In the Introduction to the Metaphysical Foundations of the Doctrine of Right, Kant assigns the will the function of giving laws and identifies it with practical reason. As merely lawgiving, Kant maintains, the will is neither free nor unfree: only the power of choice can be called free by virtue of its relation to action through maxims. Kant argues that this freedom cannot be defined as the capacity to choose for or against the moral law because this phenomenon of choice pertains to the human being qua appearance and therefore cannot define freedom, which is necessarily intelligible. For Kant, the negative concept of freedom of the power of choice consists in independence from determination by sensible impulses and the positive concept consists in the ability of pure reason to be practical. Furthermore, he claims that the possibility of deviating from the moral law is an incapacity (Unvermögen). Thus, Kant seems to hold that freedom is restricted to moral action. Nevertheless, there is room for interpretation: Kant’s remark might not be a blanket statement about free will per se but a specific claim about its definition. The matter is still contested in the secondary literature.

In his 1789 On Determinism and Moral Freedom, Snell treats the compatibility of determinism and morality. Drawing on Kant’s distinction between the empirical and intelligible character, Snell tackles the issue of how the determinism of the phenomenal world can be reconciled with freedom, specifically with respect to the capacity to do otherwise. Anticipating the contemporary charge that intelligible freedom understood as entailing the capacity to do otherwise would contradict the causal connection of appearances, Snell advances a Leibnizian interpretation of Kant’s account of free will and rejects the proposition that an indeterministic conception of the capacity to do otherwise is a necessary condition for moral imputation. He defines freedom principally as the absence of external constraint and argues that this in no way infringes upon the hypothetical necessity of occurrences in the world of sense. Furthermore, Snell maintains that the agent’s consciousness and inner feeling of self that his action is the expression of his own self-activity is all that is required for morality and moral imputation.

Carl Christian Erhard Schmid’s Lexicon for the Easier Use of the Kantian Writings defines technical terms in the Critical philosophy. The lexicon offers insight into Schmid’s understanding of the concepts relevant to free will and anticipates his later position that freedom is restricted to moral actions. The text is particularly noteworthy for its entry on autonomy. There Schmid asserts that free actions and morally good actions are synonymous.

In his “General Overview of the Most Recent Philosophical Literature” (1797), Schelling considers Reinhold’s claim that the will must be separate from practical reason in light of Kant’s treatment of the distinction between the will and the power of choice. By divorcing the will from reason, Reinhold supposedly cannot account for our obligation under the moral law. Schelling observes that the discrepancy between Kant’s claim that the will is neither free nor unfree and Reinhold’s assertion that the will is free only insofar as it has the capacity to be good or evil is rooted in the nature of the will itself. Kant’s and Reinhold’s variance is, as it were, the result of a partial perspective of an issue properly conceived of only through a unified standpoint. Kant considers the will insofar as it is not an object of consciousness, Reinhold insofar as it occurs in consciousness. For Schelling, these seemingly disparate perspectives are integrated in the recognition that the power of choice is the appearance of an absolute will and, as such, indicates the action through which what is intellectual becomes empirical, the absolute becomes an object, and the infinite becomes finite.

In his 1790 Attempt at a Moral Philosophy, Schmid presents his doctrine of intelligible fatalism. He makes the Kantian claim that consciousness of the moral law entails that reason is capable of determining the will independently of sensibility, a capacity which Schmid calls moral freedom. Moral actions bear the imprint of reason’s self-activity whereas immoral actions are the result of a lack of reason’s activity. Drawing on Ulrich’s claims that there is no middle path between chance and necessity and that chance is irrational, Schmid holds that there must be some ground for reason’s failure to determine the will in the case of immoral action. Accordingly, Schmid posits intelligible obstacles which prevent reason’s efficacy in determining the will. Despite the thoroughgoing necessity of all actions as a result of intelligible forces, Schmid holds that imputation is still possible because the agent is unaware of those forces.

Kant’s preliminary notes for the Introduction to the Metaphysical Foundations of the Doctrine of Right offer insight into his claims in the published text and his attempt to differentiate the legislative and executive moments of volition. In these notes Kant addresses the distinction between the will and the power of choice as well as the definition and scope of freedom of the power of choice. However, rather than settle the question of whether the capacity to choose to transgress the moral law belongs to freedom of the will, several of Kant’s statements seem to contradict. On the one hand, he claims that the free power of choice can be determined only by the law of the subject’s own causality and that there is no unlawful volition. On the other hand, he asserts that the power of choice is free to observe or transgress the law’s command. While Kant claims that only the power of choice, not the will, can be considered free, he also states that the will is free in another sense insofar as it is lawgiving. The context of these apparently conflicting claims suggest a nuanced account of freedom of the will and offer material for further scholarship.

August Ludwig Christian Heydenreich’s On Freedom and Determinism and their Compatibility (1793) presents the central tensions between determinism and indeterminism prior to the Critical philosophy and outlines how the latter is able to resolve these tensions. He notes that for all that Kant’s conception of free will was able to accomplish, there is still considerable disagreement on how this conception is to be understood, particularly between Carl Christian Erhard Schmid and Karl Leonhard Reinhold. The originality of Heydenreich’s position consists in his assertion that the moral power of choice cannot belong to the sphere of nature or to the supersensible world. If it belonged to the former, then its actions would necessarily be determined in accordance with the law of causality. If it belonged to the latter, then its actions would necessarily be determined by the moral law and culpability for immoral actions would be abolished. Instead, the moral power of choice must be situated between the two realms and constitute the boundary and bridge between them.

Salomon Maimon argues in “The Moral Skeptic” (1800) that Kant’s conception of freedom as the capacity of the power of choice to be determined by reason independently of sensible determinations is an empty concept, or, as Maimon puts it, a “term without a concept.” He holds that a determinate capacity is inconceivable without laws through which its efficacy is invariably determined. Although we might conceive of laws of nature as the determining ground of immoral action and the moral law as the determining ground of moral action, there is no law to determine which of these two opposed grounds is to become the determining ground of action in a given case. Thus, the actual determination of the power of choice would be left to chance, which is absurd since chance indicates the lack of a determining ground. Maimon’s critique is embedded in a broader treatment of the difference between the moral skeptic and the moral dogmatist in view of the Critical philosophy.

In his “On the Freedom of the Will” (1789), Johann Heinrich Abicht rejects the proposition that freedom immediately reveals itself to us through consciousness or some special feeling. Were that the case, Abicht maintains, then freedom would be knowable, which is impossible given that it is transcendental and inaccessible to our understanding. Nevertheless, on Abicht’s view, consciousness still plays a role in demonstrating that our will is free. He grants that we are conscious of certain internal volitional appearances, e.g. approval, decision, inclination, desire, etc. In order to demonstrate the concept of freedom, which Abicht understands as the capacity to be the self-contained ground of volition, we must prove that the ultimate grounds of these appearances are internal to the I and therefore not subject to external determination.

Karl Heinrich Heydenreich contends in “On Moral Freedom” (1791) that the human being is originally endowed with consciousness of freedom. Moreover, Heydenreich explicitly denies that our consciousness of freedom is a consequence of consciousness of the moral law and instead maintains that the moral law provides only indirect support for our innate consciousness of freedom. Similar to Snell’s contention that our freedom is revealed to us through the feeling of our own self, at one point Heydenreich refers to our feeling of freedom. According to Heydenreich, the task of philosophy is to secure this feeling of freedom from the skepticism of speculative reason.