Adrian Moore - Kant and how to live in purely rational terms

Adrian Moore, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, explores the practical use of reason and morality in Kant’s system.

About Adrian Moore "I am Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. I study the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who, in my view, is the greatest philosopher of all time. He's certainly my own favourite philosopher and he has informed a lot of my work."

Key Points

• Even though Kant recognised that everything in the physical world is governed by predetermined factors, we are still free agents as we ourselves are part of the underlying reality. • Kant believed that deciding between the right and wrong thing to do could be based on pure reason. • The belief that there are fundamental principles of right living and others that are absolutely wrong has been the most enduring and influential of Kant’s ideas

Kant is writing in the wake of Isaac Newton, and one of the things that Kant believed about Newton’s great scientific discoveries was that they showed that everything that happens in the physical world was completely determined by inexorable laws of nature. So, in principle, if you knew all of the prior conditions before some event and if you knew what all the laws of nature were, you would be able to predict with certainty exactly what was going to happen next. Kant also believed that it was a direct consequence of this that there could be no free will in the physical world, that nothing that any of us does in the physical realm could constitute an exercise of freedom because it was all completely outside our control. If I raise my hand, for example, there's some purely physical story that you can tell about why that happened. No doubt that physical story involves a certain amount going on in my brain but, even so, whatever it is has been determined to go on by antecedent physical conditions stretching all the way back to whatever initiated it. It's a very urgent question for Kant: what possible room is there for freedom, for exercises of free will?