What if Kant is right that real freedom is not doing whatever you feel like, but choosing principles you can rationally endorse and then living by them?
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1. Guest
Karen Stohr is Ryan Family Chair Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Georgetown University, where she is also a Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Her work focuses on ethics. In this interview, we focus on her book, "Choosing Freedom: A Kantian Guide to Life".
2. Book Summary
Karen Stohr’s Choosing Freedom is a practical guide to living “freely” in a Kantian sense: not doing whatever you feel like, but governing yourself by principles you can rationally stand behind. She emphasizes that the book is not about becoming more like Kant or constantly asking “What would Kant say?”; it’s about using Kant’s insights to illuminate hard-to-notice features of our moral lives and help you live by your own standards. Stohr also frames the book as a short tour of Kant’s systematic ethics followed by lots of attention to the everyday “trees” Kant actually wrote about—things like gossip, friendship, and dinner parties—because Kant meant ethics to guide real life. Kantian freedom, on this telling, often requires self-constraint: exercising autonomy means “getting a grip on ourselves” so we can live according to rationally defensible principles rather than being yanked around by impulse and procrastination.
The early chapters lay out the Kantian basics: morality is grounded in reason rather than shifting feelings, and the categorical imperative is presented through three connected ideals—equality, dignity, and community. Stohr stresses that Kant isn’t only about isolated individual choice: the “kingdom of ends” picture highlights how our communities shape our moral lives and how morality asks us to build social relations on the equal value of persons. In the “moral assessment” sections, she connects this framework to knowing and judging ourselves (and others), urging forms of charitable interpretation that keep us from using other people’s flaws as a way to feel superior, and redirecting attention back to our own moral work. Along the way, she squarely acknowledges Kant’s moral failures—especially racist and sexist views—while arguing that Kant’s own framework contains powerful resources against dehumanization, beginning with a strict duty to treat every human being with dignity.
Most of the book applies the theory to character, goals, and social life, organized into parts on vices, life goals, socializing, and looking forward. Stohr explains Kantian vices as “monsters” that live inside us and “enslave us from the inside,” warping our reasoning and making it harder to recognize and follow our duties—hence chapters on servility, arrogance, contempt, gossip/defamation, mockery, deceitfulness, and drunkenness. She then turns to constructive practices (self-improvement, resilience, reserve, beneficence, gratitude) and to the moral texture of friendship, love, manners, and even hosting: for Kant, good social rituals can cultivate both understanding and “fellow-feeling,” helping us practice respect in community. The final chapters emphasize hope as a duty-like orientation toward moral progress: we’re to work toward better ethical community (and even peace) by sustained effort, grounding optimism in the idea that people can keep trying to be better than they were yesterday.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Intro
00:43 - Overview of Choosing Freedom
03:03 - Making Kant accessible
06:08 - Everyday Kantian ethics
06:56 - Freedom and rationality
10:16 - Acting irrationally
12:39 - Human nature and evil
16:36 - Can evil be rational?
20:58 - The categorical imperative
21:44 - Universal law formulation
25:55 - Exceptions and universalization
30:48 - Humanity formulation
34:30 - Ends and dignity
37:44 - Kingdom of ends
41:38 - Perfect vs imperfect duties
46:29 - Conscience and moral assessment
51:55 - Reflecting on conscience
52:24 - Vices and virtues
53:06 - Duty not to lie
57:53 - Lies and omissions
1:00:14 - Civility and manners
1:02:59 - Moral improvement
1:06:39 - Teaching ethics
1:09:54 - Philosophy as practice
1:13:09 - Value of philosophy
1:16:34 - Conclusion
