Kant's Theory Of Freedom

That is, our feelings of nature are properly designed and therefore ought to be heeded. Kant’s belief of ethics might be seen as an over-arching design and order of nature.

The third illustration considers the issue of developing one’s talents. Nature endows us with aptitudes that are intended for a given purpose, which Kant implies, are valid in an appropriate system of nature. Like the antecedent moralists, Kant appeals to the teleology of nature. Initially, in the first section of Groundwork Kant seems to echo Aristotle, but then takes great care to refute Aristotle’s expositions of virtues.

As Kant moves to a discussion of the second and fourth illustrations which concern duties to others, his analogy with nature prevails. Kant draws again

For speculative reason, the concept of freedom was problematic, but not impossible. That is to say, speculative reason could think of freedom without contradiction, but it could not assure any objective reality to it…Freedom, however, among all the ideas of speculative reason is the only one whose possibility we know a priori. We do not understand it, but we know it as the condition of the moral law which we do know ( KpV3-4).

With a completely different strategy in the First Critique where freedom was explicated in order to confirm the possibility of morality, Kant reverses this doctrine by noting that the moral law is the grounding of the possibility of transcendental freedom. Kant reverses the doctrine of the First Critique, i.e., freedom is possible only under the conceivability of acting in accordance with moral law when he writes:

For had not the moral law already been distinctly thought in our reason, we would never have been justified in assuming anything like freedom…But if there were no freedom, the moral law would never have been encountered in us ( KpV4

Kant consistently insists that CI does not involve maxims and that the ends mentioned in CI2 and the realm of ends in CI3 confront the formalist assertions in the Second Critique. Therefore, Kant’s Second Critique attempts to repair the theory and eliminate the problems of his pre-critical writings by introducing a formalistic approach, as I will explicate this part in 5.1, where Kant’s earlier writings concentrated on the notion of the good, either psychologically as seen in the Prize Essay, or as unconditional good and the associate necessary ends in his later essays (e.g., the Second Sensation in the Canon of Pure Reason). In the Groundwork, Kant attaches the good with the willing and associates it with the moral law. Then, he gradually relies on the notion of moral law instead of the notion of the good. In the Groundwork, the notion of the good does not rely on feeling or sensation; rather than it derives from the rational directly. Kant points out that every motive has an intended effect on the world. When desire drives us, we first examine the possibilities that the world leaves open to us, selecting some effect at which we wish to aim. But, if we act in accord with practical moral law, we encounter a significant difference since the only possible object of the practical law is the Good, since the Good is always an appropriate object for the practical law. Viewing the Good as rational consolidates