Irrationality and Self-Deception within Kant’s Grades of Evil

What is it about?

This paper argues that Kant's notion of "weakness of will" is not a form of self-deception (in which one believes that what one is doing is right when it isn't) but is instead strict akratic action (the doing of that which is known to be immoral and irrational). I give a careful reading of Kant's descriptions of the "frailty" and its relation to the "radical evil" of human beings and show that Kant's notion of weakness of will can best be understood according to Donald Davidson's model of practical irrationality. On that model, a person has a properly moral character and a properly functioning practical reason, but they also, irrationally, question whether they ought to listen to practical reasoning in the specific case. Because there can be no rational answer to that but the affirmative, the resultant immoral action (clear-eyed weakness of will) must be attributed to a "cause" and not a "reason." Therefore, Kant's notion of weakness of will looks like compulsion that results from radical evil. Yet, because we are responsible for our own noumenal character (our ultimately alignment with the moral law in our heart of hearts), we are nevertheless responsible for such akratic action. I also argue that the notion of "impurity" should be understood as self-deception in which the motivations for action are mixed with self-interest and this leads a certain arbitrariness in the impure person's practical reasoning. The impure agent is unaware of this, but scholars tend to misread impurity as an explicit negotiation with practical reason itself (thus, appearing closer to weakness of will) and the choice to do moral things for the sake of self-interest (which is what Kant calls depravity).

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Why is it important?

This is important because scholarship on Kant's notion of weakness of will has universally regarded it (and all immoral action) as a form of self-deception. This has had the effect of distorting the other types of immoral action (impurity and depravity) as scholars have struggled to distinguish the three "grades of evil" both conceptually and textually. The larger significance of the paper is that it supports a rather metaphysical notion of the noumenal self, which contains our ultimate moral character as a fundamental maxim vis-a-vis morality itself, for which we are responsible via a notion of "timeless" freedom.