Abstract for the Kant in Asia
International Conference
at Hong Kong Baptist
University
20-23 May 2009
Jens Timmermann,
“Autonomy, Personality and Moral Regard for Ends”
In the "Groundwork", the second "Critique" and the "Metaphysics of Morals" Kant seems to suggest that we deserve our special status as beings that deserve moral regard by virtue of the fact that we are in some sense "ends-in-ourselves", and that this status is grounded in our personality, spelt out as (i) negative freedom from the determinism of nature and (ii) positive freedom, i.e. the capacity autonomously to set ends. In this paper, I try to set out Kant's metaphysical underpinnings of this thesis, in particular, the close connection between the free choice of ends and being and end oneself, if of a rather special kind. My reflections on this well-known topic was triggered by Kant's cryptic handwritten note on the last page of his copy of the second Critique, in which he distinguishes between the pure will, which "is its own end", and man, who is an "end in itself".