The Kantian Will

Raleigh Miller
Ohio State University, 2009

1. Introduction

Suppose one was interested in the will as a psychological faculty. The will is

whatever is free (whatever free might mean) if the libertarian is right, and we have free

will. The will the psychological faculty in virtue of which we are in some psychological

state (call it willing that p) that is appropriately related to an action if and only if that

action (bringing it about, or striving to bring it about, that p) is intentional. The will is

whatever we are employing when we make choices. These characterizations could

probably be disputed, but they are intended to be neither controversial nor particularly

informative; they are simply supposed to gesture at the thing we are talking about when

we worry collectively about the nature of the will and the nature of the actions we call

'willings'. In the midst of such worrying, it is natural that we would take some

instrumental interest in the way some historical figures have conceived of the will. One

character that is an especially fitting object of such inquiry: Immanuel Kant. Kant, after

all, gave the will, and only the will, the capacity for unqualified moral worth. Kant‟s

Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, for instance, is marketed as an investigation

of willing as such. So Kant‟s theory of the will is something in which we should take

interest in order to clarify and contextualize our own theories of the will.

It is the contention of this paper, however, that we are led astray by interpreting

Kant's discussions of the will as concerning the same thing that our discussions of the

will concern. Formulating my thesis has the potential to get confusing, so let me preface

it by specifying some terms. The faculty in which we take interest as philosophers

attempting to discern the psychological state that precedes and accompanies (and perhaps

causes) intentional action I will call the will. That is with a lowercase w. What Kant

calls “the will” I will call the Will. What exactly the Will is will be the subject of section

three, but I can foreshadow by saying this: the Will is the faculty of representing ones

intentions as law-like (or universal) in form.1 The payoff of this paper is twofold. First,

the will is not the Will. Second, failing to appreciate the that the will is not the Will

threatens to corrupt our account of Kant‟s theory of the will. The second payoff is

unsurprising. If I am right, and the will is not the Will, then we are mistaken in taking

references to the Will as relevant to an account of Kant‟s theory of the will.

In part two I motivate the view I wish to argue against. I will call this the “Will as

will” view. I will draw from a number of passages in the Groundwork and the second

Critique that tempt us to understand the Kantian will as a recipient of competing

motivational forces from, on the one hand, inclination, and on the other hand Reason,

which then issues in action in accordance with whichever of the motivational forces

„wins out‟. In section three, I argue for separating the Will from the will. In addition to

pointing out passages in the and second Critique that I think are flatly inconsistent with

the “Will as will” view, I also account for the passages that originally tempted us in the

“Will as will” direction, and show that these passages are perfectly compatible with

(indeed, suggestive of!) interpreting Kant‟s Will as the faculty of representing one's

intentions as universal lawlike in form. I will finish with some thoughts concerning the

1
Here is a point that will not be important to this paper, but is relevant to my way of
reading the Kantian corpus as a whole: the intellect is the faculty of representing
ones judgments as universal in form. The good will is the practical analogue of the
good intellect.
significance of keeping the will separate from the Will, and the ways that our theories of

both Kant's will and Kant's Will are threatened by such a collapse.

2. The Will-as-will View

It is natural to think that the Will is the will; we‟re reasonable in taking this as the default

assumption. Until given a compelling reason to do otherwise, we‟d be quite

unreasonable to assume Kant meant something other than belief by „belief‟, or something

other than cause by 'cause' . Further we are told that the good Will is good, and we‟re

told that it is good independent of its consequences. Wanting to read Kant as saying

something relatable, we might draw a comparison between these assertions and our own

implicit theories on the relationship between morality and consequences. Consider two

of Kant‟s most famous sentences.

It is impossible to conceive anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can
be taken as good without qualification except a good will. (G 393)2

A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes—because of its

fitness for attaining some proposed end: it is good through its willing alone—that is,
good in itself. (G 394)

Whatever the Will is, its goodness is unconditional goodness. We often say similar things

about the will. “It‟s the thought that counts,” for instance, or “she meant no harm”. We

habitually divorce the moral goodness of an action‟s consequences from the moral

permissiveness of its having been enacted, so long as the intentions on which the agent

acted were motivated by kindness and benevolence. The goodness of a good will, it

would seem, cannot be compromised by the bad things to which it gives rise. What‟s

2
G=Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Moral. KRP = Critique of Practical Reason, M=The Metaphysics
of Morals
more, Kant assures us that…

The concept of a will estimable in itself and good apart from any further end…is
already present in a sound natural understanding and requires not so much to be
taught as merely to be clarified…(G 397)

This assurance that the concept of a good will is already present should lead us to be

wary of trickster philosophers trying to tell us that the Kantian Will is anything but our

good old intuitive will.

Let assume then, for the rest of this section, that the Will is the will. We then

take all of Kant‟s characterizations of the Will to be characterizing the will. The goal of

the rest of this section will be to tease out the image of the will that results. For this

section I will be consulting several key passages at the beginning of Book I of the

Critique of Practical Reason. The precise number of sentences that I have the space to

engage with will be regrattably small, but attempting to explicate Kant's writing too

swiftly carries with it far too great a risk of being obscure and confusing. So a short

paper like this must, of necessity, limit its attention to a few key areas. Kant writes so

much about the Will that attempting a unified interpretation of the Groundwork, the

second Critique, and the Metaphysics of Morals would simply be too much. On the

other hand, the second Critique offers the best single work from which to take our

evidence, for three reasons. First, the critique offers an explication of the will that is

disciplined, systematic, and precise. Second, the Groundwork, though it has much to say

about the Will and is highly influential, was written as a popular introduction to Kant's

practical thought. If we find something that is ambiguous in the Groundwork but

straightforward in the second Critique, we have good reason to place our trust in the
latter. Finally, the Metaphysics of Morals, though an extraordinary and regrettably

under-read book.is mostly concerned with providing a positive account of virtue and

goodness to supplement the bare and cold system introduced in earlier writings, Kant

spends relatively little space addressing the Will as such. Methodologically, I think we

are on the most solid ground for this short piece by focusing our attentions primarily

upon the second Critique.

Reading the Will as the will, we will take it that the will can be determined by the

contents of "practical principles" (KRP 18). Those contents have under them "several

practical rules" (KRP 19). Practical principles can be subjective or objective insofar as

the subject regards them as valid "only for his own will" or as "valid for the will of every

rational being" (KRP 19), respectively. Practical principles are grounded; if they are

grounded by something contained in pure reason then they are practical laws. If they are

grounded by anything besides pure reason, they are mere maxims. Maxims and practical

laws can conflict; the circumstances in which they conflict are those in which maxims

would be inconsistent with themselves if regarded as practical laws. This schematic is all

to be found in the first two paragraphs of KRP, and much is already obscure. The

determination relationship is entirely unclear, but our working hypothesis that the Will is

the will justifies us in assuming that a determination is a cause. If my Will is determined

by my appetite for laffy taffy, then my appetite for laffy taffy made the most notable

causal contribution to my having come to will the thing that I willed, and having intended

the action that I intended. So practical principles contain determinations (causes) and

determinations "have under" them practical rules. "Valid for a will" is compatible with

being valid for a single will, and need not have implications for other wills. Given Kant's
fetishization of universalization, we best refrain from reading 'valid' as 'correct', and

instead might read it as 'applicable'. Thus a 'maxim' that falls short of being objective

will be a practical principle that determines my will (causes me to intend what I do) and

so applies to my Will (in whatever obscure way that principles apply to wills). But there

is no intelligible sense in which 'valid for my will' could be read as 'correct for my will'

but not for other wills. Why not? Any maxim that is correct for my will but not for yours

must be correct for me in virtue of some additional fact about me that distinguishes the

two of us. If the same thing were true of you the maxim would be correct for you. This,

we will see later, is just an example of a hypothetical imperative, and hypothetical

imperatives are objective. They are not mere maxims.

Mere maxims, then, are practical principles that contain the determination of an

agent's Will which, in virtue of no fact (not even a conditional fact for which the

antecedent may not always be true) applies (is valid for) anyone else. Reading 'valid for'

as 'applies to' also rescues us from needing to worry about the relationship between

'recognition' and 'veridicality', since maxims are called subjective or objective to the

extent that they are recognized as valid for other wills. On the other hand, a maxim

which is recognized as applying to others transcends the status as maxim and becomes an

objective principle, or law.

Grounding is also a rather opaque idea, but we might regard it as that in virtue of

which the practical principle provides the determination of the will. So where a practical

principle is a proposition which contains a determination of my will, this is not a free-

floating fact, but is rather the case in virtue of some fact about me. If pure reason itself is

all that is necessary for a practical principle to provide the determination of my will, then
that principle is a practical law. Here we seem to have found a tension; if regarding a

proposition as being one under which all agents are subsumed is sufficient for making the

former's a practical law, how is that every practical principle not grounded in pure reason

is a mere maxim? We resolve this tension by realizing that coming to represent a maxim

as applying to all beings is not a mere shift of focus; it is a substantive rational

commitment. For representing some maxims as applying to all agents will be impossible

to do coherently. So any time an agent who is thinking rationally (a condition of having

one's will determined by practical laws), they will only succeed at representing a

principle as applying to all rational agents if doing so is logically possible. Thus any

successful representation of a principle as a practical law will itself be a grounding a

determination of the will in pure reason.

The next passage in which we will take dedicated interest is in Kant's first

theorem of practical reason. Theorem one reads,

All practical principles, which presuppose an object (material) of the faculty of

desire as the determining ground of the will are without exception empirical and
can hand down no practical laws.
By the term "material of the faculty of desire," I understand an object whose
reality is desired. when the desire for this object precedes the practical rule and is
the condition under which the altter bnecomes a principle, I say, first, that this
principle is then always empirical....Second, a principle which is based only on
the subjective susceptibility to a pleasure or a displeasure (which is never known
except empirically and cannot be valid in the same form for all rational beings)
cannot function as a law even to the subject possessing this susceptibility, because
it lacks objective necessity, which must be known a priori. For this reason, such a
principle can never furnish a practical law. It can, however, be counted as a
maxim of a subject thus susceptible. (KRP 21-2)

We learned above that a practical principle is only a candidate for a practical law in the

event that it is regarded by the agent as applying to all rational agents. Because regarding

a principle as applying to all rational agents carries substantial commitments concerning

the possibility of universalizing the principle, we learned that any principle that can

successfully be regarded as such by the agent is grounded in pure reason. Here in

theorem one, such principles, grounded in pure reason, are contrasted with practical

principles that are grounded in a subject's desires. These latter principles depend upon

the existence of the desire in the relevant subject, and since it cannot be one's practical

principle that wills other agents to have certain desires, it is not possible to regard

principles that are grounded in desires as objectively valid. Thus the capacity of pure

reason to ground the determinations of a subject's Will are not going to be compatible

with the subject's desires also providing the determining ground for the Will. Further,

something we have only hinted at so far, insofar as pure reason is the determining ground

of all practical laws, and insofar as pure reason issues in propositions that are regarded as

holding universally, necessarily, determinations of the will that are grounded in such

contingent facts as what pleases whom are not up to the task of being regarded as

objective, practical laws.

So far we have talked about the Will as will. We have established that the Will is

determined by practical principles. In order to be objective practical laws, practical

principles must be regarded as applying equally to all rational beings, and the only

faculty in virtue of which we are able to discern whether they can be so regarded without

contradiction is pure reason. So, practical laws are grounded in pure reason.

Alternatively, they may be grounded in something else. Desire is one candidate that has

been suggested, though we haven't talked about whether it is the only possible

determining ground of a maxim, or subjective practical principle. In fact, in his second

theory of practical reason, Kant clarifies. All "material practical principles" (KRP 22),
those principles that are grounded in something other than pure practical reason "place

the ground of the determination of the will in the lower faculty of desire" (ibid.) This

model, which I have been developing as the Will-as-will model, is portrayed in figure 1.

This model makes decent sense of the Kantian text that we have encountered thus far.

Unfortunately, I think that it misunderstands the theoretical role to which Kant is

assigning the Will. Indeed, all of the talk of the will being determined by practical

principles which could be mere maxims is, I think, not the picture we end up with if we

take seriously some of the more mysterious things that Kant says about the Will, and it's

relationship with law and universality.

3. The Will as such

 The will is the psychological state that noncoincidentally accompanies intentional

action. It is the faculty of choice. I will here argue that this does not characterize the

Will, and that we get Kant's view of the will wrong if we look to the Will as our best

guide to Kant's view of the will. I will admit to having a motive; I approach my own

reading of Kant stubbornly holding in mind the increasingly impressive parallels between

Kant's practical philosophy and his theoretical philosophy. Accordingly, there are

remarkable parallels between the theoretical role that Kant assigns to the Intellect and the

role that he assigns to the Will. The Intellect is, first the psychological faculty in virtue of

which judgment is possible. But it is not the case that all judgments employ the intellect.

Rather the intellect is the faculty of representing ideas universally. Judgments that

employ the intellect are those which are represented as prescriptive, normative, as the

judgment that any other rational mind with access to the same information would be

compelled to make. In employing the intellect, we hold one another up to the standards

that we represent ourselves as acting under, and (until we discover that we are mistaken)

we hold others as deficient to the extent that they do not come to the same conclusion.

The intellect is the faculty of representing propositions as correct-for-all, not just correct-

for-me.

Analogously, our being in possession of a Will is constitutive of our having the

capacity to form intentions at all (it is, so to speak, a condition of the possibility of

intending in the way that we, qua rational, discursive creatures, are able to intend actions,

a way of intending that is closed off to the animal intellect, stuck in a world of

receptivity) but it is not the faculty of intending. Indeed, not all intentions need to

involve the Will. Rather the Will is the faculty of representing intentions as lawlike, as
universal. When I am employing my Will in intending to ɸ , I am, in addition to

intending to ɸ , prescribing ɸ . I am committing to ɸ 's being the appropriate course of

action either for anyone in my circumstances or in any circumstances. In the former case,

the Will operates under the representation of an hypothetical imperative; in the latter, a

categorical imperative. These are all features of the rational structure of the

representation under which we subsume an intention, and given that any intention will be

formed under some representation, the Will and the faculty of intending are very much

intertwined with one another (thus explaining the ease with which we were able to

construct the Will-as-will model in the previous section). But the faculty of intending is

nonetheless distinct from the faculty of representing one's intentions as universal (or law-

like) in form.

Now, this all is thus far very unsatisfactory. My own motivations in advancing a

particular model of the Will is rather beside the point. If the text in in tension with my

way of understanding the Will, so much the worse for my way of reading Kant. But I

think I am solid textual ground, if only for a single sentence in the second Critque. We

find this remarkable sentence in the the introduction of the categorical imperative as the

fundamental law of pure practical reason.

Now this principle of morality, on account of the universality of its legislation

which makes it the formal supreme determining ground of the will regardless of
any subjective differences among men, is declared by reason to be a law for all
rational beings in so far as they have a will, i.e. faculty of determining their
causality through the representation of a rule, and consequently in so far as they
are competent to determine their actions according to principles and thus to act
according to practical a priori principles, which alone have the necessity which
reason demands in a principle. (KRP 32, my emphasis)

This is, in several ways, an extremely surprising passage. It should occur to us that, for all

the invocation of the Will that we find in the second critique and the Groundwork, this is
the clearest Kant ever manages to be about what the will is. First, Kant identifies 'having

a will' with the faculty of determining one's causality through the representation of a rule.

We've seen the language of 'determining their causality' before, in Kant's introduction of

the hypothetical imperative on KRP 20:

Imperatives determine either the conditions of causality of a rational being as an

efficient cause only in respect to its effect and its sufficiency to bring this effect
about, or...[goes on to characterize the contrasting categorical imperative]

Here Kant is characterizing the conditions of the possibility of a rational being serving as

an efficient cause. A rational being serves as an efficient cause of something when the

rational being acts. The imperative (which is itself a practical principle that is not a mere

maxim, and objective principle) determines the conditions of the rational beings acting,

but it would be a rather strange reading of this (admittedly) strange passage to take the

imperative to be the determinant of this-or-that choice or willful act. Rather, the

imperative is the logical structure of a universally represented action, the structural

backdrop against which practical deliberation takes place.

Returning to the 32 quote, we now know that the Will is the faculty of the agent's

determining their actions (choosing) through representations of a rule. The rule, of

course, is the prescriptive representation that characterizes the rational intentional

structure of lawfulness, or universality. Further, "insofar as they have a [W]ill" is

equated with "insofar as they are competent to determine their actions according to

principles and thus to act according to practical a priori principles." The possession of the

Will is the capacity to act in a way that has all of the characteristics of practical

rationality, and the latter requires holding one's intending as rational discursive mental

acts that are beholden to a standard of universality. The latter amounts only to the
following (much less threatening) idea: if I act in a manner that employs my will, I am

representing my intentions as those which a rational being [in my circumstances, if

hypothetical] ought to abide by. If it is brought to my intention that a rational being

should not have done what I did, then I have not lived up to the standards of practical

rationality I hold myself to simply in virtue in forming my intentions in a manner that is

characteristic of my having a will.

How is this incompatible with the Will-as-will model? Well, there are two

problems, but they are in some sense the same problem. The first is that the subjective

principle is not actually a determinant of Will, though it is certainly determines the

subject's efficient causality. But really, this is just a symptom of a larger problem: the

Will is not the faculty of choice. The Will is not the psychological state that issues in

intentional action. Having a will is a condition of the possibility of choosing (in the

distinctive way that is characteristic of rational discursive intellects) and it is the

condition of the possibility of intending (ditto) but it as a faculty it is not necessarily

employed coextensively with either.

In the remainder of this paper, I will return to some of the passages that motivated

the Will-as-will model, and I will, so to speak, explain them away. In some cases, a

clearer view of those passages will result in their being reappropriated as evidence for my

view, rather than text with which I must do battle.

First, let us consider the first several paragraphs of KRP, wherein there was much

mention of maxims determining the will. If we best read these passages by taking our

will to be issuing in the intentions it issues in virtue of our having certain desires, then

this would be quite problematic for me. However, this is not quite what we find. We
find rather that maxims are practical principles, and as practical principles they contain a

general determination of the will. They are mere maxims insofar as they are regarded as

the subject as only applying to their own will. But the determinations of the will are just

contents, possible determinants of the will. They needn't, in order to earn their keep as

the contents of practical principles, actually determine any person's will. As the will is

the faculty of representing our efficient causation as subsumed under a rule, or as lawlike

in structure, we will see that the way the subject regards a practical principle if the latter

is to be a maxim is impossible. It is inconsistent to conceive of a rule, an essentially

prescriptive construct, that has no normative applicability to any agents other than the

person intending. So the best way to read this first paragraph is to say that a practical

principle is a mere maxim when its content is operative in determining the way the agent

acts, but when it in fact does not in any way determine the will. Kant goes on to say that

if pure reason cannot contain a practical ground sufficient to determine the Will, then all

practical principles are maxims. Note that in saying so he refrains from committing to

there actually being any such thing as the Will in the latter case. He does not say that if

all practical principles were mere maxims, then the will would be determined by mere

maxims, or by bare desires. Rather, the actual conditions of the Will's being determined

are left to the conditions made possible by the capacity of pure reason to contain a ground

that can determine the will. Telling the story of the person that takes as his maxim not to

tolerate any unavenged offense (in order to show that conceiving the latter as a practical

law is to conceive of a contradiciton) he at no time refers to the maxim in question

determining the relevant agent's Will.

The first theorem told us that practical principles which "presuppose an object
(material) of the faculty of desire as the determining ground of the will...can hand down

no empirical laws". We read this earlier, when we were working through the Will-as-will

model, as showing that mere maxims whose ground is desire determine the Will with

mere maxims, which don't succeed at achieving 'practical law' status. Now we see that

the entire idea is constructed hypothetically. Kant refrains from saying that practical

principles grounded in desire are ever the determining ground of the will.

This may seem like a cheap shot, tweaking at Kant's grammar to get what I want.

But what is most essential to see is that this grammatical tick appears throughout. We

repeatedly see reference to practical laws and objective practical principles determining

the will. We repeatedly see reference to maxims and subjective principles being

regarded as determinants of the Will, or as potential determinants of a Will. But we

never see the latter referred as determining the will. My contention is that this apparent

omission is a non-accidental result of the fact that the Will, in the theoretical role it plays

in Kant's practical philosophy, does not issue in mere maxims. It is in virtue of the will

that mere maxims (which often play a role in an agent's determining her efficient

causation) are the mark of the Will's lack of involvement.

We find further evidence for my claim in the text immediately following the

introduction of the first theorem, where Kant characterizes the faculty of choice. Recall

that the faculty of choice was one of our initial platitudinous characterizations of the will.

Kant reiterates his claim that any practical principle is grounded in (and thus preceded

by) a desire for an object that the principle is aimed at, the principle is always empirical

(see KRP 21). In these cases

the determining ground of choice consists in the conception of an object and its
relation to the subject, whereby the faculty of desire is determined to seek its
 realization. Such a relation to the subject is called pleasure in the reality of an
object, and it must be presupposed as the condition of the possibility of the
determination of choice...Thus any determining ground of choice must always be
empirical, and the practical materical principle which has it as a condition is
likewise empirical. (KRP 22)

What are we to make of Kant's characterization of the determining ground of choice in

this passage? Having just spoken of practical principles which presuppose an object of

desire to be the determining ground of the will, Kant goes on to actually characterize the

determining ground in question as the determining ground of choice. The determining

ground of choice, that in virtue of which a choice is made, will always be an empirical

fact. Here, Kant is conceding to the Humean psychology according to which all action is

motivated by an antecedent desire set. Thus choice, preceding action, is determined by

facts about the agents conative profile, his collection of actual desires. This is the case

even when the agent acts out of respect for the moral law, as his having so acted is going

to be conditioned upon empirical facts about the agents desires and motivations.

All of this, we should now be seeing, is at a more down-to-earth level of

description than that with respect to which the Will becomes salient. The Will, the

agent's faculty of representing his intentions as universal or lawlike in form, issues its

determinations a priori. Whether those determinations are then sufficiently conatively

salient to supply the determinate grounds of the agent's choice, or his action, is entirely

independent of the a priori action of the Will upon the agents desires and intentions.

The last passage I will take note of in my analysis is Kant's third theorem (KRP

26-28. Here we are again tempted with language concerning empirical material of a

practical principle as a determination of the will. We know that practical principles

contain general determination of the will. I argued above that understanding practical
principles thusly does not commit us to holding that all practical principles will be

capable of determining the Will. Indeed, I argued, it is only those that admit of

conception as practical law that actually have the potential to determine the will. Here, in

theorem three, we learn that "the material of a practical principle" is the object of the will.

We are then told that objects either do or do not provide the determining ground of the

Will itself. We should read the "material" as a desire, or another conative empirical

psychological state. The material of the practical principle is that in virtue of which the

practical principle is brought under the scope of the Will; the material answers the

question of what about the agent brought the practical principle under question. If the

material of the principle is the determining ground of the will, then the "rule of the will is

subject to an empirical condition" and is "not a practical law" (KRP 27). We are tempted

to read this as decisively allowing for the possibility of the Will's being determined by

empirical psychological facts, and that it is only when the latter is not what happens that

the practical principle is a practical law. However, this reading, distressing (for me) in its

plausibility, is simply at odds with some of following remarks, combined with Kant's

defining the Will as the faculty of representing intentions under a rule.

If all the material of a law, i.e., every object of the will considered as a ground of
its determination, is taken from it, nothing remains except the mere form of giving
universal law. Therefore a rational being either cannot think of his subjectively
practical principles as at the same time universal laws, or he must suppose that
their mere form, through which they are fitted for being given as universal laws,
is alone that which makes them a practical law. (KRP 27)
We know that the material of a practical principle (a candidate for a law) is psychological

and empirical. We again see that stuff being considered as ground of the determination

of the will, thus allowing for the possibility that it is not the ground of the determination

of the will (and allowing my reading according to which such material couldn't be the

ground of the determination of the will). The being possessed of practical rationality, the

being that has the faculty which I am arguing is the Kantian Will, who would have some

practical principle contain the determinants of his will either simply cannot do so

(because they are not capable of universal consistency) or else he can do so but can only

do so in virtue of their form, which admits of possible universalization. That is, in order

for a maxim with empirical, psychological material to have a chance at being the

determining ground of the will, it must be in virtue of the form of the principle and in

virtue of that form admitting of possible universalization. If we read the Will-as-will, we

don't know how to make sense of this. There is no reason that mere maxims, grounded in

desires, cannot appropriately determine the will (of the sufficiently morally weak agent,

and who of us wouldn't be sufficiently weak for such a thing) simply in virtue of the

agent's deciding to act on their selfish, hedonic, non-universalizable desires. If the Will is

the faculty of choice, then it most certainly can be determined by mere maxims. But here

we are told that for a practical principle, whose material is considered (always

incorrectly) as a ground of the Will's determination, to actually serve as the determining

ground of the Will, it must be not in virtue of the material in question, but instead in

virtue of the princples's form. And the property in virtue of which a principle's form

qualifies it as a potential determinant of the will? Potential universalizability.

So much is said in the second Critique about the Will; it is beyond the scope of
this paper to conduct a compelling survey and explication of all the relevant passages.

Additionally, a complete account of Kant's Will ought to have a great deal more

interaction with the Metaphysics of Morals and the Groundwork. However, beginning

where I think one should begin, with the systematic and disciplined explication of the

second Critique, I have here analyzed some of the most important passages in Kant's

introduction of the Will as a theoretical construct, and have argued that reading the Will

as the will, and interpreting Kant's characterization of the Will as his theory of the will,

does not hold up to exegetical scrutiny.

Nonetheless, as the Will takes intentions as its objects, and is essential to our

deliberation exhibiting practical rationality and our choices having moral worth the Will

is nonetheless of profound importance to how we are to understand the will itself. This

clarification (if it be accepted), and the expunging of Kant's Will talk from our theory of

the Kantian will has three important, broad implications, and I conclude with them. First,

separating the Will from the will clears the way to understanding the Will as the practical

analogue of the Intellect in Kant's theoretical philosophy. By assuming both of these

constructs to be too tightly identified with their common-language-homonyms, we risk

losing sight of the analogies between Intellect and Will, due to the disarray of

disanalogies between intellect and will. We also risk misunderstanding the goodness of

the Will as bearing far too great a resemblance to the gushy good will of ordinary

language. Second, we risk mistaking Kant's actual theory of the will. It's plain that Kant

does refer, at times, to the faculty of choice, and does not collapse this into the Will. So

we can learn about the psychological state that accompanies intentional action by

tracking his talk of faculty of choice, its intimate psychological relationship with the
faculty of desire and the propensity to feel pleasure (these, in contrast, are at odds with

the Will). We know of the faculty of choice that it involves the relation of an object in its

relation to the subject (KRP 21) a form of relation that we don't see anywhere Kant's

account of the Will. We needn't, however, go through the difficult task of making Kant's

account of the will compatible with his vast and varied commitments concerning the

nature of the Will. We needn't attempt to figure out how the will (a conative faculty if

ever there was one) could be the faculty of determining an agents causality through the

representation of a rule. The latter seems a rather heady and intellectual form of

representation, and it's hardly clear that the will would be up to the task. Attempting to

incorporate all of the nonempirical, universal representations of the Will into Kant's

account of the will risks reading Kant as mounting a wholesale rejection of Hume's

account of desire and motivation, but this doesn't do justice to Kant's many eager nods in

Hume's direction (see, for instance, KRP 21). Kant is hardly poised to deny the relevance

of antecedent desires to the actual, empirical intentions that the agent forms.

The Will and the will are extremely tightly knit, and making sense of their

respective properties, their theoretical roles, their respective capacities and their

relationship with one another promises to shed some bright lights on Kant's practical

philosophy, the role of pure practical reason in human action, the relationship between

the intending agent and the moral law, and the relationship between Kant's theoretical

and practical philosophy. All of this is condemned to obscurity if we fail to realize that

the Will is not the will, that they are, in fact, distinct faculties that play different roles in

Kant's illustration of the rational, deliberating agent.

Works cited

KRP: Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck. Prentice Hall, New Jersey.
G: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H.J. Paton. Harper & Row, New
York.
M: The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge University Press.