ABSTRACT
This chapter articulates the nature of evil according to Immanuel Kant. It considers the extent to which an autonomous agent can, through her own agency, make progress against evil. Issues of inscrutability and temporality will, however, reveal that human autonomous action, though able to make progress against evil, is unable to accomplish a complete revolution of one's meta-maxim. As such, human autonomy can realize its goal of acting successfully on the law it legislates to itself only through appeal not to knowledge of but reasonable hope in God's grace to complete the revolution to the good. By describing the choice of evil in the noumenal way, Kant thus sets up divide between atemporal/noumenal and temporal/phenomenal choice: an atemporal and noumenal choice conditions our temporal and phenomenal use of freedom, setting the conditions for its use.
