Abstract

In this paper I discuss Kant’s two accounts of freedom in the second Critique – as the ratio essendi of the moral law and as one of the practical postulates – and make three main claims. First, Kant has two different arguments for freedom as the ratio essendi of the moral law and for freedom as a postulate. Second, these two arguments rely on the same conception of freedom as unconditioned causality. Third, these two arguments mirror two different aims: to prove the reality of freedom in moral agency – as coexisting with natural necessity – and to postulate freedom, as the causality of an exclusively intelligible world, in order to conceive of the achievement of the highest good as possible.