VI.-DISCUSSION.

THE KANTIAN CONCEPTION OF FREE WILL.

By Professor H. SIDGWICK.

In a little book published two years ago, Outlines of the History of Ethics, I had to give a brief account of Kant's ethical doctrine. As regards the notion of Free Will-which is fundamental in Kant's system-I thought it right to draw attention to a confusion which I found in his exposition between two notions of Freedom: (1) the Freedom that is only realised in right conduct, when reason successfully resists the seductions of appetite or passion, and (2) the Freedom to choose between right and wrong, which is, of course, equally realised in either choice. When I wrote, I was not able to conjecture how far my view would be disputed; but I gather, from reviews and otherwise, that it does not commend itself to several persons who consider themselves competent interpreters of Kant, and whose claims to be so regarded I have no desire to question. I have, therefore, thought that it would be well to state my grounds for attributing this confusion of thought to Kant, at greater length than I could properly state them in the little historical manual to which I have referred. And it appeared to me that such a statement might, perhaps, have more than a merely historical interest. For it may be inferred from the importance attached to the question of the Freedom of the Will in several recent treatises on Ethics-I may mention especially two that have been very cordially received, Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, and Dr. Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory-that the question of Free Will is not yet antiquated in the view of thoughtful persons generally. Indeed, we may say that it occupies a firm and challenging position on the threshold of the subject, so that it can hardly be passed without some sort of struggle, even by those who like myself-seek to evade the Sphinx rather than to solve her riddle. And if the question has to be argued at all, it seems to me that the distinctions which it will be my aim to make clear, in discussing the confusion that I allege to exist in Kant's ethical doctrine, are of permanent importance.

In the present paper, however, I do not wish either to argue directly the question whether the will is free, or to move the previous question' whether the term freedom can with propriety be applied-even interrogatively-to the human will. My direct aim is merely to show that, in different parts of Kant's exposition of his doctrine, two essentially different conceptions are expressed by the same word freedom; while yet Kant does not appear to be conscious of any variation in the meaning of the term.

I will begin by explaining more fully the difference between the two meanings which Kant appears to me to confound. Perhaps, I may most conveniently do this by referring to the book through which my attention was first drawn to the importance of the question in relation to the present state of thought. I refer to Essays in Philosophical Criticism, which, if not exactly the work of professed disciples of Kant, at any rate seems to have for its declared aim the development of the results of Kantian criticism of knowledge and morals. In an essay on the "Rationality of History," by Mr. D. G. Ritchie, in which history is represented as a "struggle towards rational freedom," the following account is given of what the writer regards as the true meaning of Freedom :-" It is because and in so far as man is rational that he is free: and in so far as each man acts more under the guidance of reason, and less under that of blind, i.e., merely natural impulse or passion, he is more of a free agent ".

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Now, I do not in the least object to this use of the term Freedom, on account of its deviation from ordinary usage. On the contrary, I think it has much support in men's natural expression of ordinary moral experience in discourse. In the conflict that is continually going on in all of us, between nonrational impulses and what we recognise as dictates of practical reason, we are in the habit of identifying ourselves with the latter rather than with the former: as Whewell says, speak of Desire, Love, Anger, as mastering us, and of ourselves as controlling them "-we continually call men "slaves" of appetite or passion, whereas no one was ever called a slave of reason. If, therefore, the term Freedom had not already been appropriated by moralists to another meaning-if it were merely a question of taking it from ordinary discourse and stamping it with greater precision for purposes of ethical discussion-I should make no objection to the statement that "a man is a free agent in proportion as he acts rationally". But, I think, it will be admitted that what English defenders of man's free agency have generally been concerned to maintain, is that "man has a freedom of choice between good and evil," which is realised or manifested when he deliberately chooses evil just as much as when he deliberately chooses good; and it is clear that if we say that a man is a free agent in proportion as he acts rationally, we cannot also say, in the same sense of the term, that it is by his free choice that he acts irrationally when he does so act. The notions of Freedom must be admitted to be fundamentally different in the two statements and though usage might fairly allow the word Freedom to represent either notion, if only one or other of the above-mentioned propositions were affirmed, to use it to represent both in affirming both propositions is obviously inconvenient; and it implies a confusion of thought so to use it, without pointing out the difference of meaning.

If this be admitted, the next thing is to show that Kant does use the term in this double way. In arguing this, it will be convenient to have the names for what we admit to be two distinct ideas. Accordingly, the kind of freedom which I first mentioned-which a man is said to manifest more in proportion as he acts more under the guidance of reason-shall be referred to as 'Good' or 'Rational Freedom,' and the freedom that is manifested in choosing between good and evil shall be called 'Neutral' or Moral Freedom'.1

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But before I proceed to the different passages of Kant's exposition in which 'Good Freedom' and 'Neutral Freedom' respectively occur, it seems desirable to distinguish this latter from a wider notion with which it may possibly be confounded, and which it would be clearly wrong to attribute to Kant. I mean the "power of acting without a motive," which Reid and other writers, on what used to be called the Libertarian side, have thought it necessary to claim. "If a man could not act without a motive," says Reid, he could have no power"-that is, in Reid's meaning, no free agency-" at all." This is the kind of Freedom which the essayist above quoted contrasts with Good Freedom as "unintelligible caprice," and to which Green, in his chapter on the Freedom of the Will, refers in a similar tone as "some unaccountable power of unmotived willing" whose manifestations would be "arbitrary freaks". This conception of Freedom-which I may conveniently distinguish as Capricious Freedom is, as I said, certainly not Kantian: not only does he expressly repudiate it, but nowhere-so far as I know-does he unconsciously introduce it. Indeed it is incompatible with any and every part of his explanation of human volition: the originality and interest of his defence of Neutral Freedomthe power of choice between good and evil-lies in its complete avoidance of Capricious Freedom or the power of acting without a motive in any particular volition. And it may be worth while observing that the distinction between Neutral Freedom and Capricious Freedom is present, in an inchoate and imperfect manner, even in Reid's doctrine. Though, as we have seen, maintains the existence of Capricious Freedom, still, the only part of his argument that I find at all interesting is that in which he elaborately avoids denying that "the strongest motive always prevails" where the contest is only among non-rational motives, such as animal appetites,-though such a denial would seem to be implied in his conception of a power of acting without a motive. His argument against the proposition that "the strongest motive always prevails" is that—unless we measure strength merely by

he

The terms 'rational' and 'moral' seem to me most appropriate when I wish to suggest the affinity between the two notions: the terms 'good' and 'neutral' seem preferable when I wish to lay stress on the difference.

actual prevalence and reduce the proposition to a tautology-we must recognise that we have in our nature two different and disparate measures of the strength of motives: that motives addressed to our animal nature which, tried by the test of feeling, are strongest may yet be, in the eye of reason, weakest, and, similarly, motives strongest according to the test of reason may be weakest according to the test of feeling; and that "the grand and important competition of contrary motives is between the animal on the one hand and the rational on the other". Hence, though Reid maintains, as a psychologist, that the "power to act without a motive" belongs to the human being as such, he admits that the "grand and important" question for the moralist does not relate to this power, but to the power of deciding the conflict between rational and non-rational motives, "between the flesh and the spirit"-in short, to what I have called Neutral' or 'Moral,' as distinct from 'Capricious' Freedom.

I lay stress on this distinction, because it helps me to understand how many intelligent readers have failed to see in Kant's exposition the two Freedoms-Good or Rational Freedom and Neutral or Moral Freedom-which I find in Kant. They have their view fixed on the difference between Rational or Moral Freedom, which Kant maintains, and the Freedom of Caprice, which he undoubtedly repudiates: and are thus led to overlook with him the distinction between the Freedom that we realise or manifest in proportion as we do right, and the Freedom that is realised or manifested equally in choosing either right or wrong. When we have once put completely out of view the Freedom of Caprice, the power of acting without a motive, or against the strongest motive when the competition is among merely natural or non-rational desires or aversions,-when we have agreed to exclude this, and to concentrate attention on the difference between Good Freedom and Neutral Freedom-I venture to think that no one can avoid seeing each member of this latter antithesis in Kant. It will be easily understood that, as he does not himself distinguish the two conceptions, it is naturally impossible for the most careful reader always to tell which is to be understood; but there are many passages where his argument unmistakably requires the one, and many other passages where it unmistakably requires the other. Speaking broadly, I may say that, wherever Kant has to connect the notion of Freedom with that of Moral Responsibility or moral imputation, he, like all other moralists who have maintained Free Will in this connexion, means. (chiefly, but not solely) Neutral Freedom-Freedom exhibited in choosing wrong as much as in choosing right. Indeed, in such passages it is with the Freedom of the wrong-chooser that he is primarily concerned since it is the wrong-chooser that he especially wishes to prevent from shifting his responsibility on to causes beyond his control. On the other hand, when what he has to prove is the possibility of disinterested obedience to Law as such, without the intervention

of sensible impulses, when he seeks to exhibit the independence of Reason in influencing choice, then in many though not all his statements he explicitly identifies Freedom with this independence of Reason, and thus clearly implies the proposition which I began by quoting from a developer of Kantian doctrine, that a man is free in proportion as he acts rationally.

As an example of the first kind, I will take the passage towards the close of chap. iii. of the "Analytic of Practical Reason," where he treats, in its bearing on Moral Responsibility, his peculiar metaphysical doctrine of a double kind of causation in human actions. According to Kant, every such action, regarded as a phenomenon determined in time, must be thought as a necessary result of determining causes in antecedent time-otherwise its existence would be inconceivable-but it may be also regarded in relation to the agent considered as a thing-in-himself, as the "noümenon" of which the action is a phenomenon and the conception of Freedom may be applied to the agent so considered in relation to his phenomena. For since his existence as a noümenon is not subject to time-conditions, nothing in this noümenal existence comes under the principle of determination by antecedent causes: hence, as Kant says, "in this his existence nothing is antecedent to the determination of his will, but every action.. even the whole series of his existence as a sensible being, is in the consciousness of his supersensible existence nothing but the result of his causality as a noümenon ". This is the well-known metaphysical solution of the difficulty of reconciling Free Will with the universality of physical causation: I am not now concerned to criticise it,-my point is that if we accept this view of Freedom at all, it must obviously be Neutral Freedom it must express the relation of a noümenon that manifests itself as a scoundrel to a series of bad volitions, in which the moral law is violated, no less than the relation of a noümenon that manifests itself as a saint to good or rational volitions, in which the moral law or categorical imperative is obeyed. And, as I before said, Kant in this passage-being especially concerned to explain the possibility of moral imputation, and justify the judicial sentences of conscience-especially takes as his illustrations noümena that exhibit bad phenomena. The question he expressly raises is "How a man who commits a theft" called quite free" at the moment of committing it? and answers that it is in virtue of his "transcendental freedom" that "the rational being can justly say of every unlawful action that he performs that he could very well have left it undone," although as phenomenon it is determined by antecedents, and so necessary; "for it, with all the past which determines it, belongs to the one single phenomenon of his character which he makes for himself, in consequence of which he imputes to himself" the bad actions.

1 Werke, v., pp. 100-104 (Hartenstein).

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