The Powers of Rational Agency: Kant’s Response to Evil

This essay argues that Kant’s theory of radical evil exalts the powers of organized, shared, and institutional agency. In section 1, I illustrate the paradoxicality of radical evil and the novelty of Kant’s “empowering” conception focused on human agency. In section 2, I argue that radical evil entails a normative variety of unintelligibility, signaling a lack of self-knowledge and self-alienation. In section 3, I show that the (moral) opacity of maxims neither undermines one’s awareness of the moral law nor prevents self- and co-legislation and thus does not preclude the exercise of moral agency. In section 4, I account for the distinctive functions of hope and faith. In sections 5 and 6, I argue that the reliance on hope or faith points to different modes of contrasting evil by organizing human agency in institutional forms. In section 7, I conclude that the most powerful response to radical evil is the organization of shared agency—a communal, ethical, political, and institutional enterprise.