Ultimate Desert, the Dialectic of Selfhood, Kant’s Three Questions, Aspiration, Eastern Views, Theism, and Predestination

Abstract

Abstract This concluding chapter explains in a personal way why the author came to believe in a free will that is incompatible with determinism. It also discusses how, beginning in the 1990s, the author began relating these concerns to three great metaphysical questions that Kant introduced at the end of his Critique of Pure Reason: What can we know? How should we live and act? What should we aspire to? The remainder of the chapter pursues these thoughts, relating them to ultimate desert, to what the author has called the “dialectic of selfhood” and to the Kantian ethical ideal of treating persons as ends because they have the capacity to be ultimate creators of their own ends. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the religious dimensions of debates about free will, in Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, and the theism of Western and Middle Eastern religions.