Ulrich, Kant und Kraus über Moralität und moralische Zurechenbarkeit

Kant’s doctrine of the compatibility of the causal determinism of the natural world with causation through freedom brought a new approach to the debate on freedom and necessity that did not meet with everyone’s approval. In 1788, Johann Heinrich August Ulrich presented his Eleutheriologie, a comprehensive critique of Kant’s doctrine and at the same time a proposal for a deterministic moral theory. Kant read the Eleutheriologie, as evidenced by a few notes, and his friend Christian Jakob Kraus published a review of the work. Both responded to Ulrich’s objections by denying the possibility of a determinist moral theory and taking this as an argument in favour of the critical doctrine. In this article, I reconstruct Ulrich’s critique and his determinist moral theory as well as Kant’s and Kraus’s defences. In this early debate, both sides developed strategies that would recur in the following debate on the Kantian theory of freedom.