Kant's Moral Psychology of the Will

该项目旨在考察康德关于错误和邪恶的心理根源的观点，以使他们与当代关于这一主题的道德哲学观点进行对话。康德清楚地认为，邪恶至少是人类的一个非常普遍的特征；这是他的语料库中一本重要著作《纯粹理性范围内的宗教》的主要主张。但他的观点的确切性质却鲜为人知，而且康德的这一部分伦理立场经常被评论家们斥为一种好奇，往好了说就是与他关于伦理的其他核心观点不相容。必须说，康德本人对这种情况负有很大责任，因为他对这一主题的讨论令人遗憾地不清楚。特别是，康德声称人类激进邪恶的正式证据是可用的，而没有实际告诉我们那个证据应该是什么，这给自己带来了重大的谴责。然而，普遍倾向于忽视康德对邪恶的描述是错误的，我认为，因为可以提供关于这一主张如何与他的道德哲学作为一个整体相适应的解释。从本质上讲，康德认为，具有人类所拥有的那种意志的存在，具有一种内在的倾向，试图尽可能地扩大他们的自由选择范围，这必然涉及征服他人对我们自己的自由选择。我们的自由意志促使我们肯定我们的自由，但也带来了将这种自由扩大到许可的倾向。该项目旨在发展对康德道德心理学的这一解读，并建议当代道德心理学可以有效地利用这些资源来帮助我们更好地理解错误和邪恶背后的动机。

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.