Free Will & Determinism in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason & Critique of Practical Reason Written by:   Course:   The question of freedom: a few aspects Professor:                                          Date:      FIRST PAGES:
Men behave differently from stones and plants and, in the opinion of many people, at least, from animals.  Unlike objects such as stones, humans are credited with some measure of control over their actions.  Unlike animals, humans are also credited with a self-consciousness about their behavior and its motives.  Freedom of the will is one of the most persistent problems faced by philosophers concerned with human action and involves questions about both control and self-consciousness.  When an event such as a stroke of lightning occurs in nature, it is described as a sequence of conditions whose satisfaction results in the lightning flash.  Proper atmospheric conditions of humidity, electrical charge, turbulence, etc., come into play, and the lightning occurs.  There is no question of whether or not the lightning chooses to occur.  The outcome is determined by the sequence of conditions.  This is the case with all the phenomena of nature dealt with by science an explained by reference to physical laws.  The behavior of animals is more complex and difficult to describe as a sequence of physical conditions whose satisfaction leads to a specific action.  Nonetheless, many scientists would argue that nothing in principle prevents this kind of explanation from being made about animal behavior.  Animals, too, are subject to natural laws which determine the outcome of the situations in which they find themselves.  Even if we speak of an animal as choosing one action over another – for example, to eat oats instead of corn – most people would be reluctant to hold the animal responsible in some way for the choice.  The "choice" would be explained on the basis of the animal's preference for the taste of one rather than the other.            In dealing with human behavior, however, the situation becomes more complex again.  In the final analysis some people would argue that human actions can be explained in the same way as those of other animals, that is, by physical laws.  Place a man in a specific situation, expose him to a given set of stimuli, and his response will be predictable.  The sequence of physical, neurological, and psychological events is discoverable, although it may be very complicated.  The way men act – even the action called "choice" – can thus be explained simply on the basis of scientific laws.  This is a modern statement of the determinist position in which a given sequence of physical events or biological states has an inevitable outcome.  Opposed to this point of view is a completely different one which regards humans as able to act in at least some ways not subject to the sequence of physical determination.  Specifically, it has long been held that moral action or ethical behavior is free of any deterministic sequence which makes the action inevitable.  Indeed, instead of being necessary moral action has been considered a matter of choice by the person involved.  In the possibility of choice there is associated the idea of responsibility for ethical action.  LAST PAGE:
Indeed, this suspicion is borne out in the "Critic of Practical Reason" where Kant speaks of the "autonomy of the will [as] the sole principle of all moral laws and of the duties conforming to them" such that the moral law "expresses nothing else than the autonomy of the pure practical reason, i.e., freedom."מנהל עסקים  At this point Kant has taken up the question which follows the establishment of free will in human action.  That is, if man is able to act freely, how should he act?  What ought he to do when faced with situations involving moral aspects?  The answers to these questions are not as elusive as they might be, for in Kant's system the very fact of freedom is a condition of the moral law and through it of the ideas of God and immortality.משפטים  Given these ideas men can begin at least to search out the specific content of the moral law with the assurance that the content exists.  Actually, the moral law itself provides a "fact absolutely inexplicable from any data of the world of sense or from the whole compass of the theoretical use of reason, and this fact points to an intelligible world – indeed, it defines it positively and enables us to know something of it, namely, a law."16
          Proceeding from an ethical question about the freedom of men's action, Kant has thus closed a circle about the intelligibility of the world.  Freedom is not incompatible, at least, with causal determinism in nature because such causal relations are rooted in orderly sequence in time.  Freedom is an expression of reason, which is grounded in the timeless noumenal world, undetermined by empirical conditions but able to determine them itself.  As the mediator between the intelligible and the empirical worlds, reason itself grasps the notion of "ought" as well as "is".  This sense of "ought" involves the moral law which is itself noumenal and evidence of ineligibility.  Finally, intelligibility suggests to Kant a God or deity as the ultimate expression, if not Creator, of the intelligible universe man encounters through reason.  FOOTNOTES
1 .       Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (Macmillan, London, 1929), p.
266-67.

2 .       Ibid., p. 464.

3 .       Idem.

4 .       Ibid., p. 465.
5.       Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, translated by Lewis White Beck (Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1956), p.69.

6 .       Critique of Pure Reason, p. 466.
7.       Ibid., p. 467.

8 .       Ibid., p. 468.
9.       Ibid., p. 470.

1 0.     Ibid., p. 472.

1 1.      Ibid., p. 473.

1 2.     Ibid., p. 474.

1 3.     Ibid., p. 479.
מנהל עסקים.     Critique of Practical Reason, p. 33.
משפטים.     Ibid., p. 4.

1 6.     Ibid., p. 44.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Beck, Lewis White. A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. Phoenix Books, Chicago, 1960.
Hall, Bryan. The Arguments of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
Lexington Books, Maryland, 2011.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason, translated by Lewis White Beck. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1956.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith. Macmillan, London, 1929.