Kant referred to both indeterminism and determinism, because he taught
(1) an empirical (thus: close to nature) person and (2) an ethical (thus:
close to culture) person. So according to Kant humans are citizens of
two worlds: (1) a visible world and (2) an intelligible
world. The humans as (1) empirical (natural) persons or citizens
of the visible world do not have an absolute free will
becaue they are subordinated by nature and its law of causality;
but the humans as (2) ethical (cultural) persons or as citizens of the
intelligible world have an absolute free will.
The moral law is based only on the existence of the intelligible
freedom(=> 2).
Ted Honderich wrote:
One summary of the great Kant's view, to the extent that it
can be summed up, is that he takes determinism to be a kind of fact,
and indeterminism to be another kind of fact, and our freedom to be
a fact too -- but takes this situation to have nothing to do with the
kind of compatibility of determinism and freedom proclaimed by such
Compatibilists as Hobbes and Hume. Thus Kant does not make freedom consistent
with determinism by taking up a definition of freedom as voluntariness
-- at bottom, being able to do what you want. This he dismisses as a
wretched subterfuge, quibbling about words. Rather, the freedom he seeks
to make consistent with determinism does indeed seem to be the freedom
of the Incompatibilists -- origination. Is he then an Incompatibilist?
Well, against that, it can be said he does not allow the existence of
origination in what can be called the world we know, as Incompatibilists
certainly do.
Kant's main idea, whatever sense can finally be made of it, depends
on his fundamental two-worlds doctrine. He locates determinism in the
empirical world or world of appearances, and freedom in the world of things-in-themselves,
the world of reason. It is important that the latter world is not in time.
So he is a determinist of a kind, opposed to the tradition of Compatibilism,
not really in the Incompatibilist tradition, but tries to make his determinism
and freedom-as-origination consistent by his own private means. You may
well wonder if he can succeed in all this -- and suspect too, at the beginning
of the 21st Century, that something so radical as his view is actually
needed. **
Who ist Ted Honderich?
Wikipedia wrote:
Ted Honderich (born 30 January 1933) is a Canadian-born British
philosopher, Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and
Logic, University College London[1] and Visiting Professor, University
of Bath. His work has been mainly about five things: determinism's truth
and its consequences for our lives; the nature of consciousness and
its relation to the brain; right and wrong in the contemporary world,
in particular with respect to terrorism; the supposed justifications
of punishment by the state; and the political tradition of conservatism.
**
Excerpt from The Critique of Pure Reason:
Immanuel Kant wrote:
.... Every human being has an empirical character for his power
of choice, which is nothing other than a certain causality of his reason,
insofar as in its effects in appearance this reason exhibits a rule,
in accordance with which one could derive the rational grounds and the
actions themselves according to their kind and degree, and estimate
the subjective principles of his power of choice. Because this empirical
character itself must be drawn from appearances as effect, and from
the rule which experience provides, all the actions of the human being
in appearance are determined in accord with the order of nature by his
empirical character and the other cooperating causes; and if we could
investigate all the appearances of his power of choice down to their
basis, then there would be no human action that we could not predict
with certainty, and recognize as necessary given its preceding conditions.
Thus in regard to this empirical character there is no freedom, and
according to this character we can consider the human being solely by
observing, and, as happens in anthropology, by trying to investigate
the moving causes of his actions physiologically
But if we consider the very same actions in relation to reason, not,
to be sure, in relation to speculative reason, in order to explain them
as regards their origin, but insofar as reason is the cause of producing
them by themselves in a word, if we compare them with reason
in a practical respect then we find a rule and order that is
entirely other than the natural order. For perhaps everything that has
happened in the course of nature, and on empirical grounds inevitably
had to happen, nevertheless ought not to have happened. At times, however,
we find, or at least believe we have found, that the ideas of reason
have actually proved their causality in regard to the actions of human
beings as appearances, and that therefore these actions have occurred
not through empirical causes, no, but because they were determined by
grounds of reason.
Suppose now that one could say reason has causality in regard to appearance;
could reasons action then be called free even though in its empirical
character (in the mode of sense) it is all precisely determined and
necessary? The empirical character is once again determined in the intelligible
character (in the mode of thought). We are not acquainted with the latter,
but it is indicated through appearances, which really give only the
mode of sense (the empirical character) for immediate cognition. Now
the action, insofar as it is to be attributed to the mode of thought
as its cause, nevertheless does not follow from it in accord with empirical
laws, i.e. in such a way that it is preceded by the conditions of pure
reason, but only their effects in the appearance of inner sense precede
it. Pure reason, as a merely intelligible faculty, is not subject to
the form of time, and hence not subject to the conditions of the temporal
sequence. The causality of reason in the intelligible character does
not arise or start working at a certain time in producing an effect.
For then it would itself be subject to the natural law of appearances,
to the extent that this law determines causal series in time, and its
causality would then be nature and not freedom.
Thus we could say that if reason can have causality in regard to appearances,
then it is a faculty through which the sensible condition of an empirical
series of effects first begins. For the condition that lies in reason
is not sensible and does not itself begin. Accordingly, there takes
place here what we did not find in any empirical series: that the condition
of a successive series of occurrences could itself be empirically unconditioned.
For here the condition is outside the series of appearances (in the
intelligible) and hence not subject to any sensible condition or to
any determination of time through any passing cause.
Nevertheless, this very same cause in another relation also belongs
to the series of appearances. The human being himself is an appearance.
His power of choice has an empirical character, which is the (empirical)
cause of all his actions. There is not one of these conditions determining
human beings according to this character which is not contained in the
series of natural effects and does not obey the laws of nature according
to which no empirically unconditioned causality is present among the
things that happen in time. Hence no given action (since it can be perceived
only as appearance) can begin absolutely from itself. But of reason
one cannot say that before the state in which it determines the power
of choice, another state precedes in which this state itself is determined.
For since reason itself is not an appearance and is not subject at all
to any conditions of sensibility, no temporal sequence takes place in
it even as to its causality, and thus the dynamical law of nature, which
determines the temporal sequence according to rules, cannot be applied
to it.
Reason is thus the persisting condition of all voluntary actions under
which the human being appears. Even before it happens, every one of
these actions is determined beforehand in the empirical character of
the human being. In regard to the intelligible character, of which the
empirical one is only the sensible schema, no before or after applies,
and every action, irrespective of the temporal relation in which it
stands to other appearances, is the immediate effect of the intelligible
character of pure reason; reason therefore acts freely, without being
determined dynamically by external or internal grounds temporally preceding
it in the chain of natural causes, and this freedom of reason can not
only be regarded negatively, as independence from empirical conditions
(for then the faculty of reason would cease to be a cause of appearances),
but also indicated positively by a faculty of beginning a series of
occurrences from itself, in such a way that in reason itself nothing
begins, but as the unconditioned condition of every voluntary action,
it allows of no condition prior to it in time, whereas its effect begins
in the series of appearances, but can never constitute an absolutely
first beginning in this series.
In order to clarify the regulative principle of reason through an
example of its empirical use not in order to confirm it (for
such proofs are unworkable for transcendental propositions) one
may take a voluntary action, e.g. a malicious lie, through which a person
has brought about a certain confusion in society; and one may first
investigate its moving causes, through which it arose, judging on that
basis how the lie and its consequences could be imputed to the person.
WIth this first intent one goes into the sources of the persons
empirical character, seeking them in a bad upbringing, bad company,
and also finding them in the wickedness of a natural temper insensitive
to shame, partly in carelessness and thoughtlessness; in so doing one
does not leave out of account the occasioning causes. In all this one
proceeds as with any investigation in the series of determining causes
for a given natural effect.
Now even if one believes the action to be determined by these causes,
one nonetheless blames the agent, and not on account of his unhappy
natural temper, not on account of the circumstances influencing him,
not even on account of the life he has led previously; for one presupposes
that it can be entirely set aside how that life was constituted, and
that the series of conditions that transpired might not have been, but
rather that this deed could be regarded as entirely unconditioned in
regard to the previous state, as though with that act the agent had
started a series of consequences entirely from himself.
This blame is grounded 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. And indeed one regards the causality of reason
not as a mere concurrence with other causes, e but as complete in itself,
even if sensuous incentives were not for it but were indeed entirely
against it; the action is ascribed to the agents intelligible
character: now, in the moment when he lies, it is entirely his fault;
hence reason, regardless of all empirical conditions of the deed, is
fully free, and this deed is to be attributed entirely to its failure
to act.
Excerpt from The Critique of Practical Reason:
Immanuel Kant wrote:
The concept of causality as natural necessity, as distinguished
from the concept of causality as freedom, concerns only the existence
of things insofar as it is determinable in time and hence as appearances,
as opposed to their causality as things in themselves. Now, if one takes
the determinations of the existence of things in time for determinations
of things-in-themselves (which is the most usual way of representing
them), then the necessity in the causal relation can in no way be united
with freedom; instead they are opposed to each other as contradictory.
For, from the first it follows that every event, and consequently every
action that takes place at a point of time, is necessary under the condition
of what was in the preceding time. Now, since time past is no longer
within my control, every action that I perform must be necessary by
determining grounds that are not within my control, that is, I am never
free at the point of time in which I act.
Indeed, even if I assume that my whole existence is independent from
any alien cause (such as God), so that the determining grounds ot my
causality and even of my whole existence are not outside me, this would
not in the least transform that natural necessity into freedom. For,
at every point of time I still stand under the necessity of being determined
to action by that which is not within my control, and the series of
events infinite a parte priori which I can only continue in accordance
with a predetermined order would never begin of itself: it would be
a continuous natural chain, and therefore my causality would never be
freedom.
If, then, one wants to attribute freedom to a being whose existence
is determined in time, one cannot, so far at least, except this being
from the law of natural necessity as to all events in its existence
and consequently as to its actions as well; for, that would be tantamount
to handing it over to blind chance. But since this law unavoidably concerns
all causality of things so far as their existence in time is determinable,
if this were the way in which one had to represent also the existence
of these things-in-themselves then freedom would have to be rejected
as a null and impossible concept.
Consequently, if one still wants to save it, no other path remains
than to ascribe the existence of a thing so far as it is determinable
in time, and so too its causality in accordance with the law of natural
necessity, only to appearance, and to ascribe freedom to the same being
as a thing-in-itself. This is certainly unavoidable if one wants to
maintain both these mutually repellent concepts together; but in application,
when one wants to explain them as united in one and the same action,
and so to explain this union itself, great difficulties come forward,
which seem to make such a unification unfeasible.
If I say of a human being who commits a theft that this deed is, in
accordance with the natural law of causality, a necessary result of
determining grounds in preceding time, then it was impossible that it
could have been left undone; how, then, can appraisal in accordance
with the moral law make any change in it and suppose that it could have
been omitted because the law says that it ought to have been omitted?
That is, how can that man be called quite free at the same point of
time and in regard to the same action in which and in regard to which
he is nevertheless subject to an unavoidable natural necessity?
It is a wretched subterfuge to seek to evade this by saying that the
kind of determining grounds of his causality in accordance with natural
law agrees with a comparative concept of freedom, according to which
that is sometimes called a free effect, the determining natural ground
of which lies within the acting being, e.g., that which a projectile
accomplishes when it is in free motion, in which case one uses the word
»freedom« because while it is in flight it is not impelled
from without; or as we also call the motion of a clock a free motion
because it moves the hands itself, which therefore do not need to be
pushed externally; in the same way the actions of the human being, although
they are necessary by their determining grounds which preceded them
in time, are yet called free because the actions are caused from within,
by representations produced by our own powers, whereby desires are evoked
on occasion of circumstances and hence actions are produced at our own
discretion.
Some still let themselves be put off by this subterfuge and so think
they have solved, with a little quibbling about words, that difficult
problem on the solution of which millennia have worked in vain and which
can therefore hardly be found so completely on the surface, That is
to say, in the question about that freedom which must be put at the
basis of all moral laws and the imputation appropriate to them, it does
not matter whether the causality determined in accordance with a natural
law is necessary through determining grounds lying within the subject
or outside him, or in the first case whether these determining grounds
are instinctive or thought by reason, if, as is admitted by these men
themselves, these determining representations have the ground of their
existence in time and indeed in the antecedent state; and this in turn
in a preceding state, and so forth.
These determinations may be internal and they may have psychological
instead of mechanical causality, that is, produce actions by means of
representations and not by bodily movements; [still] they are always
determinining grounds of the causality of a being insofar as its existence
is determinable in time and therefore under the necessitating conditions
of past time, which are thus, when the subject is to act, no longer
within his control and which may therefore bring with them psychological
freedom (if one wants to use this term for a merely internal chain of
representations in the soul) but nevertheless natural necessity; and
they therefore leave no transcendental freedom, which must be thought
as independence from everything empirical and so from nature generally,
whether it is regarded as an object of inner sense in time only or also
of outer sense in both space and time; without this freedom (in the
latter and proper sense), which alone is practical a priori, no moral
law is possible and no imputation in accordance with it.
Just for this reason, all necessity of events in time in accordance
with the natural law of causality can be called the mechanism of nature,
although it is not meant in this that the things which are subject to
it must be really material machines. Here one looks only to the necessity
of the connection of events in a time series as it develops in accordance
with natural law, whether the subject in which this development takes
place is called automaton materiale, when the machinery is driven by
matter, or with Leibniz spirituale, when it is driven by representations;
and if the freedom of our will were none other than the latter (say,
psychological and comparative but not also transcendental, i.e., absolute),
then it would at bottom be nothing better than the freedom of a turnspit,
which, when once it is wound up, also accomplishes its movements of
itself.
Now, in order, in the case at hand, to remove the apparent contradiction
between the mechanism of nature and freedom in one and the same action,
one must recall what was said in the Critique of Pure Reason or follows
from it: that the natural necessity which cannot coexist with the freedom
of the subject attaches merely to the determinations of a thing which
stands under conditions of time and so only to the determinations of
the acting subject as appearance, and that, accordingly, the determining
grounds of every action of the subject so far lie in what belongs to
past time and is no longer within his control (in which must be counted
his past deeds and the character as a phenomenon thereby determinable
for him in his own eyes).
But the very same subject, being on the other side conscious of himself
as a thing-in-itself, also views his existence insofar as it does not
stand under conditions of time and himself as determinable only through
laws that he gives himself by reason; and in this existence of his nothing
is, for him, antecedent to the determination of his will, but every
action and in general every determination of his existence changing
conformably with inner sense, even the whole sequence of his existence
as a sensible being is to be regarded in the consciousness of
his intelligible existence as nothing but the consequence and never
as the determining ground of his causality as a noumenon.
So considered, a rational being can now 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; for this action, with all the past which determines it, belongs
to a single phenomenon of his character, which he gives to himself and
in accordance with which he imputes to himself, as a cause independent
of all sensibility, the causality of those appearances.
The judicial sentences of that wonderful capacity in us which we call
conscience are in perfect agreement with this. A human being may use
what art he will to paint some unlawful conduct he remembers as an unintentional
fault as a mere oversight which one can never avoid altogether,
and so as something in which he was carried away by the stream of natural
necessity and to declare himself innocent of it. He nevertheless
finds that the advocate who speaks in his favor can by no means reduce
to silence the prosecutor within him, if only he is aware that at the
time he did this wrong he was in his senses, that is, had the use of
his freedom; and while he explains his misconduct by certain bad habits,
which by gradual neglect of attention he has allowed to grow in him
to such a degree that he can regard his misconduct as their natural
consequence, yet this cannot protect him from the reproach and censure
he casts upon himself.
This is also the ground of repentance for a deed long past at every
recollection of it, a painful feeling aroused by the moral disposition,
which is empty in a practical way to the extent that it cannot serve
to undo what has been done and would even be absurd. (Priestley, a genuine
fatalist proceeding consistently, declares it absurd; and for this candor
he deserves more applause than those who, while maintaining the mechanism
of the will in deeds but its freedom in words, yet want it to be thought
that they include it in their syncretistic system, though without making
the possibility of such imputation comprehensible.) But repentance,
as pain, is still quite legitimate because reason, when it is a question
of the law of our intelligible existence (the moral law), recognizes
no distinction of time and asks only whether the event belongs to me
as a deed and, if it does, then always connects the same feeling with
it morally, whether it was done just now or long ago. For, the sensible
ljfe has, with respect to the intelligible consciousness of its existence
(consciousness of freedom), the absolute unity of a phenomenon, which,
so far as it contains merely appearances of the disposition that the
moral law is concerned with (appearances of the character), must be
appraised not in accordance with the natural necessity that belongs
to it as appearance but in accordance with the absolute spontaneity
of freedom.
One can therefore grant that if it were possible for us to have such
deep insight into a human beings cast of mind, as shown by inner
as well as outer actions, that we would know every incentive to action,
even the smallest, as well as all the external occasions affecting them,
we could calculate a human beings conduct for the future with
as much certainty as a lunar or solar eclipse and could nevertheless
maintain that the human beings conduct is free. If, that is to
say, we were capable of another view, namely an intellectual intuition
of the same subject (which is certainly not given to us and in place
of which we have only the rational concept), then we would become aware
that this whole chain of appearances, with respect to all that the moral
law is concerned with, depends upon the spontaneity of the subject as
a thing-in-itself, for the determination of which no physical explanation
can be given.
In default of this intuition, the moral law assures us of this difference
between the relation of our actions as appearances to the sensible being
of our subject and relation by which this sensible being is itself referred
to the intelligible substratum in us. From this perspective, which is
natural to our reason though inexplicable, appraisals can be justified
which, though made in all conscientiousness, yet seem at first glance
quite contrary to all equity. There are cases in which human beings,
even with the same education that was profitable to others, yet show
from childhood such early wickedness and progress in it so continuously
into their adulthood that they are taken to be born villains and quite
incapable of improvement as far as their cast of mind is concerned;
and nevertheless they are so judged for what they do or leave undone
that they are censured as guilty of their crimes; indeed, they themselves
(the children) find these censures as well founded as if, despite the
hopeless natural constitution of minds ascribed to the, they remained
as accountable as any other human being.
This could not happen if we did not suppose that whatever arises from
ones choice (as every action intentionally performed undoubtedly
does) has as its basis a free causality which from early youth expresses
its character in its appearances (actions); these actions, on account
of the uniformity of conduct, make knowable a natural connection that
does not, however, make the vicious constitution of the will necessary
but is instead the consequence of the evil and unchangeable principles
freely adopted, which make it only more culpable and deserving of punishment.
Many phenomena correlate with each other, thus also the population growth
(fertility rate and mortality rate), the economic growth, the cultural
development, the development of intelligence. The most important phenomena
are summarized in the HDI (Human Development Index). The following map
shows the HDI ranking list:
For example: dark green means the highest HDI (?0,900 and
higher); dark red means the lowest HDI (0,349 and lower).
Correlation of population and economy.
P=>E) In the short-term the population growth influences the economic
development positively; in the long-term it influences it negatively because
of other phenomena which are long-term phenomena (culture /education,
intelligence).
E=>P) In the short-term the economic growth influences the population
development positively; in the long-term it influences it negatively (long-lasting
wealth leads to decadence).
|