as, unlike the founders of America, Rousseau was not concerned with a real, live, specific historical situation he could to some extent afford to be more theoretical in his orientation. The philosopher Immanuel Kant was even more concerned with the philosophical notions of liberty, but he detached them from their functioning in government and instead was concerned about human being's innate liberty to do morally good or evil actions. Kant saw morality as existing not as something that could be constructed at will by human beings, but as something that existed for all time, and to be commensurate with the categorical imperative, people must act as if setting a law for conduct in an impartial manner for all time. To be free is to do good, and to act as a check upon your own immoral impulses and behaviors. Kant is concerned, as a Christian philosopher, with establishing the freedom of the will. Unlike Rousseau and the "Declaration of Independence" he does not look to nature to establish such freedom:
But freedom is a mere idea, the objective reality of which can in no wise be shown according to laws of nature, and consequently not in any possible experience; and for this reason it can never be comprehended or understood, because we cannot support it by any sort of example or analogy" (Kant, "Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals," Part III). Regardless, within our own moral calculus, we must behave as if the will is free: "the hypothesis, however, that the will of intelligence is free, its autonomy, as the essential formal condition of its determination, is a necessary consequence" (Kant, "Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals," Part III).
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