Kant’s Theory Of Radical Evil

When we ask the Socratic question that what evil is in our daily life,the answers are always vague.People can say that an action or an event is evil,but there is a lack of a conceptual discussion on what evil is and how to overcome it.For a long time,there are two opinions about evil: one is that human nature is evil,the other is that even if there is evil in human nature,it can still become good morally.Kant’s efforts are to reconcile the two propositions.Through his book Religion Within The Limits Of Pure Reason published in 1793,he used a kind of delicate and profound discourse to capture the basis behind people’s experience of evil.Kant thinks that man is good or evil because of his free nature.The former is regarded by Kant as the original endowment of being a man and is divided into three kinds:Animal endowment,human endowment and personality endowment which completely follows the moral law.But different from the endowment of good,Kant regards evil as a natural tendency to evil.It is a choice that is determined by the natural tendency by chance in terms of general human nature.This tendency is only applicable to human groups relative to other races.Therefore,Kant regards it as human nature and sums up three reasons for this natural tendency: based on the vulnerability of human nature,based on the impure of human heart and based on the evil of human heart.The first two can be regarded as unintentional crimes,and the last point is the real evil.Kant also called it "radical evil".From the perspective of dualistic motivation of happiness and morality,it represents that the criterion of happiness as motivation prevailed over the criterion of morality as motivation.However,this view was criticized as soon as it was put forward.Some people thought that Kant’s "fundamental evil" was the "original sin" in the O ld Testament,and criticized that Kant’s proposal of fundamental evil was to please religion.The queries to Kant include the following points: Kant’s radical evil based on freedom itself and free will are contradictory;the definition of "natural evil" and "tendency to evil" is unclear;whether Kant’s definition of evil is applicable to all kinds of malignancies in reality.Through the in-depth study of Kant’s theory,Kant’s theory of radical evil can give an appropriate response to the above questions.He put good and evil into the inevitability of morality,and made a transcendental argument that human nature is evil,so that the radical evil can obtain reality in the categorical order,which is the starting point of all good.The most profound philosophical reason of Kant’s theory of radical evil is that human beings are responsible for the choice of the criterion of good and evil.