International Philosophical Quarterly

Volume 61, Issue 2, June 2021

A Kantian Interpretation of the Infinite Manifoldness of Evil Incentives in Real Human Life

Kant defined moral evil as reversing the order between self-love and morality. For many critics, however, his egoistically-orientated notion of self-love fails to make sense of the infinitely manifold incentives of evil under the human condition. Against this criticism, my article will re-interpret Kantian self-love and empirical self-conception from both the transcendental and empirical level, thus offering a transcendental grounding for the empirical manifestations of evil. In this way I will argue that we can explain rather sufficiently the infinite manifoldness of evil incentives in real human life with Kant’s prima facie simplistic definition of evil.