Character and Evil in Kant's Moral Anthropology

Patrick R. Frierson - Character and Evil in Kant's Moral Anthropology - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 623-634 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Character and Evil in Kant's Moral Anthropology Patrick Frierson In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant explains that moral anthropology studies the "subjective conditions in human nature that help or hinder [people] in fulfilling the laws of a metaphysics of morals" and insists that such anthropology "cannot be dispensed with". But it is often difficult to find clear evidence of this sort of anthropology in Kant's own works. In this paper, I discuss Kant's account of character as an example of Kantian moral anthropology. Kant's account of character is one of the most important parts of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Kant describes the character of the person, in particular, as the "distinguishing mark of the human being as a rational being endowed with freedom" and says that character "indicates what the human being is prepared to make of himself". Recently, Kant commentators have gone even further. G. Felicitas Munzel, for example, claims that character is "the systematic link between the moral, aesthetic, and anthropological elements of Kant's works." This paper will not investigate the full richness of Kant's account of character. Instead, I focus on one particular problem that arises in Kant's discussion of...