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224 Chapter 9
famously presented as a formulation of the categorical imperative, is
inseparable from the possibility that each of us can project our ends as a
reasonable creature who can promote a community in which ‘mine’
harmonises with ‘yours’ in the Kingdom of Ends. 4
Negative freedom can entail limiting our own immediate desires
through our attempt to live a purposive life, but it is not simply antagonistic
to needs or desires. As finite beings we must make choices. We cannot be
everywhere at once, and if we did not make choices we would not be able to
represent them as part of our own life project. In this specific sense we have to
exercise our prudence. Positive freedom for a creature that must live in a
finite body, bound by the laws of nature, must proceed through a notion of
autonomy that reconciles law and freedom. Indeed, positive freedom for
Kant is causality through moral action, in which each of us potentially
creates a new beginning as a moral person and with other persons, and aspires
to create a new social and political order guided by the Kingdom of Ends.
For Kant, autonomy is not at all reducible to being left alone by others
– not even in a more affirmative sense of aloneness as self-determination. This is
precisely because for Kant freedom must be law-like, which means we exercise
our autonomy not when we are strictly self-determining – true selfdetermination
is beyond the reach of a finite creature for Kant – but rather
when we represent our ends as our own and not merely determined by the
pulls and tugs of the day to day world; in the strongest sense, we can only
hope to attain freedom by imposing a law upon ourselves which allows us to
represent ourselves as the source of a different ethical causality, a new moral
beginning. Negative and positive freedom together, as Kant understands
them, should be taken to mean that it is human beings who set value on ends;
we make them ours in that we project an ‘I’ as a necessary postulate of the very
practical reason to which we must return to justify our ends.
To understand freedom and autonomy in this way is extremely
significant for the law of the new South Africa, as the judgments of the
emeritus justice, Justice Ackermann, demonstrate. First, as I have already
suggested, the Kantian notion of positive freedom or autonomy gives us a
defence of equality that does not depend on human persons being materially
alike – a problem that has plagued some theorists in the Anglo-American
academy. Human beings have equal worth because we all have the
4
The concept of every rational being as one who must regard himself as giving universal law
through all the maxims of his will, so as to appraise himself and his actions from this
point of view, leads to a very fruitful concept dependent upon it, namely that of a
kingdom of ends. By a kingdom I understand a systematic union of various rational beings
through common laws. Now since laws determine ends in terms of their universal
validity, if we abstract from the personal differences of rational beings as well as from
all the content of their private ends we shall be able to think of a whole of all ends in
systematic connection (a whole both of rational beings as ends in themselves and of the
ends of his own that each may set himself), that is, a kingdom of ends, which is possible
in accordance with the above principles’ (Groundwork for the metaphysics of morals (1997)
41).