ROBOTS ARE TAKING OVER THE WORLD!

Okay, so robots are not taking over the world. But imagine if you were controlled like a robot. Your programmer would control every decision you make. So would you be free? According to Kant, you can be free in a situation like this as long as you believe that your actions are performed freely. For Kant, as you make decisions from self-adopted principles, you must consider yourself as having free will (163).

In “Morality as freedom,” Korsgaard attempts to clarify Kantian ethical philosophy about the conception of freedom in morality. She first presents why Kant believes that moral law is the law of a free will. Their relationship depends on the idea that we are free only insofar as we act morally. Freedom is only significant if you act in accordance with moral law. But this freedom does not explain our interest or motivation toward morality.

Korsgaard explains that we are motivated to morality because our “intelligible existence” gives us “higher vocation” to make the world a rational place. Having the thought of that “higher vocation is the motive of morality” (171).

Together, freedom and our existence in the intelligible world give us a conception of how to follow the moral law (174). There are six things we must do and acknowledge: 1) Approach morality and act as if we are (negatively) free – nothing external can influence your actions. 2) Act on maxims freely chosen. 3) Eliminate inclinations to find the moral law (the positive conception of freedom) and act on it. 4) As we act on the moral law, we are free. 5) Negative freedom teaches that we are part of the intelligible world; therefore, we have a higher vocation to achieve the Highest Good. 6) Intelligible freedom gives us the incentive to be positively free or moral (175).

Korsgaard now asks the question, if interest in the Highest Good determines our moral actions, how can we be free? We must examine Kant’s theory of virtue or “internal freedom” (176). Humans act for the sake of an end. For Kant, to make these ends moral, we must direct them towards humanity and other aims that could be derived from it (177). For human beings, freedom takes the form of a virtue – the adoption and pursuit of moral ends (178). We cultivate virtues when we respect humanity and overcome our inclinations.

So freedom is both the incentive to act morally and the product of acting morally. We freely fulfill a higher vocation, which moves us to moral conduct. In other words, the conception of freedom motivates us to act virtuously and these virtuous actions make us free.

I found clarity in Korsgaard’s paper. She helped me make sense of Kant’s view of morality but there was one thing that confused me. She says that “a positive conception of freedom would be a material account of what such a will would in fact choose” (162). She then says that in Kant’s view is that moral law is the positive conception of freedom. If the positive conception of freedom is material then isn’t it a desire and therefore cannot be moral? Is she saying Kant’s definition is different? Or is it that a “material account” is an end and for Kant, moral ends are the only ends we should seek; therefore, justifying that the moral law is the positive conception of freedom?