Comparing Kant's Crucial To The Doctrine Of Virtue

Crucial to the Doctrine of Virtue is the third criterion which demands rational actors voluntarily choose to act morally (as laid out by the first two criterion) for the sake of being moral. Without this voluntary choice, Kant argues that any act is not an ethical act and does not belong to the Doctrine of Virtue. While Kant is clear that ethical behavior cannot be forced upon anyone, he seems to still suggest that there must be times when one is justified in coercing others to act a certain way. A world of complete pacifism does not appear to accord with the Kantian view. This is fundamentally the question that the Doctrine of Right is designed to answer, when and how is coercion justified within his account of the moral law. Kant argues that right should be understood as intrinsically connected with the justificatory nature of coercion where when one acts rightly, no legitimate basis exists for others to coerce them from engaging in the act. Instead, coercion obtains its legitimacy only when others do not act rightly, and then the coercion must be utilized in a way that is compatible with right with the intentions of re-establishing right. When coercion is used successfully within the accord of right, it is a moral action within Kant’s system of morality, although not …show more content…
But what does the word freedom mean? How are we to judge the rightness of any action without a coherent understanding of what freedom others have and do not have? It is here that I believe many Kantian scholars run off-course in understanding Kant because they fail to take into account what precisely Kant means by the word freedom. This is probably for good reason though, as although our understanding of freedom here is absolutely crucial to Kant’s entire political philosophy, he never provides a categorical definition of what the word freedom means in relation to this