Kant's analysis similarly shifted the debate over "free will" and "determinism." (Kant presents a version of this argument in Chapter 3 of the Grounding.) Human beings believe that they have "free will"; we feel as though we may freely choose to do whatever we like. At the same time, however, the world that we experience is a world of causes and effects; everything we observe was caused by whatever preceded it. Even our own choices appear to have been caused by prior events; for instance, the choices you make now are based on values you learned from your parents, which they learned from their parents, and so forth. But how can we be free if our behavior is determined by prior events? Again, Kant's analysis shows that this is an irrelevant question. Anytime we analyze events in the world, we come up with a picture that includes causes and effects. When we use reason to understand why we have made the choices we have, we can come up with a causal explanation. But this picture isn't necessarily accurate. We don't know anything about how things "really" are; we are free to think that we can make free choices, because for all we know this might "really" be the case. In the Critique of Practical Reason and the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant applies this same technique--using reason to analyze itself--to determine what moral choices we should make. Just as we cannot rely on our picture of the world for knowledge about how the world "really" is, so can we not rely on expectations about events in the world in developing moral principles. Kant tries to develop a moral philosophy that depends only on the fundamental concepts of reason. Some later scholars and philosophers have criticized Enlightenment philosophers like Kant for placing too much confidence in reason. Some have argued that rational analysis isn't the best way to deal with moral questions. Further, some have argued that Enlightenment thinkers were pompous t...
