Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Impossibility Of Evil Qua Evil: Kantian Limitations On Human Immorality, Timothy Alan Crews-Anderson

Philosophy Theses

Kant denies that evil qua evil can be an incentive to human beings. Is this a fact about what sorts of reasons human beings find interesting? Or, is it rooted entirely in Kant’s notion of human freedom? I focus on key facets of Kant’s system: human freedom, immorality and incentives. With an understanding of these concepts based in Christine Korsgaard’s reading of Kant’s moral theory, I argue that the impossibility of acting solely from evil qua evil is not rooted in human incentives and that if we were able to represent an unconditioned principle of immorality, we would have as …