1st Postulate of Immanuel Kant

Ysabelle Anne Estoya

Mary Josephine Briones

Jenny Babe Barrera

Amabelle Mazel Agrabio

TERMS

• POSTULATE- a statement that is accepted as being true and that is used as the basis, theory, argument, etc.

• FREEDOM- the quality or state of being free: as the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action.

FREEDOM

• existed because of our experience of moral obligation, that is, “because I must, I can.” The first moral postulate therefore is that freedom must be assumed.

• is an apriori that we do not understand but we know it as the condition of the moral law which we do know.

• It is because of freedom that God and Immortality gain objective reality and legitimacy and subjective necessity.

• Freedom then can be considered as the keystone of the structure of pure reason.

THREEFOLD PHASE in carrying out an act or decision indicates that there is freedom:

• 1. Before the act, we are conscious that we deliberate about the reasons in favor or against a definite action; unless our will is free, this deliberation would be absurd.

• 2. During the decision, we are conscious that we are giving consent freely, and so we perform our actions with great cautions, realizing we are assuming responsibility.

• 3. After the decision, we are conscious that we could have made a different decision, and we blame or praise ourselves alone for any regret or credit accruing from the actions.

• Unless our will is free to act with regard to these actions, the deliberation, the decision, and the assumption of merit and demerit would have been absurd.

• On the contrary, the determinist upholds that one is not free insofar as one is determined by socio-cultural factors, such as religion, custom, and family upbringing.

• The way one thinks, reasons and behaves has been molded by one’s socio-cultural orientations. Thus, one is acting under illusion of freedom. One thinks one is free, but actually one is not.

• We have to postulate that the individual’s will is free; otherwise, we cannot account for personal responsibility. For unless one is free in the performance of a particular act, one cannot be held morally responsible for it.

Freedom

• Is one of the conditions of a deliberate act for which a person is held morally answerable.

• Rewards and punishments would be absurd, unless everyone were free.

Example Situation

• example of a man who commits a theft. Kant holds that in order for this man's action to be morally wrong, it must have been within his control in the sense that it was within his power at the time not to have committed the theft.

• If this was not within his control at the time, then, while it may be useful to punish him in order to shape his behavior or to influence others, it nevertheless would not be correct to say that his action was morally wrong.

• Moral rightness and wrongness apply only to free agents who control their actions and have it in their power, at the time of their actions, either to act rightly or not. According to Kant, this is just common sense.

Compatibilism

• “comparative concept of freedom”

• I am free whenever the cause of my action is within me. So I am unfree only when something external to me pushes or moves me, but I am free whenever the proximate cause of my body's movement is internal to me as an “acting being” .

Example situation

• Between involuntary convulsions and voluntary bodily movements, then on this view free actions are just voluntary bodily movements.

• Assimilates human freedom to “the freedom of a turnspit,” or a projectile in flight, or the motion of a clock's hands. The proximate causes of these movements are internal to the turnspit, the projectile, and the clock at the time of the movement. This cannot be sufficient for moral responsibility.

• The reason, Kant says, is ultimately that the causes of these movements occur in time. Return to the theft example. A compatibilist would say that the thief's action is free because its proximate cause is inside him, and because the theft was not an involuntary convulsion but a voluntary action. The thief decided to commit the theft, and his action flowed from this decision.

• According to Kant, however, if the thief's decision is a natural phenomenon that occurs in time, then it must be the effect of some cause that occurred in a previous time. This is an essential part of Kant's Newtonian worldview and is grounded in the a priori laws (specifically, the category of cause and effect) in accordance with which our understanding constructs experience: every event has a cause that begins in an earlier time.

• If that cause too was an event occurring in time, then it must also have a cause beginning in a still earlier time, etc. All natural events occur in time and are thoroughly determined by causal chains that stretch backwards into the distant past. So there is no room for freedom in nature, which is deterministic in a strong sense.

• In Groundwork Kant’s attempt was to give a theoretical proof of the reality of our freedom but he was not successful and coming to Critique of Pure Reason he held that we could infer the reality of our freedom from the consciousness by means of the principle that ‘ought implies can.’

• Kant’s thought on freedom of the will can be seen to be going through five phases. In his first position he takes the stand that free human actions are those that have internal rather than external causes. As the second position, we have Kant stating that we cannot prove the existence of free human actions which are not dictated by deterministic laws of nature.

• This is explained in the Critique of Pure Reason. The third phase can be seen in Groundwork which was published in 1785, where he states that it is possible to prove the existence of human freedom and thereby also prove that moral law applies to us. In the fourth phase we see Kant stating that we can prove the freedom of our will form the indisputable fact of our religion.

• This can be seen in the Critique of Practical Reason that came out in 1788. As the final and fifth position in Religion (1793) Kant is no longer concerned with proving the existence of free will but rather showing that its existence simply implies the in escapable possibility of human evil but equally the concomitantly indestructible possibility of human conversions to goodness.

• We are not free in the same way that you or have brown or blond hair.

• Freedom is not an attribute, but an idea which motivates my actions. It is very important that we keep separate ethical and ontological language, and no more so than when we speak about God.

• I am free not because I am free, in the same way that I tall, short, beautiful or ugly, rather I am free, because I can think that I am.

• This is why Kant can say, in his lectures on education, that we do not consider children to be free, because they do not yet understand the meaning of freedom. 

• But what has freedom to do with morality? The reason why we do not think children are moral at an early age is that we do not expect them to be responsible for their actions, no more than we would expect a dog to be responsible or lion for eating an antelope.

• The reason that we tell a child for acting immorally is because we expect, as they mature, that that they will begin to understand what it means to act morally. When I say that you are responsible for your action, I mean that you ought to be able to give reasons for them.