Kant on the Evolution of Individual Morality

I was reading about Kantian philosophy recently when I came across an epiphanic notion of his moral philosophy that I found very soothing.

Kant’s idea of the evolution of morality relates to his conception of how morality should be developed in the inner life, where there is a trinity of instructive values worth aspiring to: obedience, veracity, and sociality.

Obedience is the crucial insight of Kant that we must learn to obey others before we are able to obey ourselves and our convictions. Only in such a way can we learn to follow the categorical imperative, i.e. our conscience and inner moral voice, which acts as an a priori commando enforcing our self-imposed moral laws.

Veracity pertains to the Kantian notion that the establishment of unity over something brings a holistic sense of wholeness to our personality. By lacking any internal contradictions, we become entire selves.

Lastly, sociality is the keystone of Kant’s aesthetic view that goodness can only be appreciated by “a joyful heart”, which demonstrates why having a socially constituted life in mutuality with others is important.

These three elements constitute the very foundation of autonomous moral agency as guided by duty-bound maxims and principles of character

Crucially, absolute obedience must be imposed at first before being gradually supplanted by voluntary obedience stemming from an individual’s personal reflection. This leads one to become an autonomous moral being led by the normative force of one’s principles.

Kant’s conceptual matrix is highly intriguing, and his sense of moral internality i.e. that our moral ideas have an inner a priori basis also has an attractive quality to it, seeming like a valuable metaphysical counterweight to empirical reductionism.

However, one should consider the reception of these notions in later times, particularly in Imperial Germany during its Neo-Kantian heyday.

Back then, the cultural hegemony of Kantian values such as absolute duty and empirical science came to dictate the civic life and social order with a militarist undertone.

This is not to detract from Kant in any way, but just to give an idea of how philosophical ideas can have wider societal ramifications as fixtures of the social fabric.