Kant's Moral Psychology of the Will

该项目旨在研究康德关于错误行为和邪恶的心理根源的观点，以便与当代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;这是他的文集中一本重要的书《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是相当少的理解，康德的伦理立场的这一部分经常被评论家驳回，充其量是一种好奇心，最坏的情况是与他对伦理学的其他中心观点不相容。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不安地不清楚。尤其是康德，他声称人类极端邪恶的形式证据是存在的，却没有实际告诉我们这个证据应该是什么，这给他自己带来了重大的谴责。然而，我认为，忽视康德对恶的解释的普遍倾向是错误的，因为可以提供一个解释，说明这种说法如何融入他的整个道德哲学。从本质上讲，康德认为，具有人类所拥有的那种意志的存在物具有一种内在的倾向，即试图尽可能地扩大他们的自由选择范围，这必然涉及到他人的自由选择对我们自己的自由选择的屈从。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展到许可证的趋势。该项目旨在发展对康德道德心理学的这种阅读，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行为和邪恶背后的动机。

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.