2.1 Noumenal freedom and modality

Let us first examine whether Kant’s notion of noumenal freedom has a positive modal component such as the possibility of doing otherwise or contingency of action. While it can be argued that Kant’s critical theory of freedom in general evolves from the first edition of the CPR (1781) through the MM (1797), he consistently construes noumenal or ‘transcendental’ freedom primarily negatively, as independence from all phenomenal causes (whether external, i.e. physical-biological, or internal, i.e. psychological) and thus from the determination of any temporally preceding ground.Footnote ¹⁵ For any temporal event would be causally determined by, and necessarily relative to, other preceding temporal event(s). Thus, any act as a temporal event is unfree, for it has a sufficiently determining ground in the past, which is no longer within an agent’s control.Footnote ¹⁶ The act of volition, if it were to be free, would then have to be considered as an atemporal one. Thus, Kant complements the negative conception of noumenal freedom with a positive one, as an atemporal and thus uncaused or ‘unconditioned causality’ (CPrR, 5: 105), ‘an absolute causal spontaneity’ (A446/B474), ‘beginning a state from itself’ (A533/B561).Footnote ¹⁷ Kant’s resolution of the third antinomy relies on this notion of absolute causal spontaneity that is uncaused by any phenomenal cause and yet causing phenomenal effects. Accordingly, each act can be considered both phenomenally, i.e. as determined by a cause preceding it in time and thus as unfree, and noumenally, i.e. as determined by an atemporal and spontaneous cause and thus as free. Kant also claims that the morally relevant notion of freedom, i.e. practical freedom, understood negatively as the capacity to act independent of sensuous impulses or desires, and positively as the capacity to act from the representation of moral or rational maxims or principles, is grounded on noumenal freedom (A533–4/B561–2). For such a rationally (as opposed to sensuously) motivated act presupposes independence from phenomenal causation as well as a causality that is not phenomenal (A534–5/B562–3).

These characterizations of noumenal freedom do not have to be construed as modally loaded. For, first of all, ‘independence’ can be read simply as the denial of the presence of a dependence relation, and, as I will discuss later on, Kant holds that ‘absolute spontaneity’ is in fact completely mysterious to us. The key here is to recognize that the contrast between noumenal freedom and nature is not between contingency and necessity, but between the absence and the presence of modal constraints. Not being necessitated by anything and being absolutely spontaneous, respectively, entail contingency or alternate possibilities only in a modally structured domain. But Kant’s MT portrays a modal vacuum where modal determinations are absent, and thus, where the lack of necessity would not amount to contingency or alternate possibilities.

Kant makes this especially clear in the case of divine freedom:

Thus, freedom requires the absence of any preceding modal constraints on volition. God, through his holy will, would always do good, and yet this lack of the alternate possibility of not doing good should not mean that God is determined to will or do good by necessity, and thus is not free.Footnote ¹⁸ Noumenal amodalism, then, leads to neither necessitarianism, nor indeterminism, and seems not only compatible with but also strongly suggested by Kant’s understanding of divine noumenal freedom.Footnote ¹⁹

But what exactly would it mean to will or act with absolute spontaneity, that is, in a modal vacuum, where there are no antecedent necessities or possibilities, but only actuality? One could think of this in terms of Kant’s actualism operative in his ‘only possible proof’, according to which possibilities must always be grounded in actualities, and God’s actuality is the ultimate ground of all possibilities.Footnote ²⁰ The absolutely spontaneous action is neither determined nor bound by any antecedent modal constraints, but is what opens up the modal space in the first place. Accordingly, the alternate possibilities of an agent’s doing A or not doing A would derive from their (absolutely spontaneous) action A itself rather than being options that precede and constrain the actual A. The action A is then not an actualization of one of two alternate possibilities, but what grounds those possibilities. Yet Kant insists that the precise mechanism of such absolute spontaneity is still incomprehensible to us in its own terms (Rel, 6: 21, 44). Hence, he holds that a metaphysical proof of noumenal freedom would not be available to our discursive finite minds, and that the only ratio cognoscendi of freedom is morality (CPrR, 5: 5; CPJ, 5: 403). This also points to the appropriate ground of justification for our modal attributions to noumena, if any, despite our epistemic restrictions.

Now, even if Kant’s conception of noumenal freedom per se does not have to be regarded as carrying positive modal content, let us recall that Stang points to Kant’s principle of ‘ought implies can’ (OIC) as the ground of his claim that human noumenal freedom requires the attribution of possibility to do otherwise and contingency to our noumenal wills. I suggest that the OIC does not warrant a modalized notion of human noumenal freedom either.

First, Kant’s formulations of the OIC concern the possibility of acting in accordance with the moral law, despite contrary empirical stimuli, in cases where the agent actually fails to do so (A555/B583; CPrR, 5: 98, 142; Rel, 6: 41, 45, 62). Thus, even if the OIC entails the possibility of doing otherwise, such modal attribution applies only to a subset of our free actions, i.e. the heteronomous ones. We can still be noumenally free in cases where we have no empirical inclination contrary to the duty. So Kant does not understand the possibility to will/do otherwise to be a necessary condition of our noumenal freedom.Footnote ²¹ Instead of the other way around, Kant understands noumenal freedom as the necessary condition of having such a capacity for a finite will: only if an agent’s will can determine itself (in accordance with a pure practical law) without being determined by empirical inclinations, can she have the capacity to do otherwise than what those inclinations would causally determine her to do.

Since Kant’s discussions of the OIC focus on the possibility of moral success in cases that involve actual moral failure, they obviously presuppose that humans have the possibility of moral failure. In fact, Kant takes this latter possibility to be crucial to the particular kind of will human will is, and to the application of the moral law to human will as a constraint, an ‘ought’ (G, 4: 414) or ‘imperative’ (MM, 6: 222).Footnote ²² As opposed to an animal will (arbitrium brutum), which is determined only by sensible impulses, i.e. pathologically, human will, as noumenally free (arbitrium liberum), is not determined pathologically, but can be determined rationally, i.e. by pure practical reason or its law (A802; CPrR, 5: 28–9; Met-L1, 28: 256–7). On the other hand, as opposed to a holy will, which is perfectly rational and has no pathological component, human will, as finite and only imperfectly rational, can be pathologically ‘affected’ (CPrR, 5: 32), even if not so determined. It is worth noting that while pathological determination signifies the causal force of a law of nature dictating that the effect follow necessarily, rational determination signifies the normative force of a practical law which obligates compliance without causally necessitating it.Footnote ²³ Thus, human will is open to the influence of two kinds of incentives, sensible and rational, and yet not causally determined by either to the exclusion of the other. In other words, neither kind of incentive is, by itself, a motive for human will ineluctably causing it to act, but human will can freely ‘incorporate’ one or the other into its maxims to make them into motives.Footnote ²⁴ This is why Kant defines at least one function of human will as a power of choice (Willkür), ‘a faculty to do or refrain from doing as one pleases’ (MM, 6: 213).

While Willkür is the power of choice that can choose to be motivated by sensible impulses or the moral law, Wille is the ‘practical reason itself’ (MM, 6: 213), the capacity to set rational principles that can motivate the choice. As Beck (Reference Beck and Srzednicki1987: 37) famously puts it, Wille is the legislative and Willkür is the executive faculty. Kant emphasizes that only the executive choice of Willkür is free, but Wille ‘cannot even be called either free or unfree, since it is not directed to actions but immediately giving laws for the maxims of actions’ (MM, 6: 226). There is no (metaphysical) necessity that the executive capacity, which is immediately related to action, harmonize with the legislative capacity and adopt the moral form the latter sets for the action. For, as spontaneous and yet pathologically affectable, the former might adopt an immoral maxim. The harmony between what the human agent wills and what she ought to (and thus can) will is always contingent.

However, despite the important role he assigns to the possibility of moral failure in his conception of human will, Kant’s position ultimately articulated in MM is to emphatically reject defining human freedom in terms of this negative possibility.

Kant does not deny here that the heteronomous choices of agents are free. What he denies is that the possibility of choosing against the moral law, which expresses the sensible aspect of human agency, is definitional of freedom, which expresses the noumenal aspect of human agency. For Kant clearly sees this possibility as the failure to carry out proper use of the capacity that is freedom, though such misuse is still a use of that capacity and thus is free.Footnote ²⁵

For these reasons, Stang’s claim that Kant’s commitment to the OIC leads him to construe noumenal freedom modally does not seem warranted. However, one might rightfully insist that Stang’s (P1), ‘some noumena have modal properties’, can still hold up, since even if Kant’s conception of noumenal freedom does not do so, his conception of human moral agency commits him to the attribution of possibility to do otherwise to human noumenal will.

2.2 Possibility to do otherwise

The question then is how to understand this modalization of human noumenal will. Let us first consider taking it as part of the theoretical description of human noumenal will. Accordingly, every human action, as a phenomenon, is causally determined by the past and thus the agent could not have refrained or done otherwise. However, the same action can also be considered as resulting from a noumenal character or will, which is not determined by temporal conditions but absolutely spontaneous. Such a will has the positive possibility of determining itself otherwise and of refraining from the action in question. Now, not only does this reading conflict with Kant’s noumenal amodalism, but it also leads to a string of other difficulties threatening the coherence of his theory of human moral agency. I will mention only a few.

The possibility of my noumenal will’s self-determining otherwise entails the possibility of my temporal action, grounded by that atemporal volition, being otherwise. However, given that my temporal action is also causally determined by the chain of past events, the possibility of the former’s being otherwise entails the possibility of the latter’s being otherwise as well. Thus, my alternative noumenal volition would bring about an alternative causal history of the world. On the assumption that one is responsible for what they could have omitted, some scholars point out that this account allows one to be held responsible for the events that transpired before their birth and even for laws of nature.Footnote ²⁶ Aside from their blatant implausibility, such consequences undermine Kant’s motivation to posit noumenal freedom as an atemporal ground for our actions: the past is not in one’s control and nothing determined by the past can be imputed to an agent.

The idea of an atemporal character is difficult enough to comprehend in itself. First, a character, if it can be held morally responsible for its failures, must have some sort of psychological continuity, which, in turn, is representable by us only in temporal terms. Yet the freedom of a noumenal volition lies precisely in its temporal-causal discontinuity with the past: each such volition is the beginning of a new causal series from itself as if it is a singular, isolated instance. Second, paradoxically, since we can only represent change as located in a causal-temporal order, no change or ‘new’ state can be attributed to the noumenal character either. Kant states that, in the noumenal character, ‘nothing happens, thus no alteration requiring a dynamical time-determination is demanded’ (A541/B569); ‘no before or after applies’ (A553/B581); ‘[i]t … never enters into a new state in which it previously was not’ (A555/B584). But if a new or alternate state is not attributable to the noumenal character, how is the possibility of having willed otherwise attributable to it? A character that would have willed otherwise would be a different character!Footnote ²⁷ Third, the lack of continuity and change in character would make it impossible for us to better ourselves, even though the possibility of such self-betterment is required both by Kant’s doctrines of virtue and radical evil and by the OIC itself. In other words, the modalization of an atemporal character is a profoundly problematic idea in itself.

There is at least one passage where Kant hints at an alternative metaphysical interpretation of the possibility to do otherwise, which would avoid violating noumenal amodalism and some of these problems. Emphasizing that the noumenal will or reason does not change, Kant writes:

Apart from noting that a different choice or self-determination would indicate a difference in character, a problem on which I have already commented, not only does Kant explicitly acknowledge here the inapplicability of the possibility of self-determining otherwise to the noumenal will, but he also offers a non-modal interpretation of the ‘possibility to have done otherwise’: the action, regardless of its causal determination by the past, is an immediate effect, and thus in control, of the noumenal will, which is not caused by anything else. Accordingly, the moral agent’s possibility of doing otherwise is less about her having a ‘leeway’ to do or refrain from doing a certain action but more about her being the proper ‘source’ of that action. This suggests a negative understanding of the OIC, according to which ‘can’ signifies a mere lack of necessary determination of the will by the past.Footnote ²⁸ And finally, this account is compatible with a non-modal conception of noumenal freedom as the mere absence of being determined by any temporally antecedent grounds and absolute spontaneity.

2.3 Modalization of will as a regulative principle of practical reason

It would have been convenient to stop here. For it appears that as far as the metaphysics of the noumenal will goes, Kant retreats from the positive possibility of doing otherwise to amodalism. However, first, this would run into one of the problems confronting Stang’s account. Even if Kant does not include positive modality in his notion of noumenal will, we have no other way of understanding the latter than as a ‘capacity’ or ‘power’ (of determination), which, in turn, invokes modal representation. Second, Kant often goes beyond this rather modest metaphysical position and repeatedly associates the possibility of doing otherwise with human moral responsibility and agency.

Perhaps this should all be expected, given Kant’s ET that it is a necessary feature of our discursive intellects to represent things modally. Kant might then hold that, while theoretical reflection on the divine intuitive intellect or on the nature of modality leads us to noumenal amodalism, when we nevertheless represent our relationship to the moral law, we are compelled to modalize our noumenal wills. For, as I discussed earlier, human will can motivate itself either rationally or sensibly and has a split structure between its two distinct capacities, legislative and executive, the harmony of which is never guaranteed. While absolute spontaneity is inscrutable to us as such, we can represent our own spontaneous volition only as relative to two distinct sources, the moral law and our happiness, and thus as consisting in a contingent choice between two determinate possibilities, i.e. prioritizing one over the other. Thus we construe the moral law as an ‘ought’, a constraint on us, demanding priority over another possibility, and our moral responsibility as upholding this demand. If there is any hope of resolution here, it should lie in the kind of validity that is to be ascribed to such modal representation of noumenal volition in the face of the fact that from a theoretical perspective this representation is inadequate.

At this point, it is useful to go back to the original context of Kant’s remarks in CPJ §76. Kant’s broader claim is that certain ways in which we represent things are due to the particular, i.e. discursive, constitution of our intellect, even though they would not be represented so by another, i.e. intuitive, kind of intellect. For instance, following his ET that a discursive intellect modalizes its objects due to its split cognitive structure, while an intuitive intellect, which has no sensible or receptive component, would have only actual objects, Kant argues that even though we can only represent the moral law in terms of obligations or imperatives, for a purely rational being with an intuitive intellect, ‘there would be no distinction between what should be done and what is done’ and what the moral law requires would be neither necessary nor contingent, but only actuality, ‘a be (happening)’ (5: 403). He further argues that like the distinctions between the possible and the actual, and between what is and what ought to be, the distinction between ‘a natural mechanism and technique of nature’ or between efficient and teleological causation is also due to our discursivity, and an intuitive intellect would find no such distinction in nature (5: 404).Footnote ²⁹

Now, the upshot of Kant’s insistence that we make these distinctions only due to the discursivity of our intellect and that they would not be made by a divine intellect is that these distinctions do not in fact pertain to the objective constitution of things. Thus, any proposition that involves these distinctions would only be ‘subjectively valid’ relative to our discursive intellect. Moreover, the resolution Kant offers for the antinomy between the thesis that all generation of material things is possible in accordance with mechanical laws and the antithesis that the generation of natural organisms is not possible in accordance with merely mechanical laws but requires final causation, is to recognize that since the distinction between mechanism and teleology is only subjectively valid for our understanding, these propositions should not be taken as principles constitutive of objects themselves but only as maxims regulative of the way we judge them (CPJ, 5: 387–9). Kant holds that the appearance of a contradiction between these propositions vanishes when they are viewed not as descriptive of objects and having objective validity, but as having only prescriptive or heuristic value in our subjectively constrained judgements of objects. In other words, the resolution lies in shifting the modal emphasis in these propositions from natural organisms themselves to our judging or mode of inquiry into them. To say, for instance, that natural organisms cannot be judged possible except as products of final causes is not to say that they are, as a matter of fact, not possible in accordance with mechanical laws and thus does not negate the maxim that all material nature must be judged as products of mechanical laws and efficient causes. The lesson here is that we are licensed to and sometimes even compelled to adopt heuristic tools in judging things without having to make metaphysical commitments about the objective constitution of those things.

If Kant offers this strategy as a resolution to an antinomy that stems from a distinction that we are constrained to make due to the discursive nature of our intellect, he would also allow a similar resolution to an antinomy that stems from the modal distinctions we are similarly constrained to make in our representation of things. Thus, rather than taking Kant’s references to the possibility of willing/doing otherwise as theoretical statements purporting to describe the metaphysical mechanics of human noumenal volition, one could understand the modalization of the human free will as a regulative principle that we are both entitled and required to employ in our judgements of moral responsibility. And not only is this a plausible interpretative strategy, but it is also strongly corroborated by the fact that Kant’s narrative in his discussions of the OIC is consistently from the standpoint of a moral judge (either as a third or first person) and constructed to uphold the rationality of judgements of imputation or blame regarding moral failures.Footnote ³⁰

For example, regarding the man who is forced by his prince to give false testimony against an honourable man on pain of execution but would admit that it would be possible for him to resist this threat, Kant says that ‘he judges, therefore, that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it’ (CPrR, 5: 30; emphasis added). More generally, he argues that, ‘considered [as a noumenon], every rational being can … rightly say of every unlawful action he performed that he could have omitted it even though as appearance it is sufficiently determined in the past and, so far, is inevitably necessary’ (CPrR, 5: 98; emphasis added). Again, in positing radical evil, Kant resorts to the same principle of imputation: ‘Every evil action … whatever the natural causes influencing him … can and must always be judged as an original exercise of his power of choice. He should have refrained from it’ (Rel, 6: 41; emphasis added). He repeatedly states that we ‘must judge’ (MM, 6: 380), ‘must suppose’ (CPrR, 5: 142), ‘rightly conclude’ (Rel, 6: 49) that we have the possibility of doing (as well as failing to do) as the moral law commands, if we are to have a coherent conception of ourselves as agents responsible for our actions.

In fact, in his much discussed example of the ‘malicious liar’, Kant explicitly calls this maxim of imputation ‘the regulative principle of reason’ (A554/B582), which one should adopt when one wants to take a voluntary immoral action and ‘investigate its moving causes’ in order to see how that action and its consequences could be imputed to the agent. While the process of investigation could reveal natural sources influencing the agent’s empirical character, such as ‘bad upbringing’ or ‘wickedness of a natural temper insensitive to shame’, the regulative principle of imputation would urge the moral judge of the action to set aside all of that agent’s ‘life that he has led previously’, and trace blame back to an unconditioned condition or an uncaused cause, that is, regard the action ‘as entirely unconditioned in regard to the previous state, as though with that act the agent has started a series of consequences entirely from himself’ (A554–5/B582–3; emphasis added). The moral judge thus bases their ‘judgment of imputation’ merely on the ‘law of reason, which regards reason as a cause that, regardless of all the empirical conditions just named, could have and ought to have determined the conduct of the person to be other than it is’ (A555/B583; emphasis added). Thus, while from the standpoint of empirical psychology, one should employ an empirical-temporal method of investigation into the determining causes that make the action inevitable in the natural order of events, from the standpoint of moral blame or imputation, one should employ the principle of ‘ought implies can’ and presuppose that the noumenal will of the agent could have chosen otherwise, regardless of whatever determining empirical causes the first method might find out. The adoption of such a heuristic in judging human actions is not only what it takes to treat humans as moral agents fully accountable for their failures, but it also has the practical interest of providing a self-critical and reflective perspective for the moral betterment of ourselves, growing more virtuous, more resistant to the temptations of our sensuous inclinations, and more resolved to follow the moral law in the face of empirical conditions unfavourable to our moral success. It is the starting point of building such resolve to judge oneself ‘capable of resisting and conquering by reason’ the impulses of nature: ‘he must judge that he can do what the law tells him unconditionally that he ought to do’ (MM, 6: 380).Footnote ³¹

Of course, as I noted earlier, how the noumenal will or its absolute spontaneity really works is bound to remain a mystery to us. And theoretical reflection on the divine intellect or modality would have us hold that noumena lack modal properties (MT). However, when we are urged, by practical reason, to represent human noumenal volition in the normative-evaluative context of judgements of moral blame and imputation, we represent it in modal terms, i.e. in the only way possible for our discursive intellect. The crucial point here is that, once viewed as a regulative principle, the attribution of possibility to do otherwise to an agent’s noumenal will does not purport to have objective validity and thus does not challenge the objective validity of the MT. That is to say, (1) ‘noumena lack modal properties’ and (2) ‘noumenal will has modal properties’ are not two propositions on a par with each other: (1) is about how things are in themselves, and (2) is about how we ought to represent human noumenal selves in the practical context, and not an article of theoretical cognition regarding the mind-independent texture of reality itself. In fact, when situated in its regulative bracket, (2) amounts to (2*) ‘we ought to represent human noumenal wills as having a modal property, once we recognize ourselves as moral agents responsible for our moral failures’.Footnote ³² While (1) follows from a theoretical reflection, (2) follows from a need of practical reason, that is, a subjectively necessary presupposition of practical reason in normative evaluation of human actions. There is then no contradiction as such. (1) is objectively valid from a theoretical perspective, and (2) is subjectively valid from a practical and regulative perspective, and carries no metaphysical import.Footnote ³³ If there is any resolution of the conflict between Kant’s MT and the requirements of representation prescribed by his theory of moral agency, it lies in this difference.Footnote ³⁴