Kant’s account of evil makes three key claims with major consequences for moral agency and responsibility. First, the distinction between good and evil lies in the will (R 6:59). Unlike prior theories that locate evil in natural inclinations or external circumstances, Kant situates evil in the will’s choice of maxims. This reveals that earlier theories misidentify both evil’s source and its effect on agency, leading to misguided remedies (R 6:59). Second, since the will selects the subjective maxim of action, evil acts are imputable. Instead of a “combat model” where evil is due to overpowering natural incentives, Kant asserts that evil results from the inversion of maxims, whereby incentives like self-love condition compliance with moral law (R 6:36). This makes evil intrinsic to human volition: an internal, inevitable challenge rooted in the freedom of choice. Third, facing this challenge is itself a duty.
Since evil is ineradicable, the imposition of a duty sounds paradoxical. The solution of the paradox lies in putting rational agency center stage. The disruptive powers of human agency rest in their capacity of self-transformation, as shown by Kant’s critique of the ethics based on habituation or grace. While he acknowledges that good habits support moral conduct, he emphasizes that moral worth depends on the principle of action, which must originate from the will each time. Habituation achieves “legal virtue,” i.e., external conformity to law, but does not amount to “moral virtue” (R 6:47). This is because the gulf between good and evil is not gradual but absolute: a radical “revolution of the heart,” not incremental habit change, is required for moral orientation (R 6:48). Similarly, grace is inadequate as an explanatory model. Its effects are indistinct from those of natural events, making it inaccessible to reason; and since it cannot be adopted as a maxim, it is incoherent with moral obligation. To effectively engage in the moral struggle requires hope in humanity, confiding in its transforming and organizational powers rather than yielding to despair or waiting for external help (6: 57). This renders Kant’s framework empowering. While moral education does not presume innocence, humans must hope they can, through their own efforts, pursue the good.
Kant considers evil as a radical, permanent aspect of human nature; a propensity fundamentally opposed to moral progress (R 6:50). Its origins are mysterious and inaccessible (R 6:32) and attempts to explain them overreach reason and risk undermining freedom. Moral change rests not on insight into one’s motives but on the subjective awareness of virtue’s persistence. Correspondingly, evil actions are morally imputable and yet cannot be fully understood in the first-person perspective of rational agents. Agents endowed with reason cannot offer a transparent rationale for why they chose evil over good, when they recognize their actions as contrary to reason. This disconnect reveals a profound form of self-alienation: agents acknowledge having acted against reason but cannot fully claim such actions as their own. This is not merely because they disapprove of them, but because they cannot identify any normative reason behind those choices. Representing ourselves as rational agents, we cannot fully accept evil actions contrary to reason as expressions of our agency. Thus, evil involves a normative unintelligibility that points to a fractured relation between self and action. Emphasizing this radical self-alienation is not to deny the conditions for moral imputation. Rather, it highlights the internal fragmentation of the agent. If rational principles constitute the agent, then alienation renders them a collection of disconnected states. The moral struggle is therefore one of self-constitution, and taking responsibility is its core. Due to radical evil, agents are always at risk of moral disintegration. The sole resistance is commitment to the moral ideal, pursued through the activity of reason.
Is this pursuit reasonable, given its uncertain prospects? Kant’s Religion suggests that the disposition to morality is firm, even if its efficacy in concrete situations is uncertain. Being subject to moral duty is empowering: “to require courage is already halfway to instilling it” (R 6:57). The moral principle “we ought to do our duty and therefore we must also be able to” applies not insofar as it ensures the deontic force of the moral duty, but because it inspires hope in humanity (R 6: 62). This qualification does not make the duty fit within the bounds of humanity, rather it allows us to distinguish between what the agent can do because of the opportunities of action open to them, and what they are able to do because of their capacities. The latter condition is not fixed, but plastic: susceptible to the discipline of reason and sensitive to the normative expectations and claims of others. Kant’s suggestion is that humanity can be shaped according to duty, by expanding and realizing its prototypical disposition to morality. Thus, duty is not a mere hortative or prescriptive inunction; being subject to a moral duty is a transformative experience, which actively engages human capacities, enabling them to develop further.
Embodied rational agents inevitably face opacity and moral failure, which can foster despair and contempt. These skeptical attitudes question whether morality can be grounded in reason at all, given the persistent vulnerability to opposing incentives and the failure to achieve stable reform. To counteract these effects, Kant introduces practical attitudes like rational faith and hope. These do not provide knowledge but enable trust in a moral order, despite evil and the disjunction between virtue and happiness. Faith and hope complete Kant’s account of rational agency by enabling the continued efficacy of reason. They help sustain moral commitment amid failure.
While Kant treats them as complementarily, it is useful to consider them disjunctively. Each functions differently. Rational faith concerns belief in God and the immortality of the soul, giving moral agents assurance that their efforts, while imperfect, are meaningful. Hope, by contrast, is future-directed and tied specifically to human moral striving (R 6:62). It affirms the possibility—not mere conceivability—of moral achievement, independent of divine aid. Although faith and hope arise under uncertainty and historical failure, neither grounds moral duty. Instead, they strengthen the moral feeling of duty: the respect for humanity’s lawmaking capacity. Faith and hope also explain how commitment to the moral ideal can be rationally sustained over time. While essential to individual determination, they are also crucial for understanding the collective dimension of moral striving. The dominant focus on individual virtue often eclipses the social organization of human agency. In my view, Kant’s insight is that moral progress requires organized, intergenerational forms of shared rational activity. These forms rest on the human ability to pursue common rational ends, yielding novel dimensions of freedom. Through such organization, humans become “useful members of the world” (DV 6:446).
My suggestion is that we classify such forms of agency based on how they draw on faith and hope. Ethical communities based on faith (e.g., churches) and those grounded in hope (e.g., ethical congregations) both involve institutional agency and invoke public right. This distinction is more than taxonomical: it reveals differing approaches to shared ethical goals. Believers and non-believers may agree on the desired outcomes but diverge in their reasons and means. These differences illuminate the distinctive tensions and entanglements between morality and heteronomy, which partly depend on the nature of the collectives.
Taken disjunctively from the assurance of a prior and independent moral order, hope as a practical attitude characterizes moral striving, and encourages humans to conceptualize the moral ideal as a collective endeavor, to be constructed through human agency and shared intentions, rather than as a divine gift. This shifts the emphasis to humanity as both subject and agent of the moral law. In this perspective, hope becomes a commitment to the possibility of moral self-governance across generations. Focusing on shared rational agency, rather than isolated conversion, makes visible the real-world, real-time effects of moral transformation.
Carla Bagnoli
Carla Bagnoli is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, on secondment at the National Academy Lincei in Rome. She has held visiting posts at the universities of Oxford, Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne, ENS Lyon, and Oslo. Bagnoli specializes in the theory of practical rationality, with a particular interest in Kantian ethics, issues of normativity, and the role of emotions in practical reasoning and agency.
