Is it possible to do evil autonomously?
If you said “no,” it is almost certainly because you hold the Enlightenment Faith, either consciously or unconsciously. But ‘autonomy’ does not yield another kind of “good” besides good.
https://twitter.com/EveKeneinan/status/1383933894412488707
If you answered Yes, you should reject liberalism. Why? Liberalism wishes to maximize autonomy and minimize evildoing. If “Yes”, then the liberal aim is self-contradictory and self-defeating. ‘Autonomy’ is supposed to be a pure good BECAUSE it cannot have bad effects. But it can.
Only on the (false) condition that autonomy maximization does not increase evildoing is the (Liberal) program of autonomy-maximization justifiable.
It doesn’t take much to see “giving everyone as much freedom of action as possible” leads to “much more freely chosen evildoing.”
The only way to fail to see this is a deep a priori buy-in to the Enlightenment Faith of e.g. Kant, that autonomous action cannot be evil. But one needs to believe with Kant that the Will = Reason. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche correct this error straightaway.
Not that we needed them to. No one before the Enlightenment ever thought to identify the Will with the Intellect. Not even Descartes—the father of “rationalism” declares the primacy of the Will over the Intellect directly (cf. Meditation 4).
Even so, the identification of the Will and the Intellect is virtual in Descartes. Kant is simply (as always) taking modernism to its logical endpoint (short of its self-defeat—Kant always stops short of that).
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