Álvaro Rodríguez-González Barredo

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.

Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 94

1

A particular family of strategies about free will has enjoyed a great success in contemporary philosophy, mostly because it offers an excellent deal. All of our worries about freedom gone for none of the metaphysical price. It is a brand of compatibilism that has its foremost exponent in P. F. Strawson (1962). The crux of freedom is in our assuming a participant attitude towards others, rather than the objective one we afford unfree beings, and whenever we suspend it, we have reasons that have little to do with the possibility of universal determinism for that. Using this opposition of “stances” we can take towards our fellows – one belonging to the realm of scientific observation; the other, to that of conversation and action – as a solution to the free will problem is the characterizing feature of the family, whose members are illustrious and many [1].

Its special appeal, as I mentioned, lies in the fact that this solution does not require any odd metaphysical apparatus to back it up. No talk of immanent causation, no transphysical agency, no immaterial soul: the undeniable practices we all engage in throughout our lives suspend the relevance of the worry about determinism (or what have you). This may as well rank among the most successful disolutions of age-old philosophical problems.

This programme, inspired by Kant from the get-go as it quite clearly was, couldn’t wait long before taking its chances at becoming Kantian orthodoxy[2]. Riding on the never-ending trench warfare between the two great camps of interpretation of what Kant’s phenomena/noumena distinction is (are they ontologically different objects? are they two aspects of the same one?), “two-standpoints”, as it came to be known, promised to do to Kant’s theory of freedom what constructivism and constitutivism had done to his ethics: a facelift for the new times. Why insist on weird and spooky entities like “intelligible characters” and “atemporal deeds”, when all we need is a practical standpoint? When we take on a deliberative stance, i.e. when we consider ourselves and others as agents, we consider them and us as free beings, not necessitated by the laws of physics. Insofar as this standpoint has as much of a right (or more) to inform our outlook into the world as that of physicalist observation, our beliefs about freedom are safe; or so it goes.

2

If Kant’s theory is worth vindicating, this can’t be the way to do it. Strawsonian, Beckian, or Davidsonian freedom are deeply respectable proposals, but if we take Kant’s infamous declaration that “every being that cannot act otherwise than under the idea of freedom is actually free, in a practical respect” (Groundwork, 4: 448) to mean that all freedom needs is a legitimate sphere of human activity that grounds our belief in it, basically everything else he has to say about it becomes unintelligible.

Thus the opening quote. Say we simply have two coequal scopes of human action, one theoretical, one practical. Each has its own conceptual framework: the former, based on natural causality; the latter, on freedom. Whenever we undertake an activity that falls under one of those, we take the world to be either naturally necessitated or shaped by the free doings of rational beings. Why exactly should we need to commit to something as strange and costly as transcendental idealism – particularly, the ideality of space and time – to say this much? Rather, the natural attitude to take if one believes that this is what freedom is about seems to be Korsgaard’s:

“The point is not that you must believe that you are free, but that you must choose as if you were free. It is important to see that this is quite consistent with believing yourself to be fully determined”

Creating the Kingdom of Ends, p. 162

Being determined is of no concern if we can still choose as if we were free, says Korsgaard. However, Kant seems to be quite concerned about it.

3

In conversation with a staunch two-standpointer in Lisbon, I got told, very sharply, that transcendental idealism is, in fact, instrumental to the co-equality of the theoretical and practical. The argument goes, if natural causality could really be at the heart of reality, and describe things as they are in themselves, then freedom would be, at most, a useful fiction for blissful “agents”. All we need, however, is an assurance that the ironclad laws of nature are on equal footing with freedom, and that they will not turn out to actually be underlying reality. That way, we wouldn’t need to inflate freedom into magic powers from beyond the pale of the phenomenal, whilst securing that we are not simply delusional when we call ourselves free.

But are we really gaining anything over the straight-faced metaphysician when we take this route? I believe not, for two reasons.

4

First, let us consider what a metaphysical cost really is, and why our two-standpointer would be getting a better deal than an old fashion believer in intelligible characters. A big part, it seems, of what made constructivist Kantian ethics so enticing is that people of all sorts of metaphysical backgrounds could come and join, without fearing that odd noumenal selves whose dignity we have to respect would pop out in the equation at any time. However, if two-standpointers turn Kantian – that is, if they abide by transcendental idealism – then they cannot just be ecumenical about metaphysical persuasions, they have to become militant agnostics.

If we consider the logical space of all possible metaphysical theories, a truly metaphysically costless account of freedom would be such that it would preclude none of it, or, at the very least, only a small region. Transcendental idealism of the agnostic variety, however, stops the entry to every single account of causality that considers it an objective feature of our world. This is fine, of course, if it is backed by argument – as Kant does – but this is definitely not a bargain.

5

What is more, even if we grant that we could achieve some cost reduction by means of two-standpoints, this is not without drawbacks. Even if we take a principled agnosticism about the ultimate metaphysical structure of reality, if we are going to put forward an account that can secure our beliefs about freedom, we at least better flesh them out, and see exactly what is we are making room for by denying ultimacy to the scientific view of the world. But this is precisely what laying out a metaphysics for freedom is. I very much sympathize with Studtmann and Shields (2023) on this: we need an account of how the world would need to be for the freedom we seek to possibly exist. In that regard, Kant is very much prescient when saying, after lengthily laying out a whole model of atemporal activity grounding phenomenal actions that “we have not even tried to prove the possibility of freedom” (Critique of pure reason, A 558/ B 586). We are, we should be, metaphysically committed to the inner workings of whatever notion of freedom we supposedly believe in.

I want to protest against equating two-standpoints with non-ontological interpretations of things in themselves, which I already mentioned as the suspect entry point of this stance on Kantian freedom. If the grounding relation between atemporal agents and their doings happens to be just a “practical” grounding, or a “real one”, and if our selves are “really two”, or “two aspects” of the same one, that is something that cannot be adjudicated in the court of discussions around freedom. Whatever the phenomenon/noumenon distinction ultimately consists in, it will do so because of considerations internal to that distinction, to the nature of transcendental idealism, and there is no reason to believe that the needs of freedom – central to the project of Kantian philosophy as they are – are going to be what settle that debate. The metaphysical stakes of freedom are not quite those. In sum, attaching a “two-aspect” tag to a reading that is every bit as based on grounding relations and timeless shenanigans as its ontologically bloated adversary doesn’t seem to amount to a real alternative. It treads on a debate that should transpire at a different level, stipulates its outcome, and uses it to take the role of an alternative it isn’t really.

6

It would be unfair towards Strawson to accuse him of not taking the problem of determinism seriously enough. On the contrary, he says:

Finally, to the further question whether it would not be rational, given a general theoretical conviction of the truth of determinism, so to change our world that in it all these attitudes were wholly suspended, I must answer, as before, that one who presses this question has wholly failed to grasp the import of the preceding answer, the nature of the human commitment that is here involved: it is useless to ask whether it would not be rational for us to do what it is not in our nature to (be able to) do.

Freedom and Resentment, p. 204

It may be so that, since we’re beings who must act, and deliberate, and converse with other like beings, we cannot hold the world to be completely antithetical to our freedom; that we, in effect, must believe ourselves to be free. But this belief, if genuine, has with it a certain conception of the world. Whether we can claim to know that the world is like that, or whether we simply hope that it be so, that’s a matter for epistemology.

Ultimately, two-standpoints understood as “Kantian freedom with a human face” strikes me as a dud. If it really doubles down on being metaphysically tolerant, then it is giving up on the idea that Kant’s theory of freedom is worth the while; if it doesn’t, then it cannot claim such superiority over the baroque adornments of ”metaphysical” readings. On the contrary, its agnostic quietism threatens to achieve the worst of both worlds: closing the doors to most philosophical outlooks, whilst not daring to give an answer to the fundamental question: what does a world in which we are free look like? For real?

[1] For instance, Beck (1975), Korsgaard (1996a), less Kantian but, still: McKenna (2012).

[2] Most famously Korsgaard’s (1996b), which shares a lot with Rawls’s (2000). Frierson (2010) as well.

References:

Beck, L. W. (1975) The Actor and the Spectator. Yale UP.

Frierson, P. (2010) “Two Standpoints and the Problem of Moral Anthropology”, in Kant’s Moral Metaphysics, Lipscomb and Krueger (eds.), de Gruyter.

Korsgaard, C. (1996a) The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge UP.

Korsgaard, C. (1996b) Creating the Kingdom of Ends, Cambridge UP.

Rawls, J. (2000) Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, Harvard UP.

Strawson, P. F. (1962) “Freedom and Resentment”, Proceedings of the British Academy, 48:187-211.

Studtmann, P. and Shields, C. (2023) “Narrative Determination”, Journal of the American Philosophical Association 779-798.