Kant’s Theory of Radical Evil and its Franciscan Forebears

Kant on Radical Evil

Kant’s account of radical evil is constructed on the foundation of the ethical views he presents in his Critique of Practical Reason and more briefly in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. There he outlines his deontological (duty) ethic according to which any action is moral if and only if it conforms to the moral law. Thus, Kant writes that our main obligation as humans is to ‘act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law.’^[8] In this regard, Kant insists that we must treat all persons, including the self, as ends-in-themselves rather than as means to achieving some other end.^[9] He gives several examples of how the maxim can be applied in practice.

In the first, an individual contemplates suicide in order to alleviate their personal suffering. Kant notes that the individual in this case treats themselves as a means to relieving suffering rather than as an end. The maxim of their action is therefore subjective, geared towards achieving personal relief and happiness. As such, this maxim fails to provide an objective and rational principle that is suited to serving as a moral basis for all persons at all places and at all times. On these grounds, Kant insists that the maxim of the individual’s action cannot be turned into a universally applicable moral law. The same conclusion is reached in the next example Kant cites of a person who considers asking to borrow money from a friend but has no intention of repaying it. Here, Kant shows that the person treats their friend as a means to personal benefit rather than as an end in itself.

Thus, the maxim of this action is subjective, geared towards personal happiness, rather than rooted in reason and objectivity. More specifically, Kant describes the action in terms of self-love, which is allowed in the case of an evil maxim to take priority over the duty to the moral law. In his Religion, Kant elaborates on the nature of self-love, by distinguishing between three different human predispositions: animality, humanity, and personality. The animal aspect of human nature involves a purely physical self-love that has no basis in reason; it is orientated towards self-preservation, procreation, and society or community with others.^[10] Humanity is self-love that concerns the desire to be happy in comparison to others – to gain recognition from and equality with others and not to be inferior to them.^[11]

This desire is rooted in practical reason but is nonetheless subservient to incentives or objectives other than the moral law. By contrast, personality consists in the power of free choice that seeks to observe the moral law for its own sake.^[12] As such, it is fully objective, rooted in practical reason, possessing no other goal than to observe the moral law. As Kant elaborates, the first two predispositions of human being – animality and humanity – which are guided by self-love, do not necessarily conflict with the moral law and can actually facilitate its observance. The important point for Kant is that such subjective considerations should not be allowed to trump the objective duty to the moral law. Thus, Kant writes:

All these predispositions in the human being are not only (negatively) good (they do not conflict with the moral law) but are also predispositions to the good (they further compliance with that law). They are original; for they belong to the possibility of human nature. The human being can indeed use the first two contra-purposively, but cannot extirpate either of them.^[13]

As Kant elaborates, there are three levels at which human self-love can be allowed to supersede the duty to the moral law and thus produce an evil maxim rather than a good one. These are frailty, impurity, and depravity.^[14] The first involves a weakness of the will to comply with the maxims of the moral law. In the second case, actions which abide by the duty to obey the moral law are not done from duty. Thus, there is a conformity to the law in deed but not in spirit, which makes the action impure. In the last case of depravity, we prefer our own desires over obedience to the moral law without compunction. This inverts the proper order of the maxims – to obtain happiness and to observe the moral law – subjecting the latter to the former rather than the other way around.^[15]

Here, Kant clearly criticises the sort of Aristotelian virtue ethic that is orientated towards achieving happiness (eudaimonia), which in Aristotelian terms refers more precisely to human excellence or flourishing than to happiness as such.^[16] As we have seen, the pursuit of happiness cannot provide an objective basis for moral action in Kant’s view, as it is prone to indulging potentially selfish self-love. In this regard, Kant also takes issue with the Aristotelian notion that moral action is a matter of discretion concerning what is right to do in particular circumstances.^[17] As Aristotle writes:

Matters concerned with conduct and questions of what is good for us have no fixity, any more than matters of health. The general account being of this nature, the account of particular cases is yet more lacking in exactness; for they do not fall under any art or precept but the agents themselves must in each case consider what is appropriate to the occasion, as happens also in the art of medicine or of navigation.^[18]

The lack of ‘fixity’ in ethical matters of which Aristotle speaks in this context was clearly incompatible with Kant’s concern to find a universally applicable, objective moral law. While Kant does not see virtue as the basis for moral virtue, he nevertheless affirms that virtue is the consequence of following the moral law and indeed of perfecting the art of doing so.^[19] As Kant writes: ‘When the firm resolve in complying with one’s duty has become a proficiency, it is also called virtue.’^[20] Interestingly, Kant follows Aristotle further in describing virtue as a matter of the will’s habituation, not in striking the mean between excess and deficiency, as Aristotle supposed, but simply in observing the moral law:

Hence virtue in this sense is acquired little by little and means to some a long habituation (in observing the law), whereby the human being, through gradual reforms of his conduct and stabilization of his maxims, has passed over from the propensity to vice to an opposite propensity.^[21]

As noted above, the main difference between Aristotle and Kant on this score is that the former saw habituation as a matter of cultivating those qualities or virtues that allow for spontaneous moral judgments, while the latter understood it in terms of the consistent application of the moral law. For Kant, in sum, virtue is ‘the moral strength of a man’s will in fulfilling his duty.’^[22] Thus, there are resonances of Aristotle in Kant, despite his rejection of eudaimonism. These resonances come into further relief in Kant’s account of the ‘degrees’ in the propensity to evil, which strongly correlate to the degrees of virtue and vice of which Aristotle speaks in Nicomachean Ethics, Book 7.

The first degree of virtue is temperance, which involves wanting to do what is right for its own sake, or out of a conviction that this is in one’s best interests, which seems to correspond to Kant’s ideal of a moral person.^[23] The second degree of continence entails wanting to do something evil but stopping oneself from doing it and corresponds to Kant’s category of impurity. Finally, incontinence involves knowing an act is wrong but doing it anyways out of a weakness of will (akrasia) to be virtuous, a notion which corresponds to Kant’s frailty. The final stage for Aristotle is simply that of vice itself, where one does wrong and no longer cares or even knows let alone feels guilty about committing evil.

This clearly corresponds to Kant’s last stage of depravity, where the maxim for good is subjected to that of evil entirely. The reason human beings fall into this state, Kant argues, is that we live in a world where we are always surrounded by incentives which compete with our commitment to prioritize our duty to the moral law. These incentives are generally directly linked to the question of our happiness, which need not but often does conflict with the moral law. According to Kant, we possess both incentives – to obtain happiness and to observe the moral law – by nature. We never lose our natural disposition to the moral law, even when we do evil, because otherwise we would never be able to do good again.^[24] By the same token, however, we always possess the capacity to do evil in virtue of free will.^[25]

This conclusion has significant ramifications for Kant’s account of the Christian doctrine of original sin. According to this doctrine, the human capacity for sinning or committing evil is the consequence of the original fall of a first man and woman through whom the propensity to evil became hereditary for all humans. As Kant insists, however, such a ‘temporal’ explanation for the origin of evil is unnecessary and irrelevant in light of a ‘rational’ one, which is rooted in an understanding of what is intrinsic to human nature and in this case of free will.^[26] For Kant, in other words, the fact that each human being is made by God to choose the good in virtue of a free will, which can nevertheless choose its opposite, evil, suffices to explain why each of us, on reaching the age of reason, inevitably realises this possibility. Although Kant acknowledges that there are many pressures on account of which we are inevitably bound to choose evil, these pressures do not force us to that end, which is always subject to free choice.^[27] As Kant stresses, culpability for evil choices, and moral responsibility for choices overall, cannot be ascribed to us unless it is the case that the capacity for good and evil is written into the very power of free choice. Thus, Kant states:

What the human being is or is to become in the moral sense, good or evil, into that he must turn or have turned himself. Either must be an effect of his free power of choice; for otherwise it could not be imputed to him, and consequently he could not morally be either good or evil. When it is said, he is created good, then this can mean nothing more than this: he is created for the good, and the original predisposition in the human being is good. The human being himself is not yet good on that account; rather, according as he does or does not admit into his maxim the incentives contained in that predisposition (this must be left entirely to his free selection, he brings it about that he becomes good or evil).^[28]

Kant’s effective rejection of the doctrine of original sin represents a significant departure from the prior Christian tradition and even the orthodoxy of his own day. As I will aim to show in the rest of this paper, moreover, the related idea of ‘radical evil’, or a latent potential for evil in human nature was itself a significant movement away from the longstanding Western tradition, which had been anticipated already by certain medieval scholars who nevertheless still believed in the idea of original sin. To demonstrate this, I will outline briefly in the next section the contours of the tradition I have in mind, stemming from Augustine of Hippo and elaborated by Anselm of Canterbury, who affirmed that free will is capable only of choosing the good and denied that evil is a substantial option of the will. As I will show subsequently, this view was roundly rejected by early thirteenth-century Franciscans who offered a revisionist reading of Augustine and Anselm, which for the first time allowed that free will is able to vacillate between good and evil and affirmed that the possibility of doing so is essential to acquiring merit for good actions and punishment for evil ones.^[29] In affirming these things, the medieval Franciscan tradition anticipated the view that Kant later formulated and laid the groundwork for that development.

Augustine on Evil and Free Will

Throughout his works, Augustine (354–430) famously argued that evil is not ‘something’ but is instead an absence or privation of the good.^[30] His views in this regard stem from his belief that everything God created is good, and that existence itself is therefore a good. According to Augustine, evil deprives us of the goodness – or the forms of existence – that God intended for us. For instance, wounds and sickness deprive us of health; death removes life; and vices in the soul detract from the good of human nature. So construed, evil is parasitic on the good. While there can be good without evil, in other words, there can be no evil except in a being that is good.^[31] As Augustine elaborates, however, natural beings, including human beings, are not immutably good like their creator. As temporal beings, they change and mature in their particular forms of goodness or existence, such as being human.^[32]

The mutability of creaturely natures allowed for the possibility, which was realised by the first man and first woman, Adam and Eve, to fall away from the good and choose evil. As Augustine is quick to stress, however, free will was not strictly speaking the efficient or moving cause of this original sin. On his understanding, free will exists solely for the purpose of choosing the good and is incompatible with sin and evil.^[33] At the fall, consequently, the will that failed to prefer the good served as what Augustine calls a ‘deficient’ cause of evil.^[34] As a result of this original sin, Augustine affirms that all human beings inherit the sin nature or tendency to sin, which each one actualises in their own way.

More specifically, original sin deprived human beings of the direct knowledge of God as the supreme being that was enjoyed by the first man and woman, limiting their contact to the temporal goods he has made. In consequence, Augustine notes that humans tend to confuse ‘this good and that good with the Good.’^[35] In other words, they stake hopes for happiness in finite and fleeting objects of direct human experience that cannot fully satisfy human desires. This does not mean that temporal things lack value for Augustine.^[36] As we have seen, all created beings are good and exist for our benefit. The problem is simply that ascribing too much significance to them, or becoming dependent upon them for personal happiness, sets human beings up for disappointment and frustration in life.^[37]

In this context, belief in God as the supreme good is crucial, because it enables us to maintain a proper perspective on the things that are ‘not God’ and thus prevents us from developing unhealthy attachments to temporal things. That is precisely why Augustine insists that free will cannot rightly choose evil, namely, because choosing the lesser over the greater good – and thus choosing evil – means becoming chained or enslaved to things for the sake of our happiness which cannot guarantee it.^[38] By contrast, the appropriate use of free will – to prefer the highest good or God above all else – makes it possible to appreciate and benefit from all things for what they are without becoming attached to them inappropriately.

Anselm on Evil and Free Will

Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) was famous for advancing arguments from reason, without appealing to past authorities as the basis for his claims. Nevertheless, there are clear signs throughout his oeuvre of his reliance on Augustine, and in particular the latter’s understanding of the nature of free will. In his own work on the subject, De libertate arbitrii, Anselm states emphatically that ‘to be able to sin does not belong in the definition of free will. Furthermore, the power to sin is neither liberty nor a part of liberty.’^[39] As Anselm elaborates, ‘slavery is nothing other than the powerlessness not to sin.’^[40] Thus, Anselm concludes that Adam and Eve ‘sinned through their own free will, though not insofar as it was free, that is, not through that thanks to which it was free and had the power not to sin or to serve sin, but rather by the power it had of sinning, unaided by its freedom not to sin or to be coerced into the servitude of sin.’^[41]

As Anselm stresses, the will is only free when it seeks to ‘preserve rectitude for its own sake.’^[42] In this regard, he echoes Augustine’s claim that ‘no one is happy but the righteous,’^[43] that is, the person who is able to subordinate lower to higher goods and all goods to the knowledge that God is supreme. To do this is what Anselm following Augustine affirms that human beings fittingly ‘owe’ to God; this is how we fulfil his will for us. At the same time, preserving justice is in our own interests, since there is nothing about being a slave to sin that is consistent with human happiness and flourishing. As Augustine had affirmed, so Anselm posits that willing what God wants us to will, which is to will to treat him as the supreme good and regard all other goods as second to him, helps us put ordinary goods in proper perspective, so that desires for them do not become inordinate and enslaving. Thus, maintaining the just and proper order of our will, first to God, and then to other things, is what truly liberates the will. As Anselm therefore states, ‘there is nothing freer than a right will since no alien power can take away its rectitude.’^[44]

Evil in Early Franciscan Thought

Alexander of Hales (118–1245) is widely regarded as the founder of the medieval Franciscan intellectual tradition, even though he only became a friar at the age of fifty-six, that is, in 1236, after a long career teaching friars who attended his lectures at the University of Paris. Alexander was one of the most renowned and sophisticated theologians in this context, and many of the views he articulated in his Gloss on Lombard’s Sentences – a genre he himself established as the medieval equivalent of a doctoral thesis – eventually were adopted, albeit developed more fully, in the so-called Summa Halensis which was named for him and which he oversaw between 1236–45. This Summa, one of the first of its kind, was collaboratively authored by other members of the first-generation Franciscan school, especially Alexander’s chief collaborator, John of La Rochelle, who sought to articulate their own scholarly tradition for the first time. In his Gloss, Alexander lays the groundwork for the Summa’s attempt to answer the question whether evil exists, by distinguishing between multiple forms of being:

One must reply that ‘being’ has multiple meanings, for [there can be] natural being or moral being, and the latter has two senses, either graced or not. Therefore, one must say that if evil were a privation of a ‘being according to nature,’ [evil] is not that, which is lacking [in this instance]. Similarly, if there were a privation of a ‘moral being,’ [evil] is not that, which is lacking [in this instance]. However, if there were a privation of the ‘being of grace’ that indwells through the highest good, then [one] is deprived of the universal end, and in this sense it [evil] will be said not to exist.^[45]

In this remarkable passage, Alexander basically rejects the longstanding privation theory of evil, which underpinned the Augustinian notion that free will is able only to choose the good. On his account, evil is not an absence of the good in the natural and moral contexts. In other words, it does exist, even if it involves a state of deficiency or lack, such as lack of virtue or lack of understanding. The only exception to this rule concerns the state of grace, where there is a genuine deprivation or privation of relationship to God in the person who lacks grace. In this case exclusively, evil is nothing.

In its second volume, which was redacted by an unknown author on the basis of works by Alexander and John, the Summa Halensis pays tribute to the long tradition of privation theory, quoting many of its famous proponents, including Augustine, Anselm, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Gregory the Great.^[46] However, it lists a number of reasons why evil cannot be nothing but must in fact be something. For instance, the anonymous author argues that ‘every corruptive thing is active; but every active thing has a nature by which it acts. Therefore, every corruptive thing also has a nature; but evil is corruptive, because it corrupts the mode, the form and the order of a thing, as Augustine says and will be shown later. Therefore, it has in itself some nature by which it acts. Therefore, evil is something.’^[47]

Furthermore, the Summa contends that evil must be something because it is subject to increase and decrease, and it contradicts the good.^[48] The argument culminates in a passage where the Summa repeats and elaborates Alexander’s distinction between the two kinds of being, esse naturae and esse moris, to which it adds a third category of esse rationis, which had earlier been mentioned by Alexander in the context of treating Christ’s human nature.^[49] In treating these categories, the Summa furthers Alexander’s thinking in rejecting the relevance of privation theory:

Being is said in many ways. There is rational being (esse rationis), according to which all things that have truth according to whatever mode, that is an adequation of the thing to the intellect, are called beings. According to this mode, evil exists because it deforms that in which it exists. There is furthermore natural being (esse naturae), and according to this mode, evil is said to be something, by reason of that which is subverted by malice, as an evil action by reason of being an action is said to be something. Finally there is moral being (esse moris), which is the being that preserves and retains the order of nature, as Boethius says in his book, The Consolation of Philosophy, according to which mode it is said that evil humans, in whom there is evil, lack being; according to this mode being is said as what is rightly ordered to the highest good, namely, God and so it is not evil.^[50]

As this passage confirms, the Summist ascribes substantiality to evil in every case except the one that refers to the order human beings should have to God, namely, esse moralis, which has been lost as a result of sin and can only be restored through grace or a state of esse gratia. Thus, the Summa like Alexander distinguishes between esse moralis that is or is not subject to the redemptive power of grace. In another context, the Summa elaborates a related distinction between what it calls ‘primary being’ (esse primum) and ‘secondary being’ (esse secundum), which respectively correspond to esse naturae/rationis and esse rationis/esse gratiae.^[51] As Strand notes, the Summa also speaks of primary being as the general esse or being of a human being as created by God, while secondary being concerns the well-being (bene esse) of the person and their re-creation after sin by God.

As Strand elaborates, the perfection of a human being in the primary sense occurs by virtue of the being’s own proper acts, such as its union with and enlivenment of the body.^[52] By contrast, the perfection of person in terms of their moral being requires an external act, that is, the infusion of grace.^[53] This infusion is something special over and above the grace of natural being.^[54] Thus, it can be lacking in a person who does not make themselves susceptible to grace through faith, that is, in one who has the capacity for esse moris, which is not realised through grace. As noted already, this is the sense that the Summa allows for a privation of being, namely, where a person fails to love God in the way that is key to moral well-being.

Augustine and other traditional privation theorists also affirmed that the lack of connection with God entails a privation of being. For these thinkers, however, this form of privation is linked to the others the Summa mentions, namely, the natural and the rational, which also entail a privation of the good. Thus, the Summa’s interpretation of privation effectively subverts the theory. The motives behind this re-reading are ones the Summa makes fairly clear in various places. First of all, affirming the legitimacy or substantiality of evil was a way to explain how God could incorporate evil into accomplishing his good purposes.^[55] Furthermore, describing evil as a legitimate option for the will alongside the good was regarded as crucial to holding human beings responsible for their choices – to ascribing merit for good choices and demerit for evil ones.^[56] This brings us to the early Franciscan doctrine of free will.

Free Will in Early Franciscan Thought

As in the discussion of evil, so in that of free will, Alexander of Hales was the pioneer of the position that became common currency in the early Franciscan school and the Summa Halensis specifically.^[57] The fullest account of free will offered by Alexander is found not in his Gloss but in the Disputed Questions he wrote before he became a Franciscan friar in 1236, and specifically, question thirty-three. In this context, Alexander introduced a new authority on the topic alongside Augustine, Anselm and others, namely, John of Damascus, whose De fide orthodoxa had been translated into Latin from Greek in the mid-to-late twelfth century and became alongside others a major source for early thirteenth-century thinkers. In this work, the Damascene argues that every being that is generated or created from nothing is changeable.^[58] On this basis, he argued that human beings specifically are able choose between different but equally legitimate good options.

Alexander interpreted the Damscene’s words as having a rather different meaning, however. In his view, the changeable nature of rational beings entails that they are able to preserve the good in which God created them or turn away from it in evil.^[59] For the Franciscan, consequently, free will is flexible or able to choose between good and evil – a possibility that John of Damascus specifically rejected.^[60] Although Alexander acknowledges the views of both Augustine and Anselm, according to which free will is only able to choose the good, he argues that this refers to graced human nature, which is a kind of free will humans possess in common with God and good angels.^[61] However human nature as such, not subject to grace, is not so ordered to the good but can alternate between good and evil, as noted above.^[62]

Like the early Franciscan idea of evil, so this idea of free will was a significant revision of the traditional Augustinian view, which denied that evil could possess being or serve as a positive option for the will under any circumstances. Although Alexander paid lip service to the traditional Augustinian view that free choice consists in both reason and will – that is, both the judgement of reason and the execution of the judgment by the will, moreover, he ultimately argues that it is really more a matter of the will which follows through on reason’s decision.^[63] Similarly, sin consists primarily in the will in Alexander’s view, because we never really lose access to the knowledge of what is right to do, as Augustine believed occurred in virtue of the loss of the knowledge of God at the fall.^[64] As hinted already, this prioritization of the will over the intellect was crucial in the Franciscan view for ascribing merit to human beings for their good and evil choices.

The Summa Halensis

The Summa Halensis adopts and develops the views of Alexander of Hales on the nature of free choice in considerable detail.^[65] Following Alexander, the Summa author invokes the Damascene’s argument at De fide orthodoxa 2.27 according to which creatures differ from God insofar they are brought into being from non-being and thus are subject to change. Although the Damascene inferred from this principle that free choice entails the ability ‘to be moved or not to be moved, to do or not to do, to desire or not to desire,’^[66] any given thing, the Summist echoes Alexander in concluding that ‘free choice is that by which one is able to sin or do right.’^[67] For the Summist, in summary, the human ability to choose does not involve a preference for this over that good but a vacillation between the opposites of good and evil.^[68]

As the Summa writes: ‘free choice is what is able to choose or to refuse something. As, therefore, choice is indifferent to the two options, free choice is indifferent to good or evil.’^[69] In this regard, the Summa admits that sin is not a matter of free choice for Augustine and Anselm in their major works on free will. The author acknowledges that free choice is undermined by sin insofar as it entails slavery to unhealthy desires.^[70] However, he concludes that the servitude of sin is only incompatible with the freedom humans possess in a state of grace. When it comes to the state of nature, they possess the ability to do both good and evil.^[71] This is because human beings are created from nothing. As such, they are changeable and can therefore demit from the good in which they were created to do evil.^[72] They can do this by the power of free choice, which according to the Summa is the cause of both all the good as well as all the moral evil in the world.^[73]

This power, and in specific, the power to sin, involves inverting the proper order of what the Damascene called thelesis and boulesis, where the former concerns objects of sensory or intellectual desire, and the latter is ordered towards justice and ultimately God. The objects of thelesis are not intrinsically evil, for Alexander and the Summa authors, who build on John of La Rochelle’s account of these faculties in his Summa de anima of 1236 as well as the earlier.^[74] Like Kant’s animal and human proclivities, however, they are determined and linked intrinsically to natural objects of human desire, which may not always be compatible with the purposes of justice and God’s will. By contrast, boulesis on John’s account, like Kant’s practical reason, frees it from temporal objects or matters of self-love so that it can prefer what is best in any given instance.

Conclusion

The analysis above allows for drawing a number of parallels between the early Franciscan and Kantian positions on the nature of evil, not least in relation to free will. Whereas the longstanding Augustinian tradition had described evil as a privation or absence of the good, both early Franciscans and Kant attribute it a positive substance. This in the view of both is necessary to affirming that human beings are responsible for evil or immoral choices that it may make, namely, that they have the capacity for both good and evil equally. According to both Franciscans and Kant, this capacity is latent in free will, which has more to do with the choices of the will or practical reason, precisely because these choices are the final arbiter and indicator of our fundamental dispositions – the sources of merit or demerit for which we can be held accountable.

For both Kant and the early Franciscans, an evil choice involves inverting the order of the maxims that should be properly hierarchized, or putting considerations of personal happiness or self-love above what is right or just to do in any given instance. In the Franciscan view, as noted, what is right or just coincides with the will of God, whom human beings are supposedly commanded to love first and foremost.^[75] For Kant, by contrast, the rule of justice is inherent in reason itself and the maxim to ‘act as if the maxim of my action could become a universal law’. These are significant differences, which reflect the larger differences between the medieval era in which belief in God was taken for granted and the critical or Enlightenment era in which human autonomy from the divine was more strongly asserted. However, the differences to not detract from the fundamental similarities in perspective, which represent a broader shift, long in the making, away from the Augustinian idea that free will can only serve the good, that was founded on a privation theory of evil.