From Freedom of Will to Freedom of Action: Freedom According to Kant

The concept of freedom is an important concept imprinted on Kant's practical philosophy. Kant, a philosopher who is passionate about freedom, stipulated freedom as the dominant idea of human species and history, stating that the progress of a society depends on the extent to which freedom in that society has spread and developed. Kant improved his views on this concept by taking freedom as a measure for both his ethical and political views. Kant has placed freedom on the basis of the fields of both ethics and law while classifying the metaphysics of ethics as ethics and law. The concept of freedom in Kant's philosophy has made progress from his moral philosophy towards legal and political philosophy. Kant tried to elucidate how freedom occurs in both ethics and legal fields by considering freedom in relation to the will in the ethical concept and to our actions in the legal field. Kant, who considers freedom in the field of ethics in an internal sense, has devised and based his view of ethical freedom in the context of moral law. Moral law is a law without any exterior force and compulsion, which is made by the individual’s own mind, and the individual determining his/her wishes according to this law creates the individual’s inner freedom. When it comes to the field of law, freedom is not related to the inner self, but to the behaviour that affects others, that is to say, the external and legal dimension of the actions of the person, and the legal field always comes with an external force. External freedom has to rely on a certain level of coercion, while inner freedom does not have any external constraints. This study, aims at revealing the clarity of Kant’s two types of views of freedom and their relation to each other