Abstract

Moral judgements usually concern the moral responsibility of an acting person. Someone is considered praiseworthy or blameworthy for an action based on whether this action is according to or against moral norms. According to a Kantian account, the essential issue is the motivation of the acting person since this is a measure for being a moral cause of the action i.e. for intending it. Only moral causation allows the moral imputation of the action to the acting person. And moral motivation always implies the use of practical reason, as the capacity of acting in accordance to rules, while there are two kinds of rules (categorical and hypothetical). To give priority to one of these would lead to moral merit or to moral guilt. The latter considers the acting person as treating himself or others merely as a means instead to respecting himself or others as persons i.e. as individuals able to act according to their own aims and to be responsible for that. We find such an account in Johann Christoph Hoffbauer’s interpretation of Kant’s theory of free will. While Kant is occasionally accused of inconsistency in claiming evil actions are real and imputable while claiming only good actions are free (and therefore imputable), Hoffbauer offers a consistent version of Kant’s theory of free will. In this paper, I analyze his interpretation, sketching first its pre-Kantian theoretical context, and second discussing Hoffbauer’s Kantian interpretation of the concepts of will and the faculty of choice, and using the case of a lie as an illustration.