Fifteen Eighty Four

Imagine you are facing a weighty choice: should I follow my passion and study philosophy, despite financial insecurity and uncertain career prospects? Should I have children and give up some of the personal liberties I cherish? Should I speak up at the next board meeting about an injustice, even at the risk of being ostracized by my colleagues?

It is natural to think that our freedom manifests itself in our ability to choose between such alternatives, and that we can be held responsible only for actions we freely choose. But if nothing within or outside me determines my choice, doesn’t it become a coin toss, a random act of chance? How can I be responsible for something that happens by accident?

Considerations like these led seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers including Leibniz, Du Châtelet and Hume to reject the idea of freedom as a choice made from a state of indifference. Instead, they understood freedom as acting in accordance with – and being determined by – our innermost nature or character. We are most free when no external constraint prevents us from acting as our character dictates. Versions of this view go back to Aristotle, who deeply influenced Leibniz.

The German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant begged to differ. To him, equating freedom with acting in accordance with our inner nature yielded a toothless substitute: a “freedom of the turnspit”, as he put it in a polemical remark against Leibniz. His objection rested on his conviction that freedom and morality are closely intertwined. For Kant, the question of freedom becomes most pressing when moral reasons call on us to overcome even our strongest inclinations. We must possess freedom of choice if we are to do what is right under such conditions. A central aim of his philosophy was therefore to show that genuine freedom of choice, free from predetermination, is metaphysically possible and compatible with a scientific conception of the world.

Yet Kant also recognized that our choices must somehow be grounded in our character if we are to be responsible for them. They cannot be merely random. This is where my book A Kantian Theory of Moral Character comes in. I argue that Kant wants both to preserve a strong conception of freedom of choice and to make room for the idea that its exercise is embedded in and expresses our character.

The result is a conception of moral character that differs both from the Aristotelian and Leibnizian view that character determines our choices and from its descendants in contemporary common sense and scientific discourse. For Kant, I argue, character is an open-ended process that we enact throughout our lives, rather than a set of fixed traits determining our choices and actions. Character is a project, continuously in the making. As George Eliot writes of Tertius Lydgate in Middlemarch, “character too is a process and an unfolding”.

What does this mean for the choices with which we began? On the Kantian view I develop, we are free to choose either option, but we do not choose in a vacuum. Making a moral choice is never an instantaneous, isolated affair; it is a commitment through which we project a similar pattern of choice into the future. If I decide to speak up at the board meeting and take the moral reasons for doing so seriously, I thereby commit myself to a course of future action. I must stand by my statement even when everyone turns against me; I might even have to leave the company. The sincerity of my present choice is measured by whether I follow through. In this way, character gives unity to our practical life without limiting our freedom.