Joseph Hamilton

Research Project

Kant and Hegel on Evil

My research project investigates Kant’s and Hegel’s accounts of the structure of free agency by looking at the ways in which they think agents can fail to be free. When analyzing a capacity, its failure conditions often reveal insights about its structure. Kant and Hegel, broadly speaking, identify free agency with moral or ethical agency. Therefore, by examining the failure condition of moral agency, namely evil, we can illuminate the structure of free agency.

The first part of this project reconstructs Kant’s position. In Kant’s view, agents have a split self-conception: they view themselves both noumenally, as purely rational agents legislating moral principles for themselves and all other rational agents, and phenomenally, as mere rational animals navigating base temptations and social pathologies. Evil agents reverse the appropriate organization of their maxims, thereby rejecting the thought of their being bound by a moral law. Such agents thereby deceive themselves about their moral standing, and consider their actions as justified without the constraint of the moral law. This undermines the autonomy constitutive of morality.

The second part turns to Hegel. Hegel rejects Kant’s claim that evil is a force external to the moral law. Instead, evil is part of the possibility of autonomy. This is because Hegel understands self-consciousness to involve ethical norms only applying if an agent takes them to. This has two consequences. On the one hand, a self-conscious being can understand themselves as unbound by any ethical law. On the other, it allows an agent to understand their natural, given self as transformable in accordance with ethical norms. Evil is therefore necessary for the realization of freedom because only with this concept can an individual grasp their fully spontaneous relationship to themselves.