The Kantian position

The Kantian framework within which I shall be working mainly involves Kant's moral argument(s) for the existence of God.Footnote ⁶ This argument-cluster is designed to begin from the fact of morality or of our moral obligation and move to the necessity of positing God to account for this fact, or some derivative fact. It is important to note that this Kantian argument is not simply a moral argument that states:

1. (a) Moral values/obligations/facts exist.

2. (b) If moral values/obligations/facts exist then God exists.

3. (c) Therefore God exists.

This is a valid argument, but the inference is too quick to pass muster for Kant, partly because he denies that the mere existence of moral values or obligations would be sufficient to imply God's existence, and partly because it makes an inference which goes beyond knowledge and into the realm of faith.Footnote ⁷ So we are going to have to move more slowly from morality to God, and also frame the claim so as not to violate the bounds of knowledge Kant thinks he has shown with the Critique of Pure Reason and the system of transcendental idealism. The arguments thus share the following form. First, there is an assertion of some rational commitments regarding morality or the rationality of morality. Second, these rational commitments are seen to involve or entail some further commitment. This further commitment is however, problematic in some way (which will become clear when I outline the specific argument), and then God is the necessary solution, insofar as God is found to make rationally consistent the demands or commitments we antecedently have. I note here that it is a virtue of these arguments that they show that the relationship of God and morality is a more complicated one than the simple argument above suggests.Footnote ⁸

Kant's Second Critique argument

The argument is designed to show that, in order to consistently affirm our moral obligation, we must postulate the existence of God, as well as the actuality of immortality, although it is just the existence of God I focus on for now. In any case, the arguments would be essentially the same, substituting ‘God’ for ‘immortality’ throughout. The only difference would be in the role the postulates would play in explaining why we need to postulate them. The argument's first premise is going to be that moral obligations or moral facts exist.Footnote ⁹ This Kant thinks he has already shown. Briefly, his thought on this (as of 1788 and the Second Critique) is that we are confronted with what he calls the Fact of Reason (Kant (Reference Kant and Gregor1996a), 5:30). This fact is the individual's consciousness of his own moral ability, especially in the guise of something like ought-implies-can. Kant's example is a person who, when told that he needs to bear false witness against a neighbour or suffer death, knows that he could certainly refuse and face death with the knowledge that he did his duty. So, Kant concludes, we intuitively feel the binding power of morality, and then infer that we possess at least the freedom required for this binding power to be actual. This is then developed until we reach the postulates.

The postulates section spells out what Kant thinks about the ultimate goal of morality. Kant of course thinks that particular actions ought to be performed or refrained from on the basis of their maxims – the subjective principle of action – or the inherent worth of the actions themselves (for example whether they use rational agency as a mere means). But Kant also sees that we might reasonably enquire about the moral project as such, even once we agree that moral actions are to be done for their own sake. This question of the moral project is what guides Kant to think of the highest good.Footnote ¹⁰ The highest good is the perfect unity of both happiness and morality, and for Kant is spelled out with the idea that one's happiness is proportioned to one's virtue.Footnote ¹¹ It is our highest rational end combined with our highest natural end. There is, naturally, some disagreement in Kant scholarship about how to interpret the highest good, but I will leave this aside for now, as we can just take a rough conception for the purposes of this article.

One further point needs to be discussed. This is the famous ‘primacy of practical reason’. It plays a role in motivating these arguments. Kant (Reference Kant and Gregor1996a, 5:120) argues that if practical reason has ‘of itself original a priori principles with which certain theoretical positions are inseparably connected’ then we might well conclude in favour of practical reason. So, given that morality, and the fact of reason – the sheer confrontation between myself and the knowledge of my own obligation – shows that reason is ‘of itself . . . practical’ then we are entitled to conclude that practical reason has a certain primacy, that is, that practical reason can legitimately extend to our believing things that no theoretical reasoning could show to be legitimate. The caveat is of course that this is only allowed in cases where theoretical and practical reason have the same object (such as in the case of God) and where the union of these two faculties of reason (which are in the end ‘one and the same reason’ (ibid., 5:121) ) is not contingent ‘but based a priori on reason itself and therefore necessary’ (ibid.). In other words, we can only invoke practical reason and its primacy over theoretical reason once we are entitled to conclude that the object for which we are invoking this primacy is not a contingent or a discretionary one, but one necessary to the rationality of a universal moral project. This entitles Kant to move on to thinking about the postulates of God and immortality as demanded by rational consistency in the moral project.Footnote ¹²

The highest good, then, is an end of our rational activity of the moral project. But, Kant reasons, in trying to bring about this highest good, as we are by engaging in the moral project, we are caught in a bind. It appears that we are trying to bring something about that we know that we have no ability to do. So either we give up morality (which we cannot, because the Fact of Reason impresses itself upon us), or we accept that there exists a being which could in some way bring about the highest good. Of course, such a being would be God (ibid., 5:125). So, Kant concludes, we are rationally committed to faith in God, by virtue of the demands of practical reason, even if, as he also thinks, we have no ground on merely theoretical reason to judge one way or the other on the question of the existence of God. A similar argument is given for immortality, but I shall not go into that here. We can summarize the argument slightly more formally as follows:

1. (a) We are rationally committed to morality.

2. (b) Morality, or the moral project, aims at a certain state of the world, called the ‘highest good’, in which virtue and happiness are proportioned to one another, or there is a maximal amount of goodness and a maximal amount of happiness.

3. (c) So, in order to accept morality with its commitments (which we are rationally committed to), we must accept that we should aim at the highest good.Footnote ¹³

4. (d) But the highest good is out of our reach, so there is a rational tension here.

5. (e) The rational tension can only be solved by jettisoning morality, or by invoking some further being who can bring about the highest good.

6. (f) We cannot jettison morality, so we must be rationally committed to believing in a being who can bring about the highest good.

7. (g) This being is God.

It is important to note that this argument, which is centred on rational commitment, is not directed at proving that God exists. That would be too much. If sound, it shows instead that we are committed to God's existence, given the prior commitments we have to morality and what morality entails. We therefore have to believe in God's existence, as it is the only way to reconcile our rational commitments to one another. This is why I use the phraseology of ‘rational tension’ – our commitments pull in different directions, unless we accept the conclusion that we are committed to having faith in God.Footnote ¹⁴ This is the result partly of Kant's strictures concerning knowledge of transcendent things – Kant just cannot have it that theoretical reason alone can show the existence of a being who is transcendent and non-empirical.

Summary so far

In the remainder of this article, I will outline the special role that hope plays in Kant's argument. I will argue that it is a virtue of this style of arguing that it shows how the theological virtues are in a unity, or at least these arguments lay the groundwork for a unified theory of the theological virtues. I will not directly argue that the theological virtues imply one another, so that to have any of them one must possess all of them, but my conclusion is more modest – that the Kantian style of arguing can be developed to give an account of the theological virtues and their unity, from the perspective of the agent, and I will outline how this can be so on this view. We should note, however, that the arguments always leave it open that, from purely theoretical reason, one seems entitled to reject morality along with the postulates. This is a possible way to answer the arguments, but I shall not discuss it, as it is a radical solution that involves jettisoning a great deal.

The role of hope

Now we have an outline of the position, we can see how hope is involved. I shall give a brief outline of the main features of hope as an attitude, before turning to hope and the Kantian argument. We do well, however, to distinguish here between mundane or worldly hopes and fundamental hope. I am concerned primarily with the latter, which shares some features with the former, but is somewhat different in scope (this distinction is clearly outlined by Pieper (Reference Pieper, Winston and Winston1969, 21ff.).

Hope is distinct from mere wanting or wishing. We can wish for things we know to be incredibly unlikely, such as winning the lottery. Similarly, we can want to win the lottery. But hoping to win the lottery, without any particular evidence which makes one more than usually confident, seems like too strong an attitude to take. In other words, hoping seems to involve something like a reasonable belief that the event or state hoped for will come about, or there should at least be some evidence that such a state or event will come about.Footnote ¹⁵ Hoping, unlike wishing, entails belief in possibility. One may wish for things that are possible, but one could also wish for something impossible, it seems. One might wish that things on a recent date had gone differently, or that one had got the job, or even that one had never been born. These wishes, being about the past, seem impossible (as long as we grant that changing the past is impossible). However, it seems fishy to say ‘I hope that I had never been born’. The only sense one can make of this is as a claim about the future – that one hopes that, for example, it will turn out that one's entire life had been some kind of radical illusion. But even in this remote possibility, it would not be expressed as ‘I hope that I had never been born’, but rather ‘I hope that it will turn out that I had never been born’. So hopes have a number of features. One feature is that they require some belief in the logical possibility of the hoped-for. A second, which builds on the first, is that the agent must have a rational belief in the real possibility of the hoped-for. This is in line with recent interpretations of Kant here such as Chignell (Reference Chignell and Watkins2013b).Footnote ¹⁶

Many, but not all, hopes are more specifically characterized by a rational belief that this possibility may be realized by one's own action or effort. This does not have to characterize hope, because we can, for example, hope that our friend wins the race.Footnote ¹⁷ An important additional feature is that hope may license certain behaviour that might be irrational without this hope.Footnote ¹⁸ It is this feature that I want to focus on in connection with the Kantian arguments.

We have seen that one way of viewing Kant's argument is that we are rationally committed to certain other projects, including the bringing about of the highest good, by virtue of our commitment to morality. But morality itself does not give us the means by which to bring about the highest good. It is in a sense powerless to produce that. The highest good requires that God will produce a state of virtue and happiness. But to believe in God and God's ability here requires some kind of faith. Once we have that kind of faith, our rational commitments begin to be unified again. On the one hand, we have a rational commitment to morality, and all that it entails, including the highest good. On the other, we are committed (partly by morality itself) to an honest evaluation of ourselves and our place in the world. These two together result in the inescapable conclusion that we are rationally committed to bringing about a state of affairs that is really impossible for us to bring about.

Now this tension is resolved by God. Again, it is crucial to remember that, for Kant, purely theoretical reason alone could not tell us that we should postulate God in this sense, because purely theoretical reason can maintain that we could just give up our moral conception of ourselves. But given that practical reason is unable to abide by that, we are driven to the God-option.Footnote ¹⁹ Now we have faith, we can see where hope comes in. We have a belief both that the object of hope (which will be the highest good) is possible, and a belief that it will actually come about. But this belief is uncertain. There is some connection between the highest good and our moral actions, which remain under our control. What I want to suggest here is that moral action in a broad sense is licensed by hope. That is to say that, for any individual moral action, there are reasons which we can give for and against such an action being carried out. If we are Kantians, then we will regard a moral duty as being overriding, and so it remains true that, for example, I just ought to return the book. These individual moral actions do not require hope as a theological virtue. But when we sit back and reflect on the question of why we might perform any moral actions whatsoever, here is where hope is important. Because the whole edifice of morality is bound up with the highest good (as a consequence) and the highest good requires God, we require there to be some rational licence, as it were, for actions. This rational licence is given by the justified hope in God's bringing about the highest good.

I am not claiming that hope is a motive, or motivating reason (though it may be). It is not that I think that actions have to be done with hope or motivated by hope. Instead, hope gives us a kind of internal warrant to perform actions we would not otherwise be rationally entitled to perform. This is because hope removes a kind of internal conflict of reason, in the same way as faith in God removed the internal conflict of our rational commitments.

We are indeed committed to morality. But when it comes to the highest good, we are confronted with a problem. The question that gives rise to the problem is whether we have faith in the highest good. Now this question might seem to have an obvious answer – yes – but things are not so simple. This is the problem. If we claim to have faith in the same way as we do have faith in the existence of God, this has two unfortunate consequences. The first consequence is that we are overly dogmatic – that is, we make claims for the existence of something which is not yet, something we wholly lack access to, something beyond us in time.Footnote ²⁰

This would be an overly dogmatic attitude to take, because it is not just a ‘taking-to-be-true’ attitude regarding something for which there cannot be empirical evidence (or for which empirical evidence is silent), as faith in God is.Footnote ²¹ With the highest good, or other such objects, it would be a taking-to-be-true regarding something which has no existence yet. But it is not the transcendent nature of the claim – that these things are beyond us – which is necessarily problematic. It is the combination of the transcendence element of the claim and the inherent future-directedness of the attitude towards the highest good that generates the worry over dogmatism. The second undesirable consequence is related. This is that in claiming such faith for the highest good, we would be claiming something like an inevitability for the highest good. This naturally raises all sorts of worries about free will and determinism, which could be avoided by thinking of the highest good and the attitude we should take to it in a different way.Footnote ²²

In the same vein, Pieper raises the twin dangers, as he sees them, either side of hope. On the one hand, we might fall into despair. On the other hand, we might become presumptive (Pieper (Reference Pieper2012, 113). Presumption, which is the kind of attitude I would designate by a kind of misplaced faith, is a ‘perverse anticipation of the fulfilment of hope’ (ibid., 113). In other words, this attitude rejects the arduous character of the hoped-for object, by claiming either that (a) it is already present or (b) that its coming-about is certain.Footnote ²³ Presumption then actually destroys hope, because it turns it into certainty (either of the present or the future), and this certainty has consequences for moral thought and action. If we are presumptive, we engage in either what Hare calls ‘puffing up’ the human capacity to do good, or reducing the moral demand.Footnote ²⁴ That is, either we take the route of saying that we actually have a much greater ability to fill the ‘moral gap’ between our action and our duty, or we claim that the moral demands are not actually all that demanding. Neither of these options are acceptable on the Kantian model.

Despair is the condition of taking the current state of the world as bad (because of moral evil, say) and then assuming that nothing could ever change, that attempts at individual or collective moral renewal are ‘vanity, vanity, all is vanity’. Pieper tells us that despair is ‘self-contradictory, self-divisive. In despair man actually denies his own desire, which is as indestructible as himself’ (ibid., 116). In other words, the hope in the final achievement of the good is so inextricably linked to the moral nature of humanity that taking away the hope through despair ends up denying the moral nature – but then we are irrevocably split. Hope is therefore akin to a necessary condition on our selfhood remaining intact. We have therefore seen that conceiving of the highest good as an object of faith (in a narrow sense) is not the right attitude to take, and that we should instead take the attitude of hope, in order to avoid presumption or despair.

So we should reject that kind of thinking in terms of faith in the highest good, and take a different path. Hope fills the role, because it does not require us to be overly dogmatic, nor does it involve thinking of the hoped-for object as inevitable (indeed, one might think that hoping for something which is an inevitability is evidence of confusion).Footnote ²⁵

Therefore hope is the right attitude to take towards the highest good. This is because of its peculiar Janus-faced character.Footnote ²⁶ Hope is in some sense similar to faith, insofar as it relies on a belief in the real possibility of the hoped-for object. But it is also in some sense similar to charity or love, insofar as it is an attitude concerned with the practical aspects of living, namely, that it can play a role in a system of commitments which licenses moral behaviour. Hope is at once a theoretical and a practical attitude, which bridges the gap between faith and love. Another way of putting this same point is to say that hope has a cognitive element – belief in some present possibility – but also a conative element – turning towards the future. This account can thus incorporate Chignell's (Reference Chignell2013a, 205) point that hope is clearly weaker than and different from belief but has been often used to interpret talk of ‘faith’ in religious circles. This is because faith and hope form a unity (along with love), such that it is artificial to separate them out.Footnote ²⁷

I will now discuss how my Kantian account can show that hope forms a bridge between faith and love, and why this is a virtue of my account. Without this bridge, we are left in a puzzle about how to move from faith to love. That is, we can raise the following question: how does faith generate good works? I will argue that the Kantian arguments supply one good account of this generation, which also shows the unity of the theological virtues.Footnote ²⁸

The bridge of hope is shown by the arguments, because from the perspective of the agent we can see that the concern for morality hinges on it being a rational project. Because morality implies other commitments, we need to accept them, or reject morality, on pain of rational incoherence or disunity.Footnote ²⁹ After the conclusion of the argument, the agent is in a position where they have accepted morality, and its extra commitments, and so is rationally coherent again. However, it is important to note that the acceptance of God is logically posterior to the acceptance of the highest good as an end incumbent upon us (because the highest good requires God).

In the order of discovery, for the agent, the theological virtues go from love (in its guise of morality), through hope (for the highest good), to faith (in God).Footnote ³⁰ Because the highest good plays such a vital role in the arguments, for the agent, they are well placed to see the connection between their faith in God, their hope, and their moral actions. It is not that individual moral actions are only licensed by hope, or by the rational structure of which hope is a part. It is that the project of morality itself is rationally licensed by this structure.Footnote ³¹

The question of how faith generates works is then only raised if we have the simple argument in mind, or an overly simple view of the relationship between morality and God. This is because for someone who accepts the simple argument outlined earlier – that moral facts/values/properties exist and if they exist then God exists – there is a puzzle about how their faith does anything more. In principle the agent who accepts this argument at T1 could have performed all the moral actions they do at T2, at the pre-acceptance stage of T0. In other words, their faith adds nothing over and above adding to their stock of (putatively) true beliefs. For the Kantian agent, however, things are different. Their moral commitments are bound tightly together with their faith, but their faith by itself could not make any difference – the faith requires the hope in the fulfilment of the project of morality, and the faith and hope together enjoin the agent to perform acts of love, that is, moral actions, and might in the end provide rational support for doing those actions.Footnote ³²

So, an agent who has love and hope but no faith is disunified because they are willing to perform moral actions and have an idea of the purpose of the moral project, but are caught in the tension of having to believe that but also not believing that there is a being or agent who could bring about such a thing. They would then resolve this tension either by accepting faith, or by puffing up their own (and other humans’) capacities, or bargaining down what the moral law requires. The agent who has love and faith but no hope is willing to perform moral actions and believes that there is a being which could bring about a highest good, but lacks a unity insofar as they have no way of accounting for why their moral actions are important for the project of morality, in a broad sense. The agent who has faith and hope but no love believes that there is a being who can bring about a highest good, and hopes for the coming of this highest good, but themselves fails to contribute, and so falls into something similar to the presumptive attitude; for example, they might fatalistically think that because God is all-forgiving then it doesn't matter what they do, so love, or moral action, is pointless.Footnote ³³

It is important that the hope is of a peculiar character. It cannot be that the agent has the hope that they shall bring about the highest good – as if a single agent within a single human lifetime could do so – but that their actions are in some way connected to the highest good. From Kant, we find a model of this. On this model we seem to find the view that earthly actions count insofar as they form, at least partly, the metric by which our place in the highest good (as a maximally happy and maximally virtuous state) is determined.

To see this, we can turn again to Pieper, especially his discussion of despair. Despair is the negation of hope insofar as it considers the hoped-for impossible to achieve. In my view, this would mean that the despairer might still perform individual moral actions, and recognize moral authority, but when it comes to thinking about the project of morality as such, they would think that it is unachievable. This is a tension in reason, because the despairing agent is practically engaging in a project that they conceive to be unfulfillable.Footnote ³⁴ This person has faith and love, but not hope. What is added by hope is a rational coherence in the attitudes of the agent. The agent who hopes is then led to conceive of morality as a fundamentally worthwhile project, despite any and all evidence to the contrary, for example, no matter how much moral evil the world actually contains.

Objections and responses

I shall now frame and respond to some objections which one might have. One objection might be that hope involves optimism, which can be misleading or unwarranted. This gets something right – hope and optimism are connected in some sense, as I shall outline – but the kind of optimism that is objectionable here is not warranted by hope. In this section I will not be talking about optimism as a psychological condition or trait, as it has been discussed by some (such as Benatar (Reference Benatar2006) ). I think it is clear that the kind of theological hope I have been talking about does not warrant what has become known in psychological and philosophical literature as ‘Pollyannaism’, that is, an unwarranted and basic attitude that things will just turn out well.Footnote ³⁵ Another way of putting this is to say that optimism which would be unwarranted is when the assurance of the hoped-for is taken as bedrock, perhaps in something like the way I outlined above, when it is taken as an object of faith rather than hope.Footnote ³⁶ That would be problematic, for the reasons I gave above. Another kind of optimism which is commonly thought to be problematic is the optimism inherent in Leibnizian theodicy. I shall not here be arguing against this theodicy. It seems to me that there are at least some construals of Leibniz according to which his views fall foul of the Kantian restrictions I want to put in place against faith in the not-yet. There could be other readings of Leibniz, however, which do not overstep this particular boundary. So if this objection presents a worry that my position either (a) leads to Pollyannaism or (b) licenses a kind of ‘best of all possible’ view, then that worry should be assuaged. My view only amounts to a ‘best of all possible’ view insofar as the highest good is, by definition, the optimal arrangement of happiness and virtue. But there might be some other worry, according to which my view is troublesome because history shows us that moral progress is at best shaky, and there has been very little of it.Footnote ³⁷ What about this worry?

The objector here rightly claims that hope and optimism are connected. The agent who hopes for the highest good or some analogue of it cannot help but also be an optimist, because things would get better if the hoped-for object were to become actual.Footnote ³⁸ But the hopeful optimist is not, on my view, committed to thinking that the highest good can come about by their own action. Indeed, they are committed to explicitly recognizing that it cannot. Thus the hopeful optimist, who also has faith and love, need not be in any way misled or naïve about the depth and reality of evil in both historical and contemporary societies – Hare (Reference Hare, Dole and Chignell2005, 214) and Palmquist (Reference Palmquist2009, 22) are particularly forceful here. They also, by refusing to infer from the extent of existing evil to pessimism, gird themselves against motivational problems. There is then no need to choose between being morally motivated and seeing the world aright.Footnote ³⁹ I take it that this thought is expressed by Jeffrey when she says that theological hope ‘produces patience in waiting for God to bring his kingdom to earth and salvation to individuals in his own timing and ways . . . hope is a mean between the extreme of anxious striving, on the one hand, and despairing paralysis, on the other’ (Jeffrey (Reference Jeffrey2017), 205). This mean is shown by the Kantian reasoning. On the Kantian view I am endorsing here, we should not think that there is any tight relationship between our ability to bring about moral ends and the highest good, because it is part of the reasoning regarding the argument for God that we explicitly recognize that our ability cannot ever match up (Kant (Reference Kant and Gregor1996a), 5:119).

Another optimism-related objection is that the highest good is not a coherent object of hope, because there is no such thing as an optimal arrangement of virtue and happiness. If, for example, there were 10 million people in the heavenly state of the highest good, surely it would be better if there were 20 million, or even 10 million and one. Surely a maximally virtuous and maximally happy person is always going to be an addition to the goodness of the highest good. I think we are warranted in rejecting the assumption behind this objection. Hope as an attitude does not have to spell out the details of the hoped-for in order to be warranted. It might have to fulfil other conditions, such as being based on evidence or rational commitments, but that the hopeful agent be able to give an account of the details of the hoped-for does not seem like a genuine condition on the rationality of hope. At least, in this particular case under discussion, these problems would surely be regarded as finally solvable by God, being omniscient.

A second cluster of objections might be a ‘moral hazard’ argument similar to that given by Jay (Reference Jay2014). Jay argues that, for Kant, having a doxastic attitude that God existed would itself be problematic. It is not merely that we cannot ring-fence our motivational capacities from our expectations, but that we cannot separate them from our attitudes either. Jay argues that the problem with thinking that the propositional attitude towards ‘God exists’ is doxastic is that in brings with it a bunch of further theses. Among these will be something like ‘God will punish the wicked’. So, when we take the attitude of faith towards those claims, something happens to us. It is not that we lose our freedom to choose, but that we are ‘overwhelmingly inclined to choose badly when presented with the prospect of incurring terrible consequences’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The worry is then that having knowledge of God will impinge on our capacities to choose well. Jay envisions this happening by, perhaps, not taking the adequate time in rational reflection and moral deliberation, and thereby either choosing an action which is not in accord with duty, or choosing an action in accord with duty for the wrong reasons (for example, because one is emotionally driven rather than coolly reflective). Even if some of us can be knowledgeable about these heavenly rewards or hellish punishments and still choose the good, the fact that many would be unable to do so is enough for Kant, on Jay's account, to think that knowledge of these matters is overall a bad thing (Jay (Reference Jay2014), 227). So, Jay concludes, we should take a non-doxastic attitude to God's existence; that is, we should, if we are attracted to Kantian views, be fictionalists about God.

This argument assumes that we take the same kind of attitudes to each of the different propositions in the complex of propositions that Jay invokes to get his argument started. But this assumption is unwarranted. We might believe that God will punish the wicked, and that we are not worthy of salvation, but we can justifiably hope that God will save us through grace, or forgive us, as attested by Scripture. More specifically, we can develop a response to this worry from materials derived from Luther. Luther argues that the importance of the Gospel is that it sets us free from the law. What this means is that the law condemns us of sin, but the Gospel reveals grace and forgiveness, such that the problem that might lead us to endorse Jay's argument does not get going. The problem only gets going if we are convinced that having anything stronger than a non-doxastic attitude regarding God will mean that our motivation is determined badly. But on the Kantian view, the worry dissipates once we realize that our duty can be made manifest to us by practical reason (especially in the Fact of Reason). We end up knowing that we just ought to perform or not perform certain actions. With a firm grasp of the highest good, then, and our place in it, perhaps informed by revelation, we might then believe that even if we choose badly, so long as certain conditions are met (e.g. repentance) then this will not doom us to the prospect of hell, and therefore we will not be inclined to choose badly at all.Footnote ⁴¹

I have pursued a reading which means that the Kantian argument requires more than only minimal attitudes.Footnote ⁴² Kant has in mind a committed practical attitude, which is supposed to inform one's life and moral orientation, which would be difficult to square with a fictionalist take on religious belief. Kant requires a theoretical belief in the real possibility of God and the highest good, as full theoretical belief would be both presumptuous and beyond the bounds of knowledge, which translates in the practical sphere into a commitment to an improvement in one's moral character, among other things.