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Some Hope for Kant’s Groundwork III

Saunders, Joe

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Abstract

Kant worries that if we are not free, morality will be nothing more than a phantasm for us. In the final section of the Groundwork, he attempts secure our freedom, and with it, morality. Here is a simplified version of his argument: 1. A rational will is a free will 2. A free will stands under the moral law 3. Therefore, a rational will stands under the moral law In this paper, I attempt to defuse two prominent objections to this argument. Commentators often worry that Kant has not managed to establish that we are rational beings with wills in the first place, and that he equivocates in his use of ‘free’ between premise 1 and 2. I argue that both of these objections can be overcome, and thus seek to offer some hope for Kant’s approach in Groundwork III.

Citation

Saunders, J. (2021). Some Hope for Kant’s Groundwork III. Inquiry, https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174x.2021.1997798

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Oct 22, 2021
Online Publication Date Dec 6, 2021
Publication Date Dec 6, 2021
Deposit Date Oct 20, 2021
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy
Print ISSN 0020-174X
Electronic ISSN 1502-3923
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174x.2021.1997798
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1233891

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Latest articles © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered,
transformed, or built upon in any way




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