7 - Two Deductions and the Problem with Freedom
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 November 2025
Summary
This chapter tackles the issue of seemingly inconsistent statements by Kant across Groundwork and the second Critique. I show that Kant’s comment in the second Critique concerning the impossibility of proving the absolute necessity of the moral law has to do with a different question than that analysed by Kant in the first part of Groundwork III. Kant is really working with two deductions: the Groundwork deduction concerns the implications of having a will: If you take yourself as having a will, then you must also take yourself as bound by the moral law. I call this the EW deduction. But the problem of the second Critique is a different one. It actually picks up on issues already mentioned in the last part of Groundwork III (“On the Extreme Boundary of all Practical Philosophy”), and concerns insight into the real possibility of having a will (the RP deduction). We have no speculative access to such a possibility, for it would require us to have insight into the ground of both our receptivity and spontaneity. The first deduction, which concerns a hypothetical necessity, succeeds, but the second does not.
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- Kant's Metaphysics of the WillFreedom, Reason, and the Moral Law, pp. 180 - 208Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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