The Problem of Moral Despair Within Moral Theism of I. Kant

Abstract

This article examines the problem of moral despair in the context of Immanuel Kant’s ethics. In the history of ethical teachings Kant is known primarily as the creator of a formally rigorous moral doctrine that allows to formulate rules for determining the morality of actions in such way that these rules do not contradict each other and are fundamentally universalizable. However, a deeper dive into Kant’s texts often reveals more complex relationships between his ideas. The idea of the autonomy of practical reason presupposes the independence of ethics from religion as well as independence of a particular person from any means of justifying morality which he himself does not agree with, including the justification of morality as a law given by God. Nevertheless, Kant’s idea of the highest good implies that practical reason, guiding a person towards both happiness and moral perfection, must have an idea of the law according to which well-being and virtue must accompany each other, so that one is present in a person’s life in proportion to the other. The idea of a divine legislator gives hope for this proportionality. Conversely, the rejection of this idea, while not making it impossible to follow moral law, leaves man in a world where moral people suffer and bad people live comfortably, with no hope that this will ever change. Thus, according to Kant, atheism inevitably leads to despair, and despair hinders the human will to follow moral duty. At the same time, Kant’s conclusions are not the only ones possible based on fundamental ideas about practical reason. Based on Kant’s texts, this article outlines the formal scheme on which Kant’s concept of moral despair is based, reconstructs the antinomies from which this scheme is derived, and then shows the possibility of deriving other schemes from these antinomies. In addition, the article demonstrates that the very context of Kant’s reflections on hope and despair implies a consequentialist reading of his texts, which raises the question of the role of moral theism in Kant’s ethics and the interconnection between its various elements even more sharply.