Reaching into the Infinite: On Kant's Self-Legislation

This is my midterm paper for PHILOS 151B taught by Prof. Dewitt at UCLA.

Self-legislation and autonomy are at the very core of Kantian practical philosophy. It is the very concept through which Kant shows that there is unconditional moral law in the Groundwork, and that rational beings acting from them have dignity. ¹ It is also Kant's "keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure reason," ² through which he connects his theoretical and practical philosophy. In this paper, we will closely examine this notion in Kantian practical philosophy as it appears in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (G) and the Critique of Practical Reason (KpV). This paper assumes that the reader is already familiar with the basic concepts in Kantian theoretical and practical philosophy, and will only review relevant interpretations of Kant that can be different from the common ones. After that, we will spend most of the time considering the worry about self-legislation regarding whether it is compatible with the unconditional bindingness of law, and I will argue that this worry does not constitute a threat to Kant's argument. At last, we will see what Kant's very different conception of freedom as in autonomy offers us.

An important distinction to make at first in Kant's system is the concepts related to will. In this paper, we assume the interpretation of Kant in which the will has the following different components: ³ The higher faculty of desire (wille), ⁴ a faculty of reason ⁵ /understanding, ⁶ which is part of the will that is from pure practical reason alone; The lower faculty of desire (choice/willkür); and the will in the general sense, which is the combination of wille and choice. English translations of Kant often use the same word for them, but in pursuit of clarity, for everything not quoted I will precisely use "will" to mean that in the general sense, "wille" for that of the upper, and "choice" for that of the lower.

We will begin by examining Kant's conception of the freedom of "will" (which I shall show to be in the wille sense) in Section Three of G (G III) as the conclusion from this would be required for the following discussion. Kant starts with the notion of "will" as "a kind of causality of living beings in so far as they are rational," and the notion of negative freedom as "that property of such a causality, as it can be efficient independent of alien causes determining it," and then goes on to show that the "will" that has such negative freedom must also have positive freedom: a "will" as a causality must follow some law; but since it has negative freedom, such law cannot come from alien sources, but only from itself. Thus the "will" has to be the law to itself, and this is called autonomy/positive freedom. Yet such autonomy is precisely the principle of morality formulated in G II. ⁷ Then, as we know that our will in the general sense does not always act from the principles of morality, autonomy would be law in the sense of immediate causality only for the wille, and what Kant has been referring to as "will" in G 4:446-7 must be the wille.

Coming back to when the notion of autonomy/self-legislation first appears in G 4:431, where he combines the form of the categorical imperative (CI) in the Formulation of Universal Law (FUL) and the matter of the CI in the Formulation of Humanity (FOH) together to get the Formula of Autonomy (FOA), i.e. "the idea of the will of every rational being as a universally legislating will." First note that "will" in FOA must be referring to the will in general: Kant believes that the wille is always self-legislating, ⁸ so it cannot be commanded by CI to do so. It does not make sense for it to mean choice here either, as it is not much in our control. Secondly, note that "legislation" has a specific sense here. Consider the following text: "According to this principle, all maxims are rejected that are not consistent with the will's own universal legislation." (G 4:431) Note that the "will" here should be interpreted as the wille, or at least the source of the law lies within the wille: from the context he is explaining what "legislation" in FOA means, and if the "legislation" here is still referring to that only of the will in general then this would be explaining something in terms of itself. If this is true, then for the will in general to legislate universally (i.e. for one to fulfill FOA), the will has to reject maxims that are not consistent with the wille's universal legislation.

From this analysis, we can see something interesting: Note that the law to be legislated by the will in Kant's self-legislation is already there set by the wille. Thus, even though it is self-legislated by the will, the will cannot choose what law to legislate. Rather, it can only choose between legislating the law set by wille or not legislating any universal law. There is no middle ground because principles that are not laws from reason are not considered by Kant to be universal in the strictest sense. In this sense, the self-legislation of the will is not in conflict with the unconditional bindingness of the law. Not only are they not in conflict, but also that it is the case where one cannot have the former without having the latter.

Still, there are unneglectable questions left to be asked. For example, how can we say that the will is self-legislating if the law to be legislated is already there? For this, besides that the law is set necessarily by a part of the will (the wille), also note that the will has the freedom of choice (not in the sense of willkür) between whether to legislate universal law or not. Assuming that there is morality, such freedom is not veiled in the obscurity: The fact that we can choose whether or not to act from principles that cannot be possible universal law shows us that the will indeed has the freedom of choice on this. ⁹ If that is true, it would be not unreasonable to say this law is self-legislated by the will in general as well. That is to say, both our will and wille can be self-legislating, though at different levels and in different senses: The wille spontaneously generates the law, and the will in general spontaneously chooses to adopt such law, so that choice/happiness is subordinate to wille/pure practical reason. However, be careful that the freedom of choice of the will mentioned here is not the negative/positive/transcendental/in-the-strictest-sense freedom of the wille mentioned in G III or KpV. But still, if the will in general wills according to FOA, i.e. when the will uses its freedom of choice to choose to self-legislate the law given by wille, then and only then would the will in general be possible to have freedom in these senses as well, for the very same reason by which we cognize the wille as free in those senses of freedom in practical cognition as in G III.

But one may yet again argue that the will's freedom of choice, of whether or not to legislate the law from wille, is incompatible with the unconditional bindingness of law. For if the will has such freedom of choice, it would seem to be able to opt out of the legislation at any time. However, I would like to argue that if a will really sees the worth of the moral law and the dignity and freedom of the rational beings acting from it, such a will would not choose to opt out of the self-legislation. For if acting from the respect of moral law, as Kant claims, really has infinite value in it, then to give up this for the good of happiness/choice, which only has a finite value, would be no less absurd than to intentionally give up what has higher economic utility to one for something that has only a lower utility.

So why does Kant, and why do we, need to bother so much about such specific conception of freedom in the sense of autonomy? In fact, we have already talked about this: From such freedom, we have dignity and infinite worth. As he argues, when one legislates and is subject to moral law only because that it is legislated by themself, one has dignity as a rational being whose will is not determined by the laws of nature, but instead as an impartial judge who legislates to not only themselves but also the sensible world with the laws from themselves. ¹⁰ Such infinite worth is something that never comes along with other conceptions of freedom.

The second, on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as this may be inferred from the purposive determination of my existence by this law, a determination not restricted to the conditions and boundaries of this life but reaching into the infinite.