| Summary: | <p>Kant does not explicitly present an account of what one might call <em>ordinary
goodness for ordinary people</em>, or the sense of moral worth one has in mind
when one judges someone to be a “good person”: somewhat worryingly,
when he does discuss the moral worth of people in <em>Religion Within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason,</em> he seems to stray very far from terms which
can apply to ordinary people in their everyday lives. Indeed, there is a
plausible line of reasoning that owing to, first, Kant’s thoroughgoing determinism
and, second, his complete rejection of compatibilist conceptions
of freedom, Kant cannot take ordinary people to be free and, as a
result, morally responsible—<em>a fortiori</em>, he cannot have an account of ordinary
goodness for ordinary people. I find that, ultimately, Kant can
reject such reasoning through what I call his doctrine of <em>Transcendental
Compatibilism</em>, which consists of three claims: (i) due to Transcendental
Idealism, Kant’s determinism is compatible with a certain libertarian-style
freedomcalled transcendental freedom; (ii) transcendental freedomis precisely
that kind of freedom required for moral responsibility according to
Kant’s moral theory, and; (iii) ordinary human beings actually are, under
normal circumstances, transcendentally free and, as such, are morally responsible
despite living in a deterministic world. By understanding this
doctrine, one can derive an account of phenomenal moral worth—i.e., ordinary
goodness for ordinary people—from Kant’s comments on noumenal
moral worth. Therefore, in Chapter I, I explore Kant’s determinism
and, through examining his resolution to the Third Antinomy of the first
Critique, establish (i) above; in Chapter II, I examine the core of Kant’s
moral theory, establish (ii) and (iii) above, and respond to three potent
objections; finally, in Chapter III, I elucidate Kant’s account of noumenal
moral worth so to derive a positive characterization of phenomenal
moral worth—i.e., a Kantian account of ordinary goodness for ordinary
people—therefrom.</p>
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