Kant's account of “the radical evil in human nature” in the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone is typically interpreted as a reworking of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. But Kant does not talk about Augustine explicitly there, and if he is rehabilitating the doctrine of original sin, the result is not obviously Augustinian. Instead, Kant talks about Stoic ethics in a pair of passages on either end of his account of radical evil and leaves other clues that his argument is a reworking of an old Stoic problem. “Radical evil” refers to the idea that our moral condition is—by default and yet by our own deed—bad or corrupt; and that this corruption is the root (radix) of human badness in all its variety, ubiquity, and sheer ordinariness. Kant takes as his premise a version of the Stoic idea that nature gives us “uncorrupted starting points” (Diogenes Laertius 7.89). What sense can be made of the origin of human badness, given such a premise? Kant's account of radical evil is an answer to this old Stoic problem, which requires a conception of freedom that is not available in his Stoic sources.

中文翻译：

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自然，腐败与自由：康德宗教中的坚忍伦理

康德在1793年“独自在理性的界限内”的宗教中对“人性中的根本罪恶”的描述通常被解释为对原始罪的奥古斯丁主义的重制。但是康德在那儿并没有明确地谈论奥古斯丁，如果他要恢复原罪的学说，那么结果显然不是奥古斯丁。相反，康德在他关于激进邪恶的论述的任何一端都以一对段落论述了斯多葛伦理学，并留下了其他线索，表明他的论点是对一个古老的斯多葛问题的重制。“激进的邪恶”是指这样的观念，即我们的道德状况是默认的，但是根据我们自己的行为，是恶劣的或腐败的；并且这种腐败是根源（基数），以各种形式，普遍存在和纯粹的普通性来描述人类的不幸。康德将斯多葛学说的一个版本作为前提，即自然给了我们“不间断的起点”（Diogenes Laertius 7.89）。在这样的前提下，可以对人为祸的根源有何理解？康德对激进邪恶的描述是对这个古老的斯多葛派问题的答案，这需要一个自由的观念，而这在他的斯多葛派著作中是没有的。