How is the corruption of the will possible? Kant on natural dialectic and radical evil

초록

In this chapter, I critically discuss Kant's account of the will in the context of our moral failure as he discusses its importance as part of his view of a 'natural dialectic' of the Groundwork and also as part of his well-known doctrine of radical evil in the Religion, respectively. In particular, I suggest that, even though Kant's understanding of the way our will fails to be moral in the natural dialectic may be a precursor to a more sophisticated account of will as the latter is developed in his doctrine of radical evil in the Religion, the natural dialectic is not quite "equivalent" to the radical evil. In Section 1, I will introduce the doctrine of natural dialectic in the Groundwork and show how the Kantian conception of will together with its maxim is deployed in the process of a natural dialectic. In Section 2, I will discuss in detail how Kant develops a sophisticated conception of will in his elaboration of radical evil in the Religion. Section 3 then suggests that, while the Groundwork account of the corruption of the will proceeds by means of the fallacy of subreption predominantly committed at the level of individuals, in the Religion Kant gives an account of the corruption of the will by means of the two-tier structure of will, that is, the distinction between the Wille and Willkür at the level of the human species as a whole. Section 4 attempts to shed light on the exact relation between the two accounts of the will. In particular, I will argue that, pace Henry Allison, they are not "virtually equivalent." Section 5 is a brief conclusion. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. All rights reserved.