The Journal of ValueInquiry 19:235-243 (1985). 9 Martinus Ni/hoff Publishers, Dordrecht. Printed in the Netherlands. THE PRACTICAL AND THE PATHOLOGICAL SUSAN MENDUS * Department of Philosophy, University of York, Heslington, York Y01 5DD, U.K. It is commonly held that Kant's discussion of freedom and his attempt to reconcile freedom and necessity is a complete failure. Having argued, in the early part of the Critique of Pure Reason, that everything in the phenomenal realm is causally de- termined, he is then saddled with the problem of explaining how there can be free actions for which the agent may properly be held to be morally responsible. His answer to this puzzle is to insist that there can be genuine freedom, but that such freedom is reserved for the noumenal realm. However, since ordinary decisions and events occur in the phenomenal realm, it would appear that they must be deter- mined by previous decisions and events within that series. And if that is the case, then the alleged freedom for which Kant makes room does no honest work - or, at any rate, not the sort of work he wanted it to do - viz. to explain how a man might properly be held responsible for the actions he performs. It would seem that Kant succeeds in justifying freedom 'if anywhere, then everywhere'.1 More trouble looms for accountability when, in the Groundwork, Kant actually equates freedom with abiding by the moral law, for it is a consequence of this equation that there can be no freely performed, morally wrong action. All morally wrong actions are unfree. But even in the later writings, it is argued, where Kant explicitly distinguishes between Wille and Willkiir and thus attempts to explain exactly how a man may be thought to be accountable for the wrong actions he performs, even here the banishment of freedom to the noumenal realm destroys utterly our ordinary notion of moral responsibility. 'The freedom Kant postulates has to play certain roles in the description of the human condition. These ... require that freedom be driven out of its noumenal isolation into the empirical realm where it conflicts after all with determinism. '2 But the enterprise of banishing freedom to the noumenal realm is partly ex- plained by reference to other aspects of Kant's moral philosophy. In particular, the desire to separate moral responsibility from considerations of natural advantage is seen as a driving force, encouraging Kant to construe freedom as existing only in An earlier version of this paper was read at a conference on Kant's Practical Philosophy at the University of Essex in February 1983. I am grateful for the many helpful comments made at that conference, and in particular to Onora O'Neill. 235