Janelle DeWitt

During my summer research fellowship, I plan to finish work on my paper entitled “Freedom and the Rational Origin of Evil: Kant's Anselmian Roots”.  Kant’s three-fold identification of freedom, rationality and morality, captured in the principle of autonomy, has long been thought to exclude the possibility of moral evil. That is, in acting immorally, one would fail to be rational (i.e., fail to determine oneself according to the moral law), and thus fail to be free. But if this were true, then why would Kant go on to declare that evil has a rational origin?  I believe the answer lies with Anselm of Canterbury, because it was for just this very reason (to give an intellectual account of evil) that he first developed the “two wills doctrine”—a doctrine from which the conception of a free will as both spontaneous and morally self-determined first emerged. Thus, what we find in Anselm is an explicit, yet ultra-simplified account of freedom and moral evil, one that clearly parallels Kant’s own.  But as I have come to discover, the value of exploring Kant’s theory in light of Anselm goes well beyond the problem of moral evil.  When the Anselmian elements are reintroduced into Kant’s account, a very different image of the Kantian moral agent begins to emerge.   

Affiliation: Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of California, Los Angeles