Radical Evil and Responsibility in Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology
type: CreativeWork
description: In this dissertation, the notion of moral responsibility is employed to clarify the Kantian idea of radical evil in relation to Paul Ricoeur’s understanding of the self as becoming. Despite the determined regularity of the natural world, Kant posits a human freedom that can be understood along the lines of our first person experience. By shifting from theoretical to practical reason, thinking about action in terms of cause and effect gives way to a posited freedom wherein we can give reasons for action and make meaningful changes in the world. At the same time, Kant’s claim that human beings are radically evil ‘by nature’ seems to problematize this freedom. If we cannot help but do evil, then how can we be meaningfully responsible for our actions? I will argue that, far from removing our responsibility for our actions, radical evil provides a prescriptive account of the coherence of our moral actions and the basis for responsibility. This dissertation aims to work out the influence of Kant’s theory of radical evil on Ricoeur’s thinking about narrative and responsibility. For Ricoeur, narrative provides the context to think about genuine initiative in a world determined by natural forces. Responsibility is enabled by the fact that we are the meaningful authors of our own actions. Ricoeur’s robust account of narrative identity is simultaneously a theory of interpretive moral agency. It provides a necessary aspect to a theory of responsibility because it allows us to think about reasons for actions in terms of initiative and in relation to the integrity of one’s life as a whole. After we considered the condition of freedom for responsibility, located our acceptance of radical evil as the price for the coherence of our lives on a moral register, and understood action as that for which we are responsible and as that which is configured into our narrative identity, we can consider the context in which we become selves. For Ricoeur, the self is never a given; it is always …
abstract: In this dissertation, the notion of moral responsibility is employed to clarify the Kantian idea of radical evil in relation to Paul Ricoeur’s understanding of the self as becoming. Despite the determined regularity of the natural world, Kant posits a human freedom that can be understood along the lines of our first person experience. By shifting from theoretical to practical reason, thinking about action in terms of cause and effect gives way to a posited freedom wherein we can give reasons for action and make meaningful changes in the world. At the same time, Kant’s claim that human beings are radically evil ‘by nature’ seems to problematize this freedom. If we cannot help but do evil, then how can we be meaningfully responsible for our actions? I will argue that, far from removing our responsibility for our actions, radical evil provides a prescriptive account of the coherence of our moral actions and the basis for responsibility. This dissertation aims to work out the influence of Kant’s theory of radical evil on Ricoeur’s thinking about narrative and responsibility. For Ricoeur, narrative provides the context to think about genuine initiative in a world determined by natural forces. Responsibility is enabled by the fact that we are the meaningful authors of our own actions. Ricoeur’s robust account of narrative identity is simultaneously a theory of interpretive moral agency. It provides a necessary aspect to a theory of responsibility because it allows us to think about reasons for actions in terms of initiative and in relation to the integrity of one’s life as a whole. After we considered the condition of freedom for responsibility, located our acceptance of radical evil as the price for the coherence of our lives on a moral register, and understood action as that for which we are responsible and as that which is configured into our narrative identity, we can consider the context in which we become selves. For Ricoeur, the self is never a given; it is always …
author: Kimball, Trevor
keywords: Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
date published: 2019-01-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:39:59Z
provider: Claremont Graduate University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Claremont Graduate University