Justice: What's the Right thing to do?Episode 7(1) Rawls: Justice as Fairness

Fully to make sense of Kant moral theory in the groundwork requires that we be able to answer three questions:

Q1: How can duty and autonomy go together? What’s the great dignity in answering to duty?It would seem that these two ideas are opposed. What’s Kant’s answer to that?

Because acting out of duty is following a moral law that you impose on yourself, That’s what makes duty compatible with freedom. Kant’s answer is it is not in so far as I am subject to the law that I have dignity, but rather in so far as with regard to that very same law, I’m the author, and I’m subordinated to that law on that ground that I took it upon myself. I willed that law. 我有尊严不是在于我遵守了原则，而是在于我从属于该原则的原因是我自愿接受它，我是主人，我定下那些法则。

Autonomy = Duty

Acting according to duty = Acting freely in the sense of autonomously

That’s why for Kant, acting according to duty and acting freely in the sense of autonomously are one and the same. But that raises the question:

Q2: How many moral laws are there? If dignity consists and is governed by a law that I give myself, what’s to guarantee that my conscience will be the same as your conscience?

Kant believes that if we choose freely out of our consciences, we are guaranteed to come up with one and the same moral law. That’s because when I choose it’s not me choosing, it’s not you choosing for yourself, who is doing the choosing? Who’s the subject? Who’s the agent?

Pure reason.

The reason that does the willing, the reason that governs my will when I will the moral law is the same reason that operates when you choose the moral law for yourself. 那个支配我的意志的理性，那个当我选择道德法则时主导我的意志的理性与你选择道德法则时起作用的理性是一样的。

That’s why it’s possible for each of us to choose for ourselves as autonomous beings and for all of us to wind up willing the same moral law, the categorical imperative.

But then there is one big and very difficult question:

Q3: How is a categorical imperative possible? How is morality possible?

To answer this question, Kant said we need to make a distinction between two standpoints, two standpoints from which we can make sense of our experience.

As an object of experience, I belong to the sensible world. 作为一个经验客体，我属于感官世界。There my actions are determined by the laws of nature and by the regularities of cause and effect. 我的行为取决于自然法则和因果定律。

But as a subject of experience, I inhabit an intelligible world here being independent of the laws of nature. 但作为一个经验主体，我居住在一个智思世界，不受自然法则的影响。

I am capable of autonomy, capable of acting according to a law I give myself.

Kant says that:”Only from this second standpoint can I regard myself as free, for to be independent of determination by causes in the sensible world is to be free.” 不受感官世界里的外界因素决定（摆布），才是自由。

If I were wholly an empirical being as the utilitarian assume, if I were a being wholly and only subject to the deliverances of my senses, pain and pleasure and hunger and thirst and appetite, if that’s all there were to humanity, we couldn’t be capable of freedom. Kant reasons, because in that case every exercise of will would be conditioned by the desire for some object. 每个意志的行使都将受制于我们对某些客体的欲望。In that case, all choices would be heteronomous choices governed by the pursue of some external end.

“When we think of ourselves as free, we transfer ourselves into the intelligible world as members and recognize the autonomy of the will.”— Immanuel Kant

我们把自己转移到这个智思世界，成了其中的一员，并认识到了意志的自由。

So how are categorical imperatives possible?

Kant admits we aren’t only rational beings, we don’t only inhabit the intelligible world, if we did, then all of our actions would invariably accord with the autonomy of the will. But precisely because we inhabit simultaneously the two realms, the realms of freedom and the realm of necessity, there is always potentially a gap between what we do and what we ought to do, between is and ought.

「

Intelligible World智思世界 — The Realm of Freedom自由世界

(subject of experience)

Sensible World感官世界 — The Realm of Necessity需求世界

(object of experience)

」

#AutonomyDutyPureReason