Gewissen und Urteilskraft in Kants Auffassung der Kasuistik

Conscience has been defined in Kant's "The Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason" as “the moral faculty of judgment, passing judgment upon itself”. In the same context Kant speaks of casuistry, which has a strict relation to the power of judgment, as a “dialectic of the conscience”. This paper aims to clarify which role the power of judgment plays both in the action of conscience and in the process of casuistry. The famous example of the Inquisitor, which immediately follows the definition of conscience in the "Religion", can be understood as a casuistic question and shows how conscience, as a reflexive, “second order” power of judgment, takes part in the processing and solution of first order application problems.