The Idea of Freedom and Moral Cognition in Groundwork III

Although the relation between freedom and the moral law is central to Kant’s moral philosophy, it is often difficult to explain precisely the nature of this relation in Kant’s work, and how Kant’s thought evolved in this matter from his pre-Critical writings to his later work. All commentators agree that at least in all his Critical works, Kant endorses some version of what Henry Allison calls “The Reciprocity Thesis”, the thesis that freedom and the moral law imply each other. However, there’s significant controversy on how various arguments in Kant’s corpus are supposed to move us from the fact that we are free to the fact that we are bound by the moral law, or vice-versa. Particularly puzzling is what seems to be a major shift in Kant’s position on this relation. It seems that in various works up to, but not including, the Critique of Practical Reason,1 Kant seems to think that he has independent grounds to establish that we’re free and that he can use this fact as some kind of foundation for the moral law.2 However, there could be little doubt that Kant later came to deny that we have any access to the fact that we are free independently of the moral law. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant says that