ASSIGNMENT COVER SHEET

(For Open Universities Australia students)

Office Use Only
**

Unit Code

PHIX250

Unit Name Freedom and Alienation

Assignment No. 1

COE USE ONLY

Date Received

Assignment Title Kant and Natrualism

Due Date

18/07/14

Contact Info

Phone:0403424484

Email:joseph.zizys@gmail.com

Word Count:

Turnitin No.:

(If Applicable)

(If Applicable)

ACADEMIC HONESTY DECLARATION (this is very important please read carefully):

By placing my name in this document I declare that:

This assessment is my own work, based on my personal study and/or research;

I have acknowledged all material and sources used in the preparation of this assessment, including
any material generated in the course of my employment;
If this assessment was based on collaborative preparatory work, as approved by the teachers of the
unit, I have not submitted substantially the same final version of any material as another student;
Neither the assessment, nor substantial parts of it, have been previously submitted for assessment
in this or any other institution;
I have not copied in part, or in whole, or otherwise plagiarised the work of other students;
I have read and I understand the criteria used for assessment;
The assessment is within the word and page limits specified in the unit outline;
The use of any material in this assessment does not infringe the intellectual property / copyright of a
third party;
I understand that this assessment may undergo electronic detection for plagiarism, and a copy of the
assessment may be retained in a database and used to make comparisons with other assessments
in future. Work retained in a database is anonymous and will not be able to be matched to an
individual student;
I take full responsibility for the correct submission of this assessment in the appropriate place with
the correct cover sheet attached and I have retained a duplicate copy of this assessment

This declaration is a summary of the University policy on plagiarism. For the policy in full,
please refer to Student Information in the Handbook or

http://www.mq.edu.au/academichonesty
Student Name:

Family Name Zizys

Given Name Joseph

Student Number: 42351979

Date:

21/07/14

Freedom and Naturalism

By Joseph Zizys

Kant argues that the idea of freedom is essential to our moral experience, yet the idea of freedom
cannot be empirically demonstrated. Stage a debate between a Kantian philosopher and a
naturalist philosopher/strong determinist on the problem of freedom and the question of moral
responsibility. How might the Kantian philosopher defend the idea of freedom as autonomy? Why
does Kant claim that we must postulate the idea of moral freedom in order to make sense of our
moral actions? How would assuming that we are not morally free affect the way we understand
ourselves and how we act?

1500 words

A Dialogue between K, a Kantian, and N, a naturalist (who also happens to be a hard determinist
and a materialist):

K: Freedom is real but cannot be seen in the natural world. By seen what I mean is that all natural
phenomena are susceptible to natural explanation, and by explanation i mean that natural
phenomena are caused by other natural phenomena and can be explicated by science. This
cannot be the whole story however, as it would mean that human freedom is an illusion. It would be
an illusion because all our behaviours and acts would be caused by determinate laws of the
previous states of the particles making up the bodies we occupy. Human freedom is real, because
we make it so by rational creation and adherence to moral law. How is this apparent paradox
resolved? It is simply that the phenomenal world is determined by a natural order, while human
autonomy is determined by rational law, and neither natural law nor moral law exhaustively
determine the truth of the reality behind phenomena. By analogy, we might expect a computer to
be able to calculate large sums of integers, and its doing so would not cause us to expect that the
particles of silicon ever deviate from natural laws, or to assert that in actual fact the computer does
not calculate the sums, or to assert that the natural laws are what in fact cause, in any essential
sense, the computer to calculate the integers it does. The two orders of explanation applicable to
the phenomena of the computer are both present, one does not supervene on the other, and it is
not necessarily possible to infer from one kind of knowledge to the other.

N: I grant that freedom cannot be seen, but that is because it is unreal. You imply some immense,
unknowable and untraversable world that we cannot see, and worse, can never understand or have
access to. I believe that what the sciences tell us about is what the world is really like, not merely
what phenomena are like, and therefore there is no place for the autonomy or freedom you
describe. I would grant that you have freedom in a legal sense, but that legal sense is simply a
designation, fundamentally every atom that makes up your body is completely determined from the

moment of creation by physical law. Whatever movements you make or words you speak, that is
merely the outcome of the motion of those particles predetermined since beginingless time.

K: I utterly reject your metaphysics of unfreedom, we are fundamentally free in as much as we are
rational. That freedom, that autonomy, is independent of the determinedness of the natural world.

N: Rationality doesnt give you freedom, your rationality itself is determined by natural laws.

K: I grant that whenever we look at the world we will find everything, including ourselves,
determined by forces, but in as much as we may rationally act we act freely and independently of
forces, that our actions coincide with, to borrow a phrase from my countryman Leibniz, have a preestablished harmony with those forces, is neither here nor there.

N: To borrow another phrase from your Leibniz, I have a principal of sufficient reason that means I
do not need to appeal to some autonomous rationality, that is somehow compatible with physical
causation but also free from it to explain the actions of man, why should I add complexity to my
model?

K: You do not have to. But you also have no right to force your model on me. I choose to believe
that I have agency, that I am real, free, and active in the world, and nothing about your determinism
give you grounds to say that I am not these things, because there is no possible evidence that
science can ever give you of the causal closure over the physical that would make your
metaphysics true and mine false. We are each free to choose a metaphysics that is compatible with

the empirical facts, and mine is just as compatible as yours, and has, in my estimation, the benefit
of honouring the autonomy and reality of individuals. Your metaphysics leads down the slippery
slope toward totalitarianism.

N: Regardless of what you think of my metaphysics and where it leads, I say that it is the
metaphysics that cleaves most closely to science, and the world, in as much as it can be explained
at all, can only be explained by the sciences.

K: your statement is itself unscientific, it is a metaphysical thesis, called naturalism.

N: I grant that metaphysics is not entirely avoidable, as some once hoped, but in as much as I have
a metaphysics it is the most modest metaphysics available, and it defers to the sciences whenever
possible

K: It seems to me that the sciences are indeed the finest achievement of human civilisation, but I
take it to be the case that there are things that the sciences, by definition, cannot explain, freedom,
art, the human mind.

N: the mind is determined by the brain, if someone is insane, or addicted to drugs, I treat their
chemistry, I do not question their morality.

K: I grant you that in as much as brain chemistry or drug dependance determines the character of
a mind morality does not enter into things.

N: I claim that everything about the mind is just like the insane or drug addicted case, in every case
there is a physical determinant of the mental sate.

K: I grant that this may be the case, every physical thing has a physical cause, but some things
have also a teleological or final cause.

N: I deny the validity of final causes, all causes are natural, efficient and sufficient, there are no
non-physical causes.

K: then your metaphysics of Naturalism is not only contradictory, but now also more complicated
than before.

N: I believe that my metaphysics is as simple as it can be, simpler than asserting multiple causes
for the same effect, for example.

K: but there is surely multiple causes at work here? on the one hand my mouth is animated by
impulses from my brain, but surely it is also animated by my intention to repudiate naturalism?

N: I assert that your intention supervenes on your brain impulses, they are, in fact, one and the
same.

K: now you are contradictory, in defending a metaphysical position that there should be no
metaphysics, complex, in asserting a particular theory of causation involving a closure for which
you can never discover empirical evidence, and confusing, in asserting that 2 things that seem very
clearly to be drastically different; my intentions and my meat, are in fact completely identical, even
though I can directly perceive many differences between them.

N: but I am driven to my position because science is the gold standard for what we are warranted
to believe, without its guidance we fall into deluded nonsense like Freudian theory, continental
philosophy, Marxism! Catholicism! . even (gasp) Islam!

K: I do not seek to endorse any of the positions you fear, but I likewise do not wish to rely on the
sciences for more than they can bear, you want the sciences to do more than they can be
reasonably expected to do. I also think that Muslims, Catholics, Marxists and Kantians, as
autonomous persons, or nations of such persons, must have be respected as having an inalienable
right to enter into a constructive discourse via the civil institutions of international diplomacy starting
from a presumption that their metaphysics where they are compatible with empirical fact, are as
valid as yours.

N: nevertheless I am driven to my position by long and painful experience of religious zealots and
totalitarians appealing to intangible and untestable ideologies to attack and oppress me.

K: I find it interesting that you, a middle aged, white, male, well paid university professor, living in a
powerful imperial and colonialist United States of America could feel such an overwhelming need

to protect yourself from ideological contamination. Is not your position itself, that science is
especially privileged and especially the domain of leadership of the white, rich American male, a
kind of ideology routinely used to rationalise and excuse the actions of your nation abroad,
amongst the poor, downtrodden and desperate, Muslims, Marxists and Catholics?

N: How dare you accuse me of such things! I am very progressive and left leaning! My intellectual
inheritance is predicated around a rejection of the 2 great evils of the 20th century; Communism
and Nazism, and I am now desperately trying to protect that legacy against the fundamentalist
Christian hordes within my country and the terrorist hordes outside it.

K: Perhaps, but you nevertheless wage wars and act on the international stage without respecting
the autonomy of other nations. Your scientific-minded act-utilitarianism is an attempt to free
yourself of metaphysical contamination that you believe makes the terrorists, Catholics,
Communists and Nazis irrational, but you have an ideology nonetheless, and if the history of your
foreign policy is any guide, it is as irrational as the rest.

N: You sound like a Marxist!

K: Well, I was very influential in Germany you know.

Bibliography:

Allison, Henry E. 2006. Kants Trancendental Idealism A Companion to Kant, Grahma Bird (ed)
Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Kant, Immanuel. 2012.Third section: Transition From a Metaphysics of Morals to a Critique of Pure
Practical Reason Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 56-71. retrieved from
http://voyager.mq.edu.au/vwebv/holdingsInfosearchId=1610&recCount=50&recPointer=0&bibId=18
81314

Kant, Immanuel. 1980 Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Purpose Political Writings,
Cambridge University Press pp. 41-53.
Korsgaard, Christine. 1989.Morality as Freedom Kants Practical Philosophy Reconsidered,
International Archives of the History of Ideas, Volume 128, 1989, pp 23-48.

Papineau, David. 2009. Naturalism, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009
Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/ on
18/07/2014