I am most of the way through the section on Kant in Rawls' Lectures. I have at last found a portion I agree with -- the practical necessity of belief in freedom. Of course, that is not really what Kant would say and I don't think any Kantian would agree with the way I think about freedom in this context, but there is some common ground at long last. I don't buy the pure practical reason talk, but there is a common conclusion. In order to make sense of how people act, and how they conceive of themselves as acting, one has to assume some sort of freedom of will, and more robust than Hume would allow. I have to work under the assumption that reasons and reasoning have some sort of efficacious powers. In thinking about what to do, it does seem that one has to think that one can act on reason or reasons. Even if there is some full causal determinism, one still thinks about choices, seeks to persuade, and so on, all of which are built on the idea that there is a free moral agent in attendance. Even this thinking about the thinking seems to me to suggest a commitment to freedom, as a practical matter. I don't have to think that it is part of the full explanation of the world, or that there is some non-causal aspect to the world we live in. So it is a practical necessity. I also do not think it true.
Working through the longish lectures on Kant left me thinking that a great deal of Kant's philosophy is built around and of metaphor, rather abstract but still metaphor. I still do not see quite what an end in itself is supposed to be or what it could mean in practice to treat others as ends in themselves, or, frankly, most o the rest of the stuff. It alternates between a constricted world of all duty and a world without any moral content (because no duties can be specified). It is a bit bothersome -- these are very smart folk and I still think they are blowing smoke and wiggling fingers, not more.
Recent Comments