Kant's Moral Psychology of the Will

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The project aims to investigate Kant's views on the psychological roots of wrong-doing and evil, in order to bring them into dialogue with contemporary moral philosophical views on the subject. Kant clearly thinks that evil is at least a very prevalent characteristic of human beings; this is the main claim of a significant book in his corpus, the Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. But the exact nature of his view is rather poorly understood, and this part of Kant's ethical position has frequently been dismissed by commentators, as at best a curiosity and at worst as simply incompatible with other central views he holds about ethics. It must be said that Kant himself bears much of the responsibility for this situation, since his discussions of the topic are distressingly unclear. In particular Kant has brought significant condemnation upon himself by claiming that a formal proof of human radical evil is available, without actually telling us what that proof is supposed to be. Nevertheless the widespread tendency to ignore Kant's account of evil is a mistake, I think, since an account of how this claim fits into his moral philosophy as whole can be provided. Essentially, Kant thinks that beings with the kind of will that human beings possess have an inherent tendency to try to extend their sphere of free choice as far as possible, which necessarily involves the subjugation of the free choices of others to our own. Our free wills draw us to affirm our liberty, but also bring the tendency to extend that liberty to license. The project aims to develop this reading of Kant's moral psychology, and to suggest that contemporary moral psychology can usefully draw on these resources to help us understand better the motivation behind wrong-doing and evil.