How Morality is Related to Religion in Kant’s Transcendental Philosophy

Kant is a distinguished philosopher as to his position on the relation between morality and religion. Because of his view that morality can identify our duties independently of the religionand that such an autonomous morality will necessarily lead to the religion, Kant came to be accused of self-contradiction—a contradiction between theology and ethics. In this paper, I overview, explain, and account for how morality and religion are related to one another in the framework of Transcendental Philosophy, trying to show that if Kant’s position here is analyzed and assessed in terms of his particular philosophical system as well as other considerations, his apparently contradicting approach to the relation between morality and religion will turn out to be a unified coherent position. In other words, by giving a new meaning to religion and attributing a single origin to morality and religion, Kant tries to reconcile his religious, moral, and epistemological concerns within a single philosophical system.