Raw LLM Responses

I'm happy to see a conversation on Kant and Kant's ethics started here. A few things that hopefully will add to the discussion: (1) When people first encounter Kant, they often say things such as, "If what matters to morality is the maxim that an individual adopts, and not the actions or the consequences, how do we know that some really evil person (e.g., Hitler) wasn't acting morally and things just didn't go how he wanted in the world (since things like consequences are out of his control)?" Kant addresses this sort of problem directly at the beginning of the Groundwork, where he states that the upcoming discussion where we try to identify the nature of morality and what makes an individual morally praiseworthy assumes that the person in question has acted appropriately and the consequences of the action were such that we generally recognize that action as being good (or, at the very least, not bad). These passages come at 4:397. "I here pass over all actions that are already recognized as contrary to duty…for in their case the question whether they might have been done from duty never arises, since they even conflict with it." "I also set aside actions that are really in conformity with duty but to which human beings have no inclination immediately and which they still perform because they are impelled to do so through another inclination [bodily impulse, external force, etc.]." (2) To motivate the discussion based on the initial post: In that discussion, a connection is made between Kant's "deontological ethics" and freedom. But we should get clear on why Kant's ethics is deontological, that is, duty-based (to whom is the duty?), or what Kant's understanding of freedom entails. On this second point, it's easy to make a distinction between internal and external freedom, or liberty and autonomy, or freedom of action and freedom of choice. Hobbes denies that these differences exist, but Kant does not. But beyond this somewhat straightforward distinction, i