Sean asked:

Please could you shed some light on Kant's strategy for reconciling morality with natural determinism.

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Another way of looking at this question is this: how is there room for moral responsibility if we live in a
determinist set-up? How could we merit praise or blame for our actions and take responsibility for
what we do if we are not free agents? And if we believe in the law of universal causality, how can we
be free?

These kinds of important question can be considered through examining what Kant is up to in his
critical philosophy.

Part of Kant's strategy in his First Critique (The Critique of Pure Reason) is to offer a distinction
between 'appearance' and what he calls the 'thing in itself'. Appearances, roughly, are the way things
seem to be to beings such as ourselves (I'm not going to dwell on the technicalities of the distinction).
The idea is that in part, the way we see the world is determined by our cognitive faculties. The world
in itself — divorced from our standpoint — may in fact be completely different from how it appears.

What is important to draw out of this distinction is the claim that we have objective knowledge of the
world of 'appearance', but cannot have knowledge of the 'thing-in-itself' (he offers some good
arguments for this).

A second concern in the First Critique is to show the universal validity of the foundational principles of
the scientific world view, including that of universal causation. Causation had been subjected to a
devastating skeptical attack by Hume, but a skepticism that is deeply unsatisfying. How therefore can
we have the universal causation that is an objective feature of the world AND the freedom necessary
for moral responsibility? If all (physical) events have causes, how can there be room for the freedom
necessary for moral responsibility?

That these foundational principles can be proved only for the appearance of things means that at the
very least one can meaningfully consider that things as they are "in themselves" may not actually be
governed by these laws at all, or that they may be subject to completely different laws we don't know
about. Thus one can coherently consider oneself as a free agent not bound by the deterministic grip
of nature, but (in Kantian terms) bound only by the moral law which is a law of rationality.

Kant's famous comment "I must therefore suspend knowledge to make room for belief" should be
read in this light; he is not claiming that knowledge must be limited in order to allow some non-rational
basis for belief about important aspects of morality. Rather he seems to be saying, instead, that
limiting the foundational principles of the scientific world view to the way things appear is necessary
not only in explaining its own certainty, but also to enable us to consider ourselves as rational agents
not constrained by the deterministic grip of nature but who are free to govern ourselves by the moral
law as dictated by practical reason.

Kant attaches considerable importance to the autonomous nature of morality; the moral good is not
laid down for us, but is a part of rationality. There is however a sense in which understanding the
moral law requires us to act upon it. In this sense we are not free — the moral good is determined by
a universal law of rationality. This is where he introduces the Categorical Imperative. The objectivity
of the moral law also constitutes a reasonable argument for the existence of God.

This seems to be why restricting natural determinism to the world of appearance allows him to make
the claim that we are moral beings, and that our status as such is thus not inconsistent with natural
determinism.

Does it follow that if we reject the phenomenon-noumenon jiggery-pokery and also believe in natural
determinism, then there is no room for moral responsibility? That depends on whether you are a
compatibilist or not — whether or not you think there is room for freedom in a determinist world and
that this type of freedom would be worth having. Perhaps all that free action requires is thinking that
you are making a choice — I freely read a book at lunch time, although if I didn't, ruffians would break
into my study and force me to read it upon pain of death. This move counters so-called liberty of
indifference (which states that acting freely requires being able to act otherwise) because even
though I couldn't have acted otherwise, I still acted freely. If I had chosen NOT to read the book, I
would not have been free to do so.

Whether you accept this line or not is itself, I suppose, a matter of choice!

Adam Gatward

For Kant, natural determinism which we see as causal law is not a product of experience of the world,
but the way in which the mind structures the world. We introduce the idea of natural causal laws
ourselves. If a moral action has a non-moral natural cause, there is no real moral description.

Kant's answer to the problem is to reject the external reality of natural causation.

Both causality and the concept of freedom are principles of pure reason. As rational beings acting in
accordance with reasons we cannot act without conceiving ourselves as free and we conceive of
ourselves as having the freedom to obey moral law. Likewise, we cannot but makes sense of the
world except as being governed by natural laws.

That there really are natural laws which interfere with our freedom to act morally is not a real conflict
because our ideas of freedom and causality issue from the same source.

Rachel Browne