Renodus

Free Will and the Moral Law

13 min read

Free Will and the Moral Law

Two questions are doing all the work.

Question one — the metaphysical one. Are human beings free? Is what we call “deciding” anything more than the last link in a causal chain that started before we were born? If the universe is the kind of place a physicist describes, where every event is the determined consequence of prior events, where does the space for a free decision sit?

Question two — the moral one. Even granting that we are somehow free, what should we do with it? Is there a binding law we are obliged to follow, or is the absence of a law our actual condition? And if there is a law, does it come from God, from reason, from our nature, from the social contract, or from something else?

The two questions are joined at the hip. If we are not free, the moral law is moot — you cannot be obligated to do what you could not have done otherwise. If we are free, the moral law becomes the most pressing question we face — because nothing tells us what to do with our freedom unless something does.

This page traces the question through four writers who, between them, define the modern argument: Kant (who built the strongest defense of both freedom and the moral law), Dostoevsky (who tested Kant’s law in fiction by giving his characters permission to break it), Nietzsche (who argued that both the free will and the moral law are fictions the weak invent to bind the strong), and Sartre (who took Kant’s freedom and removed Kant’s law).

Kant: Freedom as the Condition of Morality

Kant’s answer, worked out across the three Critiques, is that the question “are we free?” is not one science can answer, and the question “is there a moral law?” is not one science is even asking.

In [[critique-of-pure-reason|Critique of Pure Reason]] (1781) Kant argues that the world as we know it — the world of phenomena — is governed by causal laws all the way down. There is no room in the phenomenal world for a free decision. But the phenomenal world is not the whole story. Behind it stands the noumenal world, the world as it is in itself, which we cannot know but which we have rational grounds to posit. And the noumenal world is not governed by phenomenal causality. The free will, if it exists, exists noumenally.

In [[critique-of-practical-reason|Critique of Practical Reason]] (1788) Kant then argues that we have direct, undeniable evidence that the moral law exists — the fact that we feel ourselves obligated. The moment a person says “I should not have done that,” they are testifying to a law that binds them. And — this is the key Kantian move — if the moral law binds us, then we must be free, because ought implies can. You cannot be obligated to do what you could not have done. So the very fact of moral consciousness is evidence of freedom.

The content of the moral law is the categorical imperative, in the formulation everyone remembers: “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Or: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means.” The law is binding on every rational being. It does not depend on God, on consequences, on culture, or on what one happens to want. It is the structure rationality itself imposes on a free will.

This is the picture the rest of modern moral philosophy is arguing with.

Dostoevsky: The Law Tested by Permission

Dostoevsky spent his career staging Kant’s question in fiction. The most explicit test is Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment (1866). Raskolnikov has read enough nineteenth-century philosophy to think that the moral law might be a prejudice for ordinary people while extraordinary men — Napoleon, the great founders, the bringers of new orders — are exempt. The novel is the demonstration: he murders an old pawnbroker on the theory that he, Raskolnikov, is one of the extraordinary, and the rest of the book is the slow, brutal collapse of the theory. The law turns out to be inside him. The crime he committed in theory has to be confessed in fact, because he cannot live with himself otherwise. Sonya — the prostitute whose love and Christian conviction draws his confession — is the figure through whom the moral law re-enters his life as something other than abstract rule.

The deeper test is in the late novels. The line “if there is no God, everything is permitted” is the position Dostoevsky stages with utmost seriousness through Ivan Karamazov: if the moral law has no cosmic underwriting, what reason is there to follow it? Ivan’s intellectual position is the negation of Kant’s; Smerdyakov, Ivan’s half-brother, takes the position seriously enough to act on it and kills their father. Ivan is shattered. The novel argues — without ever quite saying so directly — that the law cannot survive being given permission to be optional, even in theory.

Dostoevsky’s fiction does not refute Kant. It dramatizes what is at stake in Kant’s question. If the law is real, the human being who breaks it is broken by it. If the law is not real, what is left of the human being who acts on the absence?

Nietzsche: Free Will and Moral Law as Fictions of the Weak

Nietzsche refuses Kant’s entire framework at the root. In [[the-genealogy-of-morals|On the Genealogy of Morals]] (1887) §13, he carries out the most compact philosophical refutation of free will ever written: “There is no such substratum, there is no ‘being’ behind doing, working, becoming; ‘the doer’ is a mere appanage to the action. The action is everything.” There is no neutral agent-self behind the deed who could have chosen otherwise. The lamb cannot hold the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey, because the bird is its action of predation. The “free will” the moral tradition invokes is a grammatical illusion that the weak carefully constructed because it allowed them to moralize the strong’s strength — to treat strength as a choice the strong could have refrained from, and therefore as something blameworthy.

The moral law itself fares no better. In Nietzsche’s genealogy, the entire Judeo-Christian moral framework — “good and evil,” guilt, the categorical imperative, humanitarian pity — is the historical product of the slave revolt in morals (see Power and Morality for the detailed argument). Morality is not a universal imperative binding on all rational beings; it is the inversion of noble values by a defeated class. Kant’s moral law, in this reading, is Christian asceticism without the theological backstop: the shadow of the dead God, in Kazantzakis’s phrase. “The tartuffery, as stiff as it is virtuous, of old Kant as he lures us along the dialectical bypaths which lead, more correctly, mislead, to his ‘categorical imperative’ — this spectacle makes us smile” ([[beyond-good-and-evil|Beyond Good and Evil]], §5).

So Nietzsche’s answer to both halves of the question is no. Neither the free will nor the moral law is real in the sense Kant needs. What is real is the will to power — the drive of every living being to discharge its strength, create, impose form. The Übermensch is the figure who has overcome the slave-moral fiction and creates values from the strength of that will, not from the resentful demand that others be bound by a universal rule.

The collision with Dostoevsky is direct in the other direction. Dostoevsky thought that without the moral law the human being is broken by its own transgression; Nietzsche thinks that the real breaking happens inside the moral law, which poisons the strong with guilt and the weak with resignation. Raskolnikov, in Nietzsche’s reading, is not proof of the law’s reality; he is proof of how deeply Christian morality has burrowed into even those who reject it intellectually. The cure is not confession. The cure is going further.

Sartre: Freedom Without the Law

Sartre keeps Kant’s freedom and removes Kant’s law. In [[being-and-nothingness|Being and Nothingness]] (1943) the human being is condemned to be free — there is no nature, no essence, no pre-given law that tells us what we are or what we should do. We exist first, we choose ourselves second, and there is no court of appeal beyond the choices we make.

This is a much more radical position than Kant’s. For Kant, freedom is the precondition of being bound by the moral law. For Sartre, freedom is itself the human situation, and there is no moral law on the other side of it. The categorical imperative is, in Sartre’s reading, one more attempt by the human being to escape the burden of self-creation by pretending that the law was always already in place.

Sartre does not, however, conclude that anything is permitted. His [[existentialism-is-a-humanism|Existentialism Is a Humanism]] (1945) argues that because there is no pre-given law, every choice we make is a choice on behalf of all humanity — a kind of secularized universalizability that brings him surprisingly close to Kant in spirit, even as he refuses Kant’s metaphysics. The famous example is the young man who comes to Sartre during the war and asks whether to stay home and care for his mother or to leave and join the Resistance. Sartre’s answer: no doctrine can decide for him. The doctrines all pre-suppose what the choice is supposed to settle. He must choose, and the choice will be his.

The collision with Dostoevsky is direct. Sartre writes, in Existentialism Is a Humanism: “Dostoyevsky once wrote: ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted’; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself.” Sartre keeps Dostoevsky’s premise and refuses Dostoevsky’s conclusion.

The Four Positions in One Diagram

  • Kant. Freedom is real (noumenally). The moral law is real (universally binding through reason). Therefore the human being is morally responsible.
  • Dostoevsky. Freedom is real (terrifyingly so). The moral law is real (and is not optional, and is grounded in something like God or like the structure of love). Therefore the human being who breaks the law is broken by the breaking.
  • Nietzsche. Freedom is a grammatical fiction invented by the weak so they can moralize the strong’s strength. The moral law is a slave revolt in moral clothing. What is real is the will to power, and the only task is to overcome the inherited fictions from strength, not from resentment.
  • Sartre. Freedom is real (and exhaustive). The moral law is not — there is no pre-given law. Therefore the human being is responsible for creating the law in every choice they make.

What none of the three can accept is the position that says: freedom is an illusion, the moral law is a social convention, neither question is interesting. All three insist that the question is real and that the person who refuses to face it is in bad faith (Sartre’s term), in the wasteland (Dostoevsky’s structure), or in heteronomy (Kant’s).

The Tradition Around the Argument

Schopenhauer rejects Kant’s optimism about the moral law. Behind the phenomenal world is not a free noumenal will but the Will — a single, blind, ceaselessly striving cosmic drive that uses individual human “decisions” as its temporary expressions. We are not free, in Schopenhauer’s picture, because there is only one Will and we are its momentary masks. The moral consequence is closer to Buddhist renunciation than to Kant’s categorical imperative.

Freud offers a third way. The structural model of [[civilization-and-its-discontents|Civilization and Its Discontents]] (1930) presents the super-ego as the categorical imperative installed inside the psyche as a developmental fact. We are not “free” in any robust sense; we are negotiating between the id’s drives, the ego’s reality testing, and the super-ego’s internalized prohibitions. The Kantian moral law turns out to be — in Freud’s reading — the cultural super-ego doing its work. Whether this is a refutation of Kant or a clinical translation of him is the question Freud’s late work leaves open.

Frankl restates Kant’s freedom from the other end. In [[mans-search-for-meaning|Man’s Search for Meaning]] (1946) Frankl argues that even in Auschwitz — even in the most determinedly un-free situation human history has ever produced — the prisoner retained the freedom to choose his attitude toward what was being done to him. “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.” Frankl is not a Kantian; he is making a phenomenological observation. But the observation tracks Kant: even when phenomenal causality has stripped away every option, there remains the noumenal capacity to choose how to inhabit the situation one has been thrown into.

Fromm in [[escape-from-freedom|Escape from Freedom]] (1941) shows what happens when modern people receive Kantian autonomy as a historical inheritance and find it intolerable. The mechanisms of escape — authoritarian submission, automaton conformity — are the structural responses of a species that has been given freedom but has not yet learned to bear it. The cure is positive freedom — Sartre’s choice in a more humanistic register.

The Cinema

Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) is the cleanest cinematic test of the question. Alex is a violent young man whose violence is conditioned out of him by the Ludovico technique — and the film argues, against the state, that a man without the freedom to do evil is also a man without the freedom to do good. The conditioning has not made him moral; it has made him incapable of moral life. Kubrick is dramatizing the Kantian point: where there is no freedom, there is no morality.

Kieślowski’s Decalogue and the Three Colors trilogy run the moral law through the modern Polish-French city, asking whether a Kantian universal can survive being applied to specific lives. Kieślowski’s answer is qualified yes: the law is real, but its application is always particular, always painful, and always leaves a remainder.

Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) is what happens when the moral law has become inaudible: Travis Bickle’s “freedom” is freedom in Sartre’s sense (he can do anything), but he has no law to ground it (he must invent one), and the law he invents is private and violent. The film is, in this sense, Sartre’s worst-case answer.

Connected Works and Pages

  • The Shadow — what the moral law represses
  • Power and Morality — the moral law at the political scale
  • The Absurd — what the moral law collides with
  • Alienation — what happens when the moral law is felt as external coercion rather than internal obligation

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