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C H A P T E R F O U R The Social Consequences of “Radical Evil” In order to see the full dimensions of Kant’s account of the social consequences of radical evil, it will be particularly useful to consider the way in which Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, the text in which Kant introduces this concept, functions against the background of other philosophical and theological efforts to delimit the contours of human destiny. My reason for doing so, in the context of the larger interpretive framework that I have proposed for the critical project, is to provide at least a sketch of the position this work has frequently been taken to hold within the overall critical project and which my interpretation seeks to revise. According to this more or less standard interpretation , even though Religion represents Kant’s mature systematic treatment of religion in accord with the principles of his critical project, it is a work that simply applies those principles to a particular form of human activity. It thus does not contain any significant advance in Kant’s thinking on the matters that are central to the critical project.1 In contrast to that assessment, this chapter will present a case for taking Religion to mark a major development in Kant’s thinking about the scope and function of the critical project. In particular, Religion provides an extensive and, on many counts, Kant’s most explicit account of the social dimensions of the critical project. It does so precisely because it recognizes the radical evil of which human beings are capable as the most fundamental threat to that project in its social character. So the first section of this chapter will look at this text in its guise as a study of religion that has been taken to enshrine the reduction of religion to morality. In contrast to this still widely prevalent interpretation of Kant’s text, I will indicate in the second section 67 68 The Social Authority of Reason how Kant’s study of religion shows it to be, nonreductively, the human activity that serves as the principal locus for the exercise of the social self-governance of reason. I will next consider, in the third section, Kant’s understanding of the threat that radical evil poses to the social self-governance of reason: Radical evil arises from reason so at war with itself that the attainment of human destiny is put at constant risk of foundering on the shoals of human social antagonism and division. This threat can be countered, in Kant’s view, only by a moral commitment to work for perpetual peace—the project that, as chapter 5 will show, carries Kant’s hope for the full embodiment of the social selfgovernance of reason. Morality and Human Destiny: Against the Enlightenment Stream? Concern for the final destiny of the human individual—or what a long-standing tradition has termed the “salvation” (or “damnation”) of the “soul”—has frequently been understood as a central feature of Christian theology and practice. This effort to discern the possibilities that shape the final and definitive outcome of one’s life has often, though not always, intersected with a concern about the moral quality of the life that each person lives and with the extent to which that moral quality has a bearing upon such destiny: Is the weal or the woe of that final state contingent upon the good or the ill that one has done in the life that precedes it? Kant was thus by no means the first philosopher or religious thinker to insist that an adequate account of our final destiny as human beings requires that such destiny stand in close dependence upon the moral quality of our lives. Kant’s insistence in this regard, moreover, is quite in keeping with a broad current of the criticism of religion to which many streams of Enlightenment thought contributed: To the extent that a body of religious belief and practice systematically fails to promote a good moral life among its adherents, this provides a good reason for doubting its claim to be a true religion worthy of acceptance by rational human beings. Conversely, to the extent that a body of religious belief and practice systematically promotes a good moral life among its adherents, this provides a good reason for at least seriously considering its claim to be a true religion.2 In short, the capacity that the [18.117.148...

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