We are similar to the computer in that both we and the computer can make choices, but we differ from the computer in that our will is not governed by anything except itself. This make sense practically because our notion of choice already assumes that it is our will, and nothing else, that makes any given choice our choice. And what is this assumption except another formulation of noumenal freedom: the will operating independently from determinate laws—the will that is free. Therefore, we cannot accept practical freedom without first accepting noumenal freedom, or else we would become nothing but machines. Indeed, the concept of noumenal freedom is already integrated in our psychology and cognition, since that is how we make sense of our choices. And since it is already a part of our cognitive framework, noumenal freedom is very plausible because it matches how most people think about freedom.
Yet one might still raise an objection by asking why should free will even matter in moral matters? For example, consequentialists may argue that free will plays no role in moral considerations because what makes an action right is that it maximizes happiness. This argument side-steps the matter of noumenal/practical freedom altogether, and one can argue that it is simpler and less contrived. I cannot answer such an objection because the purpose of this paper is not to convince anyone to accept Kant’s account of morality. Instead, the purpose of this paper is to defend the noumenal/practical freedom distinction within a Kantian framework, and as such, it must inherently accept Kant’s moral system. In that regard, I believe I have shown how noumenal freedom is both necessary and plausible for a Kantian framework.
Posted by humanflyz at December 7, 2005 12:19 AM | TrackBack