The First Piece: On Radical Evil in Human Nature

The Prefaces

Morality, insofar as it is based on the concept of the human being as a free agent who, just because of that, binds himself through his reason to unconditional laws, needs neither the idea of another being above him in order that he recognise his duty, nor an incentive other than the law itself in order that he observe it. Morality in no way needs religion for its own sake; by virtue of pure practical reason it is self-sufficient.

But morality inevitably leads to religion. For it gives rise to the idea of a highest good in the world, which can be possible only if there is a powerful moral lawgiver outside the human being — a God.

In the second Preface, Kant uses an image: revelation and reason are like two concentric circles. Revelation is the wider circle, which contains historical elements; the pure religion of reason is the narrower circle within it. A philosopher may stay in the inner circle, and see whether the outer one, read morally, leads back to it.

Is the Human Being by Nature Good or Evil?

That the world lies in evil is a complaint as old as history, even as old as the older art of poetry; indeed, as old as the oldest of all poems, the religion of priests. All have the world begin with the good: with a golden age, with life in paradise, or with a still happier life in communion with heavenly beings. But they soon make this happiness vanish like a dream; and they make the fall into evil hurry to the worse with accelerated pace. Recently, however, the opposite heroic opinion has gained ground, especially among philosophers and educators: that the world is steadily advancing from the worse to the better.

Kant does not take either side straightforwardly. He holds that the human being has both an original predisposition to good and a propensity to evil.

When we call a human being evil, we do not mean that he does evil actions, but that his actions are such as to allow us to infer evil maxims in him. Evil is not in the senses, nor in the natural inclinations, which are in themselves innocent; nor in a corruption of reason itself, which would make the human being a devilish being. Evil lies in the will's freely chosen order of incentives.

Kant names three original predispositions to good in human nature: to animality (self-preservation, sex, community); to humanity (self-love, comparing oneself with others — from which, when perverted, spring jealousy and rivalry, "the vices of culture"); and to personality (the susceptibility to respect for the moral law).

And three grades of the propensity to evil: first, frailty — the weakness of the human heart in following its good maxims: "What I would, that I do not; but what I hate, that I do," as Paul says; second, impurity — mixing moral with non-moral incentives, doing what duty requires but not purely from duty; third, depravity, or the perversity of the heart — the propensity to subordinate the incentives of the moral law to others, not moral.

Radical Evil

The difference between a good and an evil human being must lie not in the difference between the incentives he takes into his maxim, but in their subordination: which of the two he makes the condition of the other. Every human being, even the worst, has the moral law within him; and every human being, even the best, has self-love. The human being is evil only because he reverses the moral order of the incentives in adopting them into his maxim: he makes the incentive of self-love and its inclinations the condition of complying with the moral law — whereas the latter, as the supreme condition of the satisfaction of the former, should have been adopted into the universal maxim of the power of choice as the sole incentive.

This evil is radical, because it corrupts the ground of all maxims; as a natural propensity it cannot be extirpated through human forces, for this could only happen through good maxims — which cannot take place when the subjective supreme ground of all maxims is presupposed as corrupted. Yet it must be possible to overcome it, since it is found in the human being as a freely acting being.

Kant's doctrine of "radical evil" startled his contemporaries: Goethe complained that Kant had "slobbered on his philosopher's mantle" by reintroducing original sin. Kant's evil is, however, not inherited guilt, but a free choice, for which each person is responsible.

Kant then rejects the idea that evil is passed on by inheritance from our first parents: of all the ways of representing the origin of evil, the most inappropriate is to imagine it as having come to us by inheritance. The story of the Fall represents, in the form of a narrative, what happens in every evil choice: "In Adam all have sinned."

The Restoration of the Original Predisposition

How can an evil human being become good? Not by gradual reform of conduct alone, but by a revolution in the disposition — a change of heart, a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation, through a single unchangeable decision. Then, in the world of sense, this revolution appears as a gradual reform: an endless striving from bad to better.

The human being must make himself, or must have made himself, into whatever, in a moral sense, he is or is to become. Both must be an effect of his free power of choice; for otherwise they could not be imputed to him, and he could therefore be neither morally good nor evil.

If the moral law commands that we ought now to be better human beings, it inescapably follows that we must be capable of being better human beings.

"Ought implies can" — Kant's principle that the moral command presupposes the possibility of fulfilling it.