Guyer 2007

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Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary
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Naturalistic and
Transcendental Moments in
Kant's Moral Philosophy
a
Paul Guyer
a
University of Pennsylvania , USA
Published online: 05 Oct 2007.
To cite this article: Paul Guyer (2007) Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments in
Kant's Moral Philosophy, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 50:5,
444-464, DOI: 10.1080/00201740701612309
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Inquiry,
Vol. 50, No. 5, 444–464, October 2007
Naturalistic and Transcendental

Moments in Kant’s Moral Philosophy
PAUL GUYER
University of Pennsylvania, USA
(Received 19 June 2007)
ABSTRACT During the 1760s and 1770s, Kant entertained a naturalistic approach to
ethics based on the supposed psychological fact of a human love for freedom. During the
critical period, especially in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant
clearly rejected such an approach. But his attempt at a metaphysical foundation for
ethics in section III of the Groundwork was equally clearly a failure. Kant recognized
this in his appeal to the ‘‘fact of reason’’ argument in the Critique of Practical Reason,
but thereby gave up on any attempt to ground the fundamental principle of morality at
all. So it is of interest to see how far we might now proceed along the lines of his original
naturalistic approach.
I. Introduction
Kant initially conceived of the moral law as a rule recognized by human
reason adherence to which could realize a goal set by specifically human
nature, namely freedom from domination by our own arbitrary impulses
and inclinations and by the arbitrary will of others, determined by their
arbitrary impulses and inclinations. Only after completing the Critique of
Pure Reason did he decisively conceive of the moral law as a synthetic a
priori proposition that both could and must be explicated and established
with the resources of transcendental philosophy without depending upon
any empirically established assumptions about human nature, although its
presentation to us in the form of the categorical imperative reflects the
empirical fact of our imperfect rationality. The Groundwork for the
Metaphysics of Morals is Kant’s attempt to provide a transcendental
argument for the moral law that does not merely exploit the resource of
Correspondence Address: Paul Guyer, Logan Hall, University of Pennsylvania, 249 S. 36th
Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19104-6304, USA. Email: pguyer@phil.upenn.edu
0020-174X Print/1502-3923 Online/07/050444–21 # 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/00201740701612309
Kant’s Moral Philosophy 445
transcendental idealism provided by the first Critique, but attempts to

construct a transcendental deduction of the moral law on the model of the
transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding in the
previous work. Both transcendental deductions depend upon a central claim
about self-identity: just as the transcendental unity of apperception is the
medium or tertium quid through which the transcendental deduction of the
first Critique is supposed to show that the categories that are necessary if we
are to make any judgments about objects in fact must apply to all of our
possible experience, so a claim about the underlying rationality of the
noumenal self is supposed to be the medium through which the moral law
that is valid for rational beings in general is proved to be binding upon

human beings in particular. In Kant’s mature practical philosophy,
empirical facts about human nature are supposed to be invoked only, first,
to explain our resistance to the moral law, which transforms it into the
categorical imperative, and second, in the derivation of our specific duties
from the moral law. However, Kant’s attempt to construct a transcendental
moral philosophy along the lines of the transcendental theory of knowledge
of the first Critique is, to say the least, a mixed success: his analysis of the
moral law and its several formulations is one of the masterpieces of western
philosophy, and his attempt to provide a transcendental deduction of it is
one its most spectacular train wrecks. To my mind, at least, that leaves the
question of whether we can salvage the normative core of Kantian moral
philosophy along something more like his own original lines; that is, by
showing that adherence to the moral law is the only rational way to secure
and realize freedom seen as the natural end for human beings without any
appeal to claims about rational beings in general or any appeal to
transcendental idealism to prove that we human beings really are rational
beings and must comport ourselves as such.
II. Kant’s original naturalistic ethics

Prior to his attempt to create a transcendental moral philosophy, Kant
seemed content to treat human freedom as the natural fundamental value
and goal of human beings, and principles of human reason as the natural
means to establish and secure such freedom; his early moral philosophy thus
did not differ in method from naturalistic philosophies such as those of
Richard Cumberland1 or David Hume,2 although it differed substantively in
seeing freedom rather than happiness as the fundamental natural value of
human beings. His earliest notes on topics in ethics, the notes he wrote in
1764 or 1765 in his copy of his own Observations on the Feeling of the
Beautiful and Sublime, introduce several of the key notions of Kant’s mature
ethics, including the contrast between the merely conditional value of an
action as a means to an end, the categorical value of an action as an end in
itself and the idea that a good will is a universal will. But these notes also
446 Paul Guyer
show Kant treating freedom from domination, both by other persons but
also by one’s own inclinations, as the strongest natural desire of human
beings (in a way that he will not explicitly do in his mature writings) and at
least hinting that reason perfects the will and determines what is universally
valid in order to establish and secure such forms of freedom. Kant explicitly
asserts the value of controlling rather than being controlled by one’s own
inclinations and that of being free from domination by other persons, which
would ultimately be domination by the inclinations of others and one’s own
inclination to allow oneself to be dominated by them. Along the former
lines, clearly influenced by the Hellenistic tradition (for as far as these
statements go they are reminiscent of Epicureanism as well as of Stoicism),

he says things like:
One could promote one’s welfare by allowing one’s desires to expand

and striving to satisfy them; one could promote one’s rectitude if one
allowed the inclinations of whim and luxuriousness to grow and then
tried to resist them for the sake of moral incentives. But there is
another solution to both of these problems, namely, not allowing these
inclinations to arise…3
It is not compatible with happiness to let the inclinations become
excessive, for since there are uncommonly many cases where
circumstances are unfavorable to these inclinations, where things are
not as desired, they become a source of oppression, misery, and worry,
of which the simple person knows nothing…4
A person’s contentment arises either from satisfying many inclinations
with many agreeable things, or from not letting many inclinations
sprout, and thus by being satisfied with fewer fulfilled needs. The state
of him who is satisfied because he is not familiar with agreeable things
is simple sufficiency, that of him who is familiar with them but who
voluntarily does without them because he fears the unrest that arises
from them is wise sufficiency. The former requires no self-compulsion
and deprivation, the latter however demands this… Virtue does not at
all consist in overcoming acquired inclinations in particular cases, but
in seeking to be free of such inclinations and thus learning to do
without them gladly. It does not consist in conflict with the natural
inclinations, but rather in making it the case that one has none except
for the natural ones, because these can always be satisfied.5
These remarks stress that genuine satisfaction depends upon regulating our
own inclinations, choosing to satisfy only those that we can without conflict
and turmoil. From this point, Kant turns to the importance that we place on
being free from domination not by our own impulses but by other persons.
For example:
The human being has his own inclinations, and by means of his
capacity of choice has a clue from nature to conduct his actions in
accordance with these. Nothing can be more appalling than that the
action of one human stand under the will of another. Hence no
abhorrence can be more natural than that which a person has against
servitude…6
…the human being is dependent upon many external things… But
what is harder and more unnatural than this yoke of necessity is the
subjection of one human being under the will of another. No
misfortune can be more terrifying to one who is accustomed to
freedom, who has enjoyed the good of freedom, than to see himself
delivered to a creature of his own kind who can compel him to do what
he will (to give himself over to his will).7
The will of another person is the effect of his own drives [and]
inclinations and agrees only with his own true or imagined welfare.
But if I was previously free, then nothing can open a grimmer prospect
of misery and desperation than that in the future my condition should
not lie in my own will but in that of another…8
Kant suggests that there is some sort of contradiction in domination –

‘‘There is in subjection not only something externally dangerous but also a
certain ugliness and a contradiction that at the same time indicates its
injustice’’9 – and, if reason is our capacity for detecting contradictions, this
would suggest that it is by means of reason and its rules that we can discover
how to avoid domination. But he does not clearly spell out what sort of
contradiction he has in mind nor how reason can help us to avoid it. And he
certainly does not suggest that reason itself is in any way the source of the
value that we place on freedom from either of these two dominations; it
seems to be just an empirically discoverable fact about human nature that
we value freedom. Kant just asserts, as a matter of fact, that ‘‘There may
well be attractions that a person prefers to freedom for a moment, but this
must make him sorry in the end’’.10 Indeed, he explicitly characterizes the
high value that we place on one form of freedom, namely freedom from
domination by other persons, as a natural fact some pages later: ‘‘The sole
naturally necessary good of a human being in relation to the wills of others
is equality (freedom) and, with respect to the whole, unity’’.11 Here Kant
suggests that the freedom of each person to the greatest degree consistent
with an equal freedom for all others – the core idea of his later conception of
the realm of ends as well as of the universal principle of justice – is a
naturally necessary desire of and goal for human beings.
In a variety of sources from the 1770s, Kant suggests an explanation for
the value that we place on freedom that is still thoroughly naturalistic, as
well as suggesting a little more about the part that reason plays in securing
such freedom. His central ideas are, first, the psychological idea that we
448 Paul Guyer
enjoy unhindered activity, or that maximizing our possibility for unhindered

activity maximizes our ‘‘feeling of life’’, and, second, the practical idea that
reason provides us with the means to minimize conflicts within our own
activities and between our activities and those of others, thereby allowing
each of us to maximize our activity and feeling of life. His notes on moral
philosophy, that is, his annotations to Baumgarten’s Introduction to
Practical Philosophy (Initia philosophiae practicae prima, 1760) prepared
for use in his classroom lectures, often assert the value of freedom without
explanation and then argue that governing our actions according to
universal laws is necessary to prevent freedom from limiting or destroying
itself. Thus, one note simply asserts that ‘‘The dignity of human nature lies
solely in freedom; through it alone we can become worthy of any good’’,12
while one like this longer text maintains that reason must be used to make
the exercise of freedom in both oneself and others consistent, while hinting
that there is a satisfaction in the exercise of freedom that is independent of
the satisfaction that would be attached to the achievement of any particular
end freely pursued:
1. The principium of moral judgment (the principium of the

conformity of freedom with reason in general, i.e., lawfulness in
accordance with universal conditions of consensus) is the rule for the
subordination of freedom under the principium of the universal
consensus of freedom with itself (with regard to oneself as well as other
persons).
2. The ground of moral feeling, on which the satisfaction in this
consensus in accordance with principles rests, is the necessity of
satisfaction in the form of actions by means of which we agree with
our ourselves in the use of our power of choice***….
***The epigenesis of happiness (self-creation) out of freedom, which is
restricted by the conditions of universal validity, is the ground of the
moral feeling.13
Here Kant states that reason supplies the universal rules in accordance with
which the use of freedom in both oneself and others can be made consistent.
This means that one’s use of freedom at one time is consistent with one’s
own use of freedom at other times and with others’ use of freedom at all
times. Here Kant at least hints at a psychological satisfaction in freedom
which makes its consistent and therefore maximal use desirable. The latter
point, however, comes out more clearly in Kant’s lectures on anthropology,
that is, his lectures on the chapter on empirical psychology in Baumgarten’s
Metaphysica, from the mid-1770s. These passages sum up Kant’s idea that
our deepest satisfaction comes from the feeling of life that in turn comes
from maximally unhindered activity, but that the use of reason is necessary
in order to coordinate and thereby maximize the freedom of our activity,

and that this is the role of the moral law. First Kant states that:
The feeling of the promotion of life is gratification or pleasure. Life is

the consciousness of a free and regular play of all of the powers and
faculties of the human being. The feeling of the promotion of life is
that which is pleasure and the feeling of the hindrance of life is
displeasure.14
Then he argues that we can in fact enjoy the gratification that the free
exercise of our powers promises only when our free activity is regulated by a
rule of reason or, as he calls it without distinction at this point,
understanding:
The play of the mental powers must be strongly lively and free if it is to
animate. Intellectual pleasure consists in the consciousness of the use
of freedom in accordance with rules. Freedom is the greatest life of the
human being, whereby he exercises his activity without hindrance.
Through some hindrance of freedom life is restricted, since freedom
does not stand under the coercion of a rule. If this were the case, then
it would not be free, but since this introduces a lack of rule if the
understanding does not direct it, while this lack of rule hinders itself,
thus no freedom can please us except that which stands under the rule
of the understanding.15
Similar passages also turn up in Kant’s notes on moral philosophy: ‘‘Feeling

is the sensation of life. The complete use of life is freedom. The formal
condition of freedom as a use that is in complete accordance with life is
regularity’’.16 The idea seems to be that while any free act considered in
isolation would be accompanied with a feeling of satisfaction in being alive
and active, that feeling can be maximized in a manifold of actions – whether
one person’s actions over time, or the actions of a multitude of persons over
space and time – only by the use of a rule, namely the rule to choose only
those actions that leave open maximal opportunities for further free actions
by oneself and others. Such a rule is in essence the moral law.
Now such a derivation of the moral law not only appeals to empirical
knowledge of the special nature of human beings – Kant certainly makes no
suggestion that we could know a priori that we take a pleasure in the exercise
of our freedom that is even greater than any pleasure that we may take in
the realization of any particular end – but also depends upon an argument
that each person can maximize her own freedom of choice and activity only
by conceding equal liberty to all others, which Kant hardly spells out. The
view thus seems to be a species of rational egoism, although differing from
those versions of that approach which suppose that each human being wants
450 Paul Guyer
to maximize his own power (Hobbes) or his own enjoyment of particular

objects of desire (Cumberland, Shaftesbury) or minimize his own uneasiness
(Locke) and needs to cooperate with others only in order to accomplish this.
Kant’s psychological approach to the value of freedom does not give anyone
a direct or immediate reason for valuing the freedom of others, only an
indirect reason for respecting the latter. For that reason as well as others
Kant may have come to be dissatisfied with such a naturalistic,
psychological account of the value of freedom, enough to drop it in his
published works on moral philosophy. The question is whether he succeeded
in replacing it with a successful non-naturalistic argument for the
unconditional and absolute value of freedom as the basis of his mature

moral philosophy.
Before I turn to the Groundwork to see whether it does offer a successful a
priori or transcendental argument for the value of freedom, let me observe
that Kant clearly preserves the idea that freedom is the fundamental value to
be maximized by the use of reason in his lectures on moral philosophy up to
the time of that work, and even continues to hint at the naturalistic
psychological explanation of the value we humans place upon freedom. The
basis for Kant’s derivation of duties toward both oneself and others in the
lectures on ethics that he gave as early as 1777 and as late as the winter
semester of 1784–85 – the semester at the end of which the Groundwork was
published – is that freedom ‘‘is the highest degree of life’’, but that ‘‘insofar
as it is not restrained under certain rules of conditioned employment, it is
the most terrible thing there can be…. If freedom were not restricted by
objective rules, the result is much savage disorder’’. Freedom must therefore
be restricted by the ‘‘supreme rule’’ to ‘‘Behave so that in all your actions
regularity prevails’’, or to ‘‘restrict freedom’’ by ‘‘the conformity of free
conduct with the essential ends of mankind’’. But the essential ends of
mankind are in turn nothing but the conditions for the preservation and
maximization of freedom: ‘‘The conditions under which alone the greatest
use of freedom is possible, and under which it can be self-consistent, are the
essential ends of mankind’’.17 Again, Kant’s argument is that, in order to
maximize his enjoyment of the ‘‘highest degree of life’’, each must restrict his
use of freedom on any one occasion by the rule that such a use should be
consistent with his use of freedom on other occasions as well as with others’
use of their freedom. In the immediate context of these remarks, Kant
suggests what he means by a use of freedom that is not consistent with
freedom by the example of suicide, in which the suicide would use ‘‘his
freedom to destroy himself, when he ought to use it solely to live as a
man’’.18 Presumably what he means by this is that while an act of suicide
considered by itself may be a perfectly free act, it of course destroys the free
agent who performs it and therefore the possibility of any further free acts
on his part, so it minimizes rather than maximizes his freedom over what
should have been a multitude of possibilities for action. This is the kind of
self-conflict within freedom that is inconsistent with the value of freedom

and that reason tells us to avoid in order to preserve and maximize freedom.
Kant neatly sums up the structure of this part of his reasoning in the
lectures on ‘‘natural right’’ that he was also giving during the winter
semester of 1784, when he says that ‘‘If only rational beings can be ends in
themselves, then this cannot be because they have reason, but because they
have freedom. Reason is merely a means.’’19 This states that the use of
reason is the means to the preservation of freedom. Here, however, Kant
hints at what might be a non-psychological account of the value of freedom.
He starts these lectures with the proposition that in the ‘‘system of ends’’
there must be a final end, or an end that is not itself a means to something
else. He then suggests that the human being must be such an end on account
of his freedom, or that freedom itself is the final end, precisely because in the
exercise of freedom the will is not dependent upon anything else and is thus
not a mere means to some other end, and only the sheer exercise of freedom
could be considered to be something that has its value in itself rather than in
some further, contingently valuable end to be achieved through it: ‘‘The
inner worth of the human being depends on his freedom, that he has his own
will. Since he is to be the final end, his will must not be dependent on
anything further.’’20
III. The transcendental deduction of the moral law

Such a thought may certainly lie beneath Kant’s argument in the
Groundwork that the categorical imperative must be the rule to act only
on maxims that have the form of universal laws because to do otherwise
would be to take ends suggested by contingent inclinations as sufficient
reasons for action, thus to have our maxims set for us by mere inclination
rather than to choose them freely. The real motivation for this argument is
that the exercise of freedom has an absolute value while any end set by
inclination has a merely contingent value, and that to act in accordance with
the requirement of universalizability is the only alternative to acting for the
sake of contingently valuable ends, and thus the only way to act freely. Kant
suggests the premise for this argument both in his analysis of the common-
sense concept of duty as requiring motivation by something other than mere
inclination and in his philosophical thesis that dignity lies only in giving
ourselves a law rather than being ruled by the law of nature, such as the law
to seek gratification of inclinations (G, 4:440), so that ‘‘the sublime worth
beyond all price of an absolutely good will consists precisely in that its
principle of action is free from all influences of contingent grounds such as
only experience can provide’’ (4:426). Perhaps Kant’s assertion of the
absolute value of self-determination can stand on its own feet, and the
accomplishment of the Groundwork would lie in its demonstration that
the moral law, in its several manifestations in the different forms of the
452 Paul Guyer
categorical imperative, is the only means by which we can realize such

dignity. However, Kant seems to want to go further in the Groundwork and
to provide a non-naturalistic argument for the supreme dignity of self-
determination rather than of determination by inclination, thus for the
absolute value of freedom. What I now want to suggest, however, is that the
argument of Groundwork II and III that is based on the model of the
transcendental deduction of the categories in the end actually sidesteps the
normative task of motivating the premise of the absolute value of freedom
by offering an argument, based in transcendental idealism, that we
necessarily are free and really have no choice but to act on the principle
of reason that in fact maximizes the possibility for the exercise of freedom.
This transcendental argument, I will claim, not only flies in the face of
common sense, but also suffers from internal flaws.21
Let me begin by outlining the structure of the transcendental deduction of
the categories that I take to be replicated by the structure of Kant’s
transcendental deduction of the categorical imperative, by which I mean
precisely his attempt to prove that the moral law applies to us. I conceive of
the transcendental deduction of the categories as an argument in two stages
comprising the ‘‘Analytic of Concepts’’ which are in turn part of a larger,
three-stage demonstration of the objective validity of all of the categories of
the understanding that is completed only in the ‘‘Analytic of Principles’’.
What I have in mind is an argument in which it is first demonstrated that in
order to make judgments about objects we must conceive of those objects in
accordance with the categories, considered en bloc (this is what Kant calls in
the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason the ‘‘clue to the discovery of
all pure concepts of the understanding’’ and in the second edition the
‘‘metaphysical deduction’’). The argument goes on to demonstrate that we
must be able to make object-referring judgments about all of our
experiences, so that the categories, again considered merely en bloc, must
apply to all of our experiences (this is the ‘‘transcendental deduction’’
properly so called). Finally, it is demonstrated that each of the specific
categories identified at the outset of the argument must apply to our
experience (this is what is accomplished in the ‘‘system of all principles of
pure understanding’’, the central chapter of the ‘‘Analytic of Principles’’).22
The metaphysical deduction proceeds by expounding the structural
features or ‘‘logical functions’’ of judgments – the types of quantity, quality,
relation, and modality that can be manifested within a judgment – that can
be combined to yield the possible ‘‘logical forms’’ of judgments, and then
argues that our concepts of objects must be structured in certain ways if we
are to be able to think of or refer to them by means of judgments that have
those logical functions and forms; those ways of conceiving of objects,
which can themselves be thought of as the general forms for specific
mathematical or empirical concepts of objects, are the categories. For
example, in order to be able to think of objects by means of judgments that
have subject-predicate form, we must be able to think of the objects

themselves as substances that have accidents; in order to think of objects by
means of judgments that have an ‘‘if-then’’ form, we must be able to think of
some objects or properties of objects as grounds for other consequences in
those objects, e.g., we must be able to think of some states of objects as
causes for others that are their effects. This stage of Kant’s larger argument
can be thought of as proceeding by means of an analysis of the possible
functions and forms of judgments and of what it would be to cognize objects
by means of those judgments.
The next stage of Kant’s argument, the transcendental deduction properly
so called, aims to show that we must conceive of all of our experiences as

experiences of objects, and thus must make judgments employing the
categories about all of our experiences. In Kant’s own words, the
transcendental deduction is aimed at proving that ‘‘all experience contains
in addition to the intuition of the senses, through which something is given,
a concept of an object that is given in intuition, or appears; hence concepts
of objects in general lie at the ground of all experiential cognition as a priori
conditions’’ (A 93/B 126). Kant has various ways of attempting to prove this
thesis,23 but the central ones turn on the premise of what he calls the
‘‘transcendental unity of apperception’’, a certain and a priori representation
of the numerical unity of the self throughout its different individual
representations or states of outer or inner sense (e.g., A 113). Kant tries out
different ways of linking the validity of the unity of apperception for all of
our experiences and the application of the categories to all of our
experiences, but his main hope seems to be the argument that since the
unity of apperception must itself be expressed by means of judgments
connecting all of our experiences to each other, the categories, as the
conditions of the possibility of any judgments at all, necessarily apply to all
of our experiences, and are also, since they are forms for conceiving of
objects, sufficient to make all of our experiences cognition of objects (A 116-
19, B 132-4). But the precise details of Kant’s argument do not matter for
our present purposes, since Kant’s transcendental deduction of the
categorical imperative will not turn on the details of the transcendental
deduction of the categories; what is important is only that the transcen-
dental deduction is intended to depend on an a priori claim about the self
through which the categories are actually linked to our intuitions. Further,
Kant says that even though ‘‘this principle of the necessary unity of
apperception is, to be sure, itself identical, thus an analytical proposition,
yet it declares as necessary a synthesis of the manifold given in an intuition’’
(B 135), from which it follows that the target proposition that the categories
apply to all of our experience must be conceived of as a synthetic a priori
cognition. The general aim of the transcendental deduction is thus to move
from the analytic conditional that if we are to conceive of objects we must
do so by means of the categories to the synthetic a priori assertion that the
454 Paul Guyer
categories do apply to all of our experience through the tertium quid of the
synthetic unity of apperception.
The third stage of Kant’s theoretical deduction broadly understood is
then the proof that each of the categories must apply to our experience,
which Kant offers in the ‘‘System of principles’’. Kant’s strategy here is to
introduce into the argument of the ‘‘Transcendental Analytic’’ the
specifically spatial and/or temporal structure of our intuitions demonstrated
in the ‘‘Transcendental Aesthetic’’ (in the second edition, this step takes
place in 126 of the ‘‘Transcendental Deduction’’), and then to argue that
making the various judgments about our experience of objects that are
necessitated by their spatio-temporal structure requires the use of all of the

categories. For example, the fact that we must make judgments about
objects that are not merely extended in space but also change over time
means that we must employ the categories of substance and causation as
well as those of extensive magnitude. This stage of Kant’s argument also
yields synthetic a priori cognitions, including above all the conclusion that
‘‘the principle of sufficient reason is the ground of possible experience’’ (A
201/B 246), because the results of the necessary application of the categories
to the spatio-temporal structure of our manifolds of intuition go beyond
what is contained in the content of either the categories or the forms of
intuition considered by themselves.
What I now want to argue is that the structure of Kant’s deduction of the
categorical imperative in the Groundwork and indeed the structure of a
complete exposition of his moral philosophy as intended by (although not
fully carried out within) that work exemplifies this same pattern. The first
phase of Kant’s argument is the demonstration that the moral law as he
formulates it is the law for the action of any purely rational being. This can
be thought of as an analytical argument deriving the moral law from the
concept of a rational being, as indeed Kant himself explicitly says
(Groundwork, 4:412), and is parallel to the metaphysical deduction of the
categories. The second phase of Kant’s argument is that the moral law
derived from the pure concept of a rational being necessarily applies to us
because transcendental philosophy shows that at the deepest level, and
contrary to all too frequent appearances, we ourselves are rational beings.
This is what Kant himself explicitly calls the synthetic argument of
Groundwork III, which yields the validity of the categorical imperative for us
as a synthetic a priori cognition, and it parallels the transcendental
deduction not only in yielding a synthetic a priori result but specifically in
turning upon an allegedly a priori insight into our own identity: just as the
transcendental deduction of the categories turns on our allegedly a priori
cognition of our own numerical identity, so the transcendental deduction of
the categorical imperative turns on our allegedly a priori cognition of our
own rationality. Finally, although Kant only suggests this in his four
illustrations of the first two main formulations of the categorical imperative
in the Groundwork, and saves the details for the later Metaphysics of Morals,
the final stage of his exposition of moral philosophy is the derivation of the
full range of our juridical and ethical duties from the application of the
categorical imperative to certain basic facts about the human condition
beginning with the most basic fact that we are embodied, and this can be
thought of as paralleling the derivation of the principles of empirical
knowledge from the application of the categories to the spatio-temporal
structure of our intuition in the ‘‘System of principles’’. The latter, as we
saw, was supposed to yield synthetic a priori results, and I take Kant to
suggest that the derivation of duties by the application of the categorical
imperative to certain basic facts about the human condition also yields
synthetic a priori results when he says that the argument of the Groundwork
first proceeds ‘‘analytically from common cognition to its supreme principle
and then, in turn, synthetically from the testing of this principle and its
sources back to common cognition’’ (4:392). If we take the latter ‘‘turn’’ to
refer not to the demonstration that the categorical imperative applies to us
that Kant offers in Groundwork III but rather to the demonstration that the
categorical imperative yields the commonly recognized duties of mankind
that he sketches out in the illustrations of the categorical imperative in
Groundwork II and then completes in the Metaphysics of Morals, then by
this Kant is saying that this derivation of duties employs a synthetical
method and yields results that are synthetic a priori (even if they are
‘‘impure’’ because they presuppose some minimal empirical concepts).
In the remainder of this section, I will focus on the first two of these three
steps. I will argue that while the Groundwork aims at the same substantive
conclusion as Kant’s earlier reflections on moral philosophy, namely that
freedom is the value that is realized by adherence to the moral law, the
transcendental rather than psychological method that Kant employs in this
work actually sidesteps altogether the normative task of demonstrating the
absolute value of freedom for which he earlier turned to psychology: its
argument from our underlying identity as rational beings aims to show that
the moral law is valid for us because we really are rational and free beings
rather than showing that it ought to be binding on us because we ought to
recognize the value of being rational and free beings. But this argument
from our underlying identity is fatally flawed, and it thus leaves outstanding
the normative question of the value of freedom, assuming that is a question
the Groundwork is really supposed to answer.
So let me now briefly characterize the two stages of Kant’s transcendental
deduction of the categorical imperative: the analytical demonstration of
Groundwork II that the moral law is valid for any rational being and the
synthetical argument of Groundwork III that we ourselves are rational
beings and that the moral law applies to us. The first of these arguments
proceeds by means of an analysis of the concept of a rational will, or of a
rational being with a will, and yields Kant’s first two main formulations of
456 Paul Guyer
the categorical imperative, from which the remaining two are supposed to
follow. The argument of Groundwork II may be obscure because although
Kant explicitly says that ‘‘since moral laws are to be valid for every rational
being in general’’ the aim of this section is ‘‘to derive them from the
universal concept of a rational being in general’’ (4:412), he also describes
what he is doing as deriving formulations of the categorical imperative (e.g.,
4:420, 428). This is what you get when you apply the moral law valid for
every rational being to imperfect creatures like us, whose ‘‘will is not in itself
fully in accord with reason’’ because we have inclinations that if unchecked
would lead us to act contrary to reason and the moral law (4:413). For
example, in what may be the central paragraph in Groundwork II he refers to

‘‘something whose existence in itself had an absolute worth’’ as the ‘‘ground
of a possible categorical imperative, i.e., of a practical law’’ (4:428), when he
should be deriving the moral law valid for any rational being. But let us
ignore this confusion and take Kant’s own statements about the
methodology of Groundwork II to imply that he intends in this section to
derive the moral law from the pure concept of a rational being before
connecting it specifically to us human beings. The two key moves that Kant
makes in this analysis are the claims that a rational being, or a rational will,
is one that ‘‘has the faculty to act in accordance with the representation of
laws, i.e., in accordance with principles’’ (4:412), but also that such a
rational being does not determine ‘‘itself to action in accord with the
representation of certain laws’’ merely for the sake of acting in accordance with
law. Rather, it does so for the sake of an ‘‘end’’, ‘‘which serves the will as the
objective ground of its self-determination’’ (4:427) that can be achieved only
through adherence to that law or laws. These two propositions are supposed to
be derived by analysis of the concept of a rational being.
We can think of the next results that Kant reaches as being derived by the
analysis of the concept of a purely rational being. A purely rational being
would not conceive of itself as acting in accordance with its own
representation of any law, regardless of its origin, for example a law
suggested by its mere sensory inclinations if it has such, but would rather
conceive of itself as acting only in accordance with the representation of
laws that arise from it as reason as such; and then if a rational being
excludes anything like sensory inclination as the source of its laws, thus
conceiving of its law as containing no external ‘‘condition to which it is
limited’’, ‘‘there remains nothing left over with which the maxim of [its]
action is to be in accord’’ except the lawlikeness or necessity of its maxim is
such. Thus a purely rational being can conceive of itself as acting only on the
principle ‘‘Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can
at the same time will that it become a universal law’’ (4:428). This is Kant’s
first formulation of the categorical imperative, reached in Groundwork I by
means of the argument that the common conception of duty precludes
acting out of mere inclination and leaves no alternative but acting in
conformity with the requirement of the universalizability of maxims (4:402)

and now by the argument that the concept of a purely rational being acting
in accordance with purely rational laws precludes acting out of mere
inclination and leaves no alternative but acting in conformity with the
requirement of the universalizability of maxims. Since for Kant the concept
of nature is just the concept of a domain all of whose members do act in
accordance with universal laws, Kant claims that this Formula of Universal
Law (FUL) is extensionally equivalent to the requirement that a rational
being act as if its maxims were to be laws of nature, the Formula of Laws of
Nature (FLN).
Kant then develops the second stage of his analysis by arguing that not
only does a rational being always act on a law for the sake of an end, but a
purely rational being cannot act for the sake of a contingent end suggested
by anything like mere inclination, and therefore can act only for the sake of
something that is necessarily an end because ‘‘it is given through mere
reason’’ and ‘‘must be equally valid for all rational beings’’. This must be
something ‘‘whose existence in itself [has] an absolute worth’’, something
that is an ‘‘end in itself’’, and ‘‘in it and only in it would lie the ground of a
possible categorical imperative, i.e., of a practical law’’ (4:428). Again
apparently conflating pure and empirical concepts, Kant then asserts (‘‘Now
I say’’) that ‘‘the human being, and in general every rational being, exists as
end in itself, not merely as means to the discretionary use of this or that
will’’, and thus ‘‘must always at the same time be considered as an end’’,
leading to the second main formulation of the categorical imperative, ‘‘Act
so that you always use humanity, both in your own person and that of every
other, at the same time as an end and never merely as a means’’ (4:429). This
is the Formula of Humanity as End in Itself (FEI). However, Kant is not
actually relying on an empirical conception of ‘‘humanity’’ here. Rather, his
conception of ‘‘humanity’’ defined in the Metaphysics of Morals as the
‘‘capacity to set oneself an end – any end whatsoever’’,24 is equivalent to his
more abstract definition in the Groundwork that ‘‘Rational nature
discriminates itself from the rest in that it sets itself an end!’’ (4:437), and
what this requirement amounts to is the entirely general demand that the
capacity of each agent to set its own ends, regardless of the empirical
character of that agent, should itself be treated as an end and never merely
as a means, in the actions and maxims of all agents. In other words, the
freedom of all agents to set their own ends is the end in itself, although
making this the end of all in their treatment of all means that each agent’s
capacity to set its own ends freely can be made the end of all only to the
extent that this is compatible with everyone else’s capacity to set their own
ends being the end of all. The necessity of this end is supposed to follow
from the fact that, with ends suggested by any merely empirical and external
conditions such as inclination excluded, it is the only candidate for the end
of a purely rational being.
458 Paul Guyer
Kant claims that the further formulations of the categorical imperative,

especially the Formula of the Realm of Ends (FRE), or the requirement to
act only on maxims that can lead to ‘‘a whole of all ends (of rational beings
as ends in themselves as well as of the individual ends that each may set for
himself)’’ follow directly from these first formulations. On the interpretation
of humanity or rational being as the capacity to set ends, it should be
obvious that the requirement to make rational being a necessary end entails
making the ends it sets necessary ends insofar as that is compatible with
making each rational being an end in itself. So I will not discuss Kant’s
further formulations, but will instead now turn to the question of how he
proposes to reach the synthetic a priori conclusion that these formulations of

the moral law which he has derived by analysis of the concept of a purely
rational being necessarily apply to us.
Groundwork III first restates the results of the analytical argument of
Groundwork II and then turns to transcendental idealism for the synthetic
step of showing that these results necessarily apply to us, thereby making a
metaphysical argument that we are in fact bound by the moral law rather
than a normative argument that we ought to be bound by it. The key to
Kant’s argument is revealed at the start of the section, when he says that
freedom cannot just be negative, namely freedom from determination by
heteronomous inclinations, but must also be positive, namely ‘‘a causality in
accordance with unchangeable laws, but of a special kind’’, or autonomy,
‘‘the quality of the will of being a law to itself’’. ‘‘The proposition that the
will is in all actions a law to itself’’ is in turn equivalent to FUL, thus ‘‘a free
will and a will under moral laws are the same!’’ (4:446–7). This analysis has
the virtue of making the connection between freedom and the moral law
explicit, as it is in Kant’s pre-Groundwork texts, rather than leaving it to be
inferred from the definition of ‘‘rational being’’ or ‘‘humanity’’ as the
capacity of an agent to set its own ends freely. But it also makes the moral
law into the causal law of the genuinely free will, and points toward the
strategy of proving that the moral law does govern our actions by means of
a metaphysical argument that we really are free beings rather than a
normative argument that the moral law ought to govern our actions because
observing it is the only way we can realize the value of freedom. And this is
unfortunately the strategy that Kant now pursues.
The core of section III thus consists of a restatement of the analytical
argument of section II connecting the moral law with the general concept of
any rational being with a free will followed by a metaphysical argument that
we human beings really are rational beings with free wills, thus that the
moral law really is the causal law of our conduct. The first stage consists of
the thesis that ‘‘if freedom of the will is presupposed, then morality follows
together with its principle from the mere analysis of its concept’’ (4:447); this
turns on the premise that a heteronomous will is not a free will, so that
nothing is left to be the causal law of a free will but the moral law. Kant’s
next statements that ‘‘Freedom must be presupposed as a quality of the will

of all rational beings’’ (4:447) or that ‘‘Every being that cannot act otherwise
than under the idea of freedom is precisely for this reason actually free in a
practical respect’’ (4:448) have often been read as a self-sufficient argument
for our own freedom from the ‘‘practical point of view’’ based on the
premise that to think of oneself as really acting at all is to think of oneself as
choosing one’s actions on the basis of a purely rational standard rather than
having what are in fact merely apparent actions forced on one by an external
factor like mere inclination.25 But these remarks are actually meant only as
further statements of the analytical connection between freedom and the
moral law in the concept of a rational being, which now must be shown to
apply to us because we really are free and rational beings. This second stage
of Kant’s argument now comes in the form of an appeal to transcendental
idealism. First, Kant argues that ‘‘no subtle reflection’’ is needed in order to
make the distinction between appearances and things in themselves in the
perception of external objects, and then that anyone must draw this
distinction ‘‘even about himself and in accordance with the acquaintance
that the human being has of himself through inner sensation’’ (4:451), which
is a form of perception. Kant then says that once one has made this
distinction between his own appearance and how he really is, ‘‘he may not
presume to cognize how he is in himself’’, which we might reasonably think
means that we cannot know whether there actually is any substantive
difference between how we appear to ourselves and how we really are.
However, the further progress of Kant’s argument belies this assumption.
For what Kant next argues is that since reason is the faculty that
‘‘distinguishes [ourselves] from all other things and even from [ourselves]
insofar as [we are] affected by objects’’ (4:452), reason is the property that
characterizes us as we are in ourselves rather than as we appear to ourselves.
Thus, Kant concludes, we really are rational, not merely able or free to
determine our actions in accordance with a law of reason rather than mere
inclination, but actually necessitated to do so by our real constitution:
As a rational being, hence one belonging to the intelligible world, the

human being can never think of the causality of its own will otherwise
than under the idea of freedom, for independence from the
determining causes of the sensible world (of the sort which reason
must always attribute to itself) is freedom (4:452).
Thus, in the end Kant does not offer any sort of argument from normative
grounds aimed to convince us that we ought to value freedom more than
anything else and adhere to the moral law as the only way to preserve and
promote that value; he thinks he can prove directly that at the noumenal
level that we really are free and rational, and thus are necessarily governed
by the moral law.
460 Paul Guyer
This argument suffers from numerous and grave problems. First, Kant’s
initial inference from the very fact that we are affected in the perception of
external objects to a distinction between the appearances of those objects
and their real character (an argument for transcendental idealism that he
does not use in the Critique of Pure Reason although he had used it in the
inaugural dissertation) seems puzzling. Perhaps what Kant has in mind is a
Humean premise that there can only be a causal relation between two
things the existence of each of which is logically independent from that of
the other; however, from such a premise it follows only that there must be
at least a numerical difference between a cause and its effect, but not that
there must be any significant qualitative difference between cause and

effect (and in plenty of real-world cases, for example when motion in one
object causes a motion in another object, indeed perhaps even a motion in
the second object with the same direction and velocity as the previous
motion of the first object, there is no qualitative difference). So the
difference between our representation of an object and its cause does not
by itself imply that there need be any significant difference between the
kinds of properties represented in the cause and those it really has, a
fortiori that there must be a qualitative difference between the kind of
causality of the phenomenal self and that of the noumenal self. Second,
even if we had some sort of a priori reason to suppose that there must be
some sort of difference in kind between the represented properties of an
object and its real properties, according to Kant’s general accounts of
transcendental idealism we are not supposed to be in a position to make
any positive assertion about the properties of things as they are in
themselves; we are not supposed to confuse the noumenon in a negative
sense with a noumenon in a positive sense (Critique of Pure Reason, B 307-
8). But here Kant seems to do precisely that. Third, he seems to arrive at
his positive characterization of our noumenal selves here by equivocating
on the concept of reason itself: first he seems to say that reason is what
distinguishes us from everything else in the phenomenal world, or even
what distinguishes part of our own selves in the phenomenal world, our
rational part, from another part, namely our sensible and impulsive part,
but then he infers from this that reason is what distinguishes our
noumenal self from our phenomenal self. He ought not to be able to say
anything about our noumenal selves at all, but certainly not that the chief
characteristic of our noumenal self is, after all, something we do find in
our phenomenal self. Finally, apart from these epistemological problems
with Kant’s metaphysical argument, there is a grave moral problem, that
is, an inconsistency with ‘‘common rational cognition of morals’’: Kant’s
conclusion that the moral law is the causal law of the noumenal self
cannot after all explain what it is supposed to explain, namely the
imperatival character of the categorical imperative, because instead of
explaining how there can be a struggle between our inclinations and our
reason, which is what makes the moral law seem like a constraint on us, it
seems to preclude any such struggle, and indeed to make it impossible to
explain, if the will really makes its choices at the noumenal level, how it
could ever choose anything but to act in accordance with the moral law.
In other words, if the moral law is the causal law of the noumenally free
will, it becomes impossible to explain how a free being can ever perform an
act that violates the moral law. This is the famous problem that Karl
Leonhard Reinhold identified in 1792, a century before Henry Sidgwick
restated it in 1888.26 However, Kant did not have to wait for Reinhold’s
objection to know that his argument was deeply flawed. As is widely agreed,
he suppressed it in the Critique of Practical Reason, arguing there that our

obligation under the moral law is a ‘‘fact of reason’’ that cannot itself be
deduced but from which, through the premise ‘‘ought implies can’’, we can
infer that we are free, that is, always able to live up to the moral law (5:30) –
but not that we always do, of course, for ought implies can, not does. But,
strikingly, even in the Groundwork Kant drops the argument we have just
examined almost as soon as he has expounded it. For throughout the
remainder of section III he actually treats freedom and the moral law as an
idea or ideal that we need not ‘‘renounce’’ because we can always think that
we are different than we appear, not determined by inclination as we appear
to be but free to live up to this ideal (Groundwork, 4:458). We might take
him here to be suggesting that the very possibility that transcendental
idealism is true means that no one could prove that the will is always
determined by mere inclination and that this is sufficient to establish that we
are entitled to invoke the idea of our own freedom for moral purposes, just
as he thinks that for all the demonstrable flaws in all proofs of the existence
of God no one could ever disprove the existence of God and thus we are free
to invoke the idea of God for the practical purposes for which Kant holds it
to be necessary.
But if Kant does back off from his metaphysical argument as soon as he
has stated it, as in any case we surely must, that means his strategy for
sidestepping a normative argument that we ought to value freedom whether
in ourselves or others more highly than anything else and therefore ought to
adhere to the moral law as the only means to realize that absolute value has
failed. So where does that leave him, and us? Obviously I cannot argue now
that every attempt to derive our obligation under the moral law
‘‘transcendentally’’ rather than naturalistically from some non-psychologi-
cal assertion about our fundamental ‘‘practical identity’’, to use Christine
Korsgaard’s phrase, is going to be subject to the same defects as the specific
Kantian argument we have just examined. Korsgaard’s own attempt to
derive the moral law from the general practical identity as a valuer that must
underlie our more particular practical identities, for example,27 does not
employ Kant’s phenomenal/noumenal distinction, and so cannot be accused
of the first problems I have alleged against Kant’s own transcendental
462 Paul Guyer
deduction of the categorical imperative, that is, the application of the moral
law to us. Nevertheless, I think that any attempt to make adherence to the
moral law constitutive of our very identity as agents may need to face the
Reinhold-Sidgwick problem of explaining how if that is so we can ever act
contrary to our own identity. So if we should think of a transcendental
argument for the moral law, in analogy with the transcendental deduction of
the categories, as starting from some assertion about the identity we
necessarily have, I remain doubtful about the prospects for any such
transcendental argument. Rather, I believe that any plausible account of the
moral law will have to represent it as an ideal that we are capable of living
up to but not as a causal law that we necessarily live up to. Whether

accomplishing even this will require transcendental idealism or some other
alternative to determinism will depend upon just what sense of capability or
freedom one thinks is morally required for the imputation of responsibility,
but in any case it will require some account of why the achievement of
autonomy should be an ideal for us in the first place. And for the latter,
Kant at least suggests only two alternatives: we could follow the suggestion
of the Critique of Practical Reason, and treat our consciousness of our
obligation under the moral law as an a priori ‘‘fact of reason’’ that permits
of no deduction at all, or we could return to the strategy of Kant’s pre-
Groundwork texts and search for a naturalistic account of our valuation of
freedom, an account which appeals to empirically ascertained facts about
our deepest preferences but does not treat the moral law as a causal law of
our natural identity. Since the first of these strategies seems to rely on a
good deal of foot-stamping or, in historical terms, on an appeal to innate
ideas, I would place my own bets on the second. The most difficult challenge
to making the second approach work, I think, will be that we must either
show that fully enjoying one’s own freedom of choice and action really does
require full respect for the freedom of all others or show that we do take as
much satisfaction in the freedom of others as we do in our own (both of
these strategies were attempted by Cumberland and Shaftesbury, although
they took happiness rather than freedom as our fundamental value). But
taking up that challenge would be a task for another day, or another career:
here I hope to have shown only that while Kant has at least suggested a
naturalistic strategy for explaining the normative force of the moral law for
creatures like us, his attempt to provide a transcendental deduction of the
moral law is a failure and should at least give pause to those who would
follow in his transcendental footsteps.28
Notes
1. Richard Cumberland (1672) De Legibus Naturae; the 1727 English translation has
recently been republished as A Treatise of the Laws of Nature, edited by Jon Parkin
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005).
2. Kant would have been familiar with Hume’s ethics as presented in An Enquiry
Concerning the Principles of Morals, included in J.G. Sulzer’s edition of Hume’s
Vermischte Schriften in 1754–5; for a modern edition, see that edited by Tom L.
Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
3. Kant, Immanuel (2005) Notes and Fragments. Edited by Paul Guyer, translated by
Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press) p. 6, note to Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and
Sublime, p. 20 (2:215–16).
4. Kant, Notes and Fragments, p. 7, note to Observations, p. 22 (2:216–17).
5. Kant, Notes and Fragments, p. 10, note to Observations, p. 42 (2:225–6).
6. Kant, Notes and Fragments, pp. 10–11, note to Observations, p. 50 (2:229).
7. Kant, Notes and Fragments, p. 11, note to Observations, p. 52 (2:230).

12. Kant, Notes and Fragments, p. 441, Reflection 6856 (1776–78? 1780–89?) (19:181).
13. Kant, Notes and Fragments, pp. 443–4, Reflection 6864 (1776–78) (19:184–5).
14. Kant, Vorlesungen zur Anthropologie, ‘‘Friedländer,’’ 25:559.
15. Ibid., 25:560.
16. Kant, Reflection 6870, 19:187.
17. These passages are virtually identical in the Kaehler transcription of Kant’s lectures
from 1777, published as Immanuel Kant (2004) Vorlesungen zur Moralphilosophie, edited
by Werner Stark (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter & Co.), pp. 177–80, and the
Collins transcription, dated to the winter semester of 1784–85, and translated in
Immanuel Kant (1997) Lectures on Ethics, edited by Peter Heath and J.B. Schneewind
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 125–6 (27:344–6). It is quite possible that
Collins’s notes were copied from an earlier set of notes rather than being taken down in
class, but presumably any discrepancy between what he might have copied from an
earlier text and what he was currently hearing could not have been too great if he
remained satisfied with the earlier copy that he made or purchased.
18. Kaehler lectures, p. 174; Collins lectures, p. 124 (27:343).
19. Kant, Naturrecht Feyerabend, 27:1321.
20. Ibid., 27:1319.
21. My claim here thus differs from what I have suggested in some earlier writing on the
Groundwork, namely that its Section III appeals to transcendental idealism primarily in
order to show that we are always free to act as Sections I and II have already shown we
always should attempt to act; see for example P. Guyer (1998) ‘‘Self-Understanding and
Philosophy: The Strategy of Kant’s Groundwork’’ in: Marcelo Stamm (Ed.) Philosophie
in synthetischer Absicht, pp. 271–98 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta) and my introduction to
P. Guyer (Ed.) (1998) Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Critical Essays
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield) especially pp. xxxix–xliii. Kant clearly is attempting in
Section III to prove that we are always free to act in accordance with the categorical
imperative, but first he attempts to prove that we are in fact obligated to act in
accordance with the categorical imperative by means of the problematic argument we
will now examine.
22. I have argued for this approach in more detail in P. Guyer (2001) ‘‘Space, Time, and the
Categories: The Project of the Transcendental Deduction’’ in: Ralph Schumacher and
Oliver R. Scholz (Eds.) Idealismus als Theorie der Repräsentation?, pp. 313–38
(Paderborn: Mentis).
23. I have classified all of his strategies for proving this thesis in P. Guyer (1987) Kant and
the Claims of Knowledge, Part II, pp. 73–154 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
464 Paul Guyer
24. Kant Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue, Introduction, Section VIII, 6:392;
Gregor, p. 522.
25. Thomas E. Hill, Jr. has been a forceful advocate of this interpretation; see for example
Thomas E. Hill, Jr. and Arnulf Zweig (Eds) (2002) Editors’ Introduction to Kant,
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press) p. 97. For
another example of this interpretation of Kant, see Bernard Reginster (2006) The
Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press) pp. 64–6.
26. ‘‘From the confusion of the to be sure self-active but nothing less than free action of
practical reason – which gives nothing but the law – with the action of the will –which
acts as a pure will only insofar as it freely grasps this law – nothing less than the
impossibility of freedom for all immoral actions must follow. As soon as it is assumed
that the freedom of the pure will consists merely in the self-activity of practical reason,
then one must also concede that the impure will, which is not effected through practical
reason, is by no means free’’; Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1792) Briefe über die Kantische
Philosophie, Band 2 (Leipzig) Brief 8; translated from Rüdiger Bittner and Konrad
Cramer (Eds.) (1975) Materialen zu Kants ‘Kritik der praktischen Vernunft’ (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag) p. 255. For further discussion of Reinhold’s objection, see
Henry E. Allison (1990) Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press) pp. 133–5. See also Henry Sidgwick ‘‘The Kantian conception of free will’’ Mind
13 (1888) reprinted in his Methods of Ethics, seventh edition (London: Macmillan, 1907)
pp. 511–16; quotation from p. 515.
27. See Christine M. Korsgaard (1996) The Sources of Normativity. Edited by Onora O’Neill
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) lecture 4.
28. An earlier version of this paper was presented at Brown University, and I thank my
audience there, especially David Estlund, Chris Hill, Charles Larmore, Bernard
Reginster, and Michael Rohlf, for a vigorous discussion that I hope has led to some
clarification of my argument. The present version of the paper was presented at a
workshop held as part of the Transcendental Philosophy and Naturalism project, funded
by the Arts and Humanities Council of Great Britain. In addition to Henry Allison and
Sebastian Rödl, whose comments follow, I also thank Steve Darwall and Robert Pippin
for their oral comments on that occasion.

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Naturalistic and Transcendental

University of Pennsylvania, USA

(Received 19 June 2007)

transcendental idealism provided by the first Critique, but attempts to

that is valid for rational beings in general is proved to be binding upon

II. Kant’s original naturalistic ethics

statements go they are reminiscent of Epicureanism as well as of Stoicism),

One could promote one’s welfare by allowing one’s desires to expand

Kant suggests that there is some sort of contradiction in domination –

enjoy unhindered activity, or that maximizing our possibility for unhindered

1. The principium of moral judgment (the principium of the

in order to coordinate and thereby maximize the freedom of our activity,

The feeling of the promotion of life is gratification or pleasure. Life is

Similar passages also turn up in Kant’s notes on moral philosophy: ‘‘Feeling

to maximize his own power (Hobbes) or his own enjoyment of particular

unconditional and absolute value of freedom as the basis of his mature

self-conflict within freedom that is inconsistent with the value of freedom

III. The transcendental deduction of the moral law

categorical imperative, is the only means by which we can realize such

have subject-predicate form, we must be able to think of the objects

so called, aims to show that we must conceive of all of our experiences as

necessitated by their spatio-temporal structure requires the use of all of the

example, in what may be the central paragraph in Groundwork II he refers to

conformity with the requirement of the universalizability of maxims (4:402)

Kant claims that the further formulations of the categorical imperative,

proposes to reach the synthetic a priori conclusion that these formulations of

next statements that ‘‘Freedom must be presupposed as a quality of the will

As a rational being, hence one belonging to the intelligible world, the

there must be any significant qualitative difference between cause and

he suppressed it in the Critique of Practical Reason, arguing there that our

up to but not as a causal law that we necessarily live up to. Whether

8. Kant, Notes and Fragments, p. 12, note to Observations, p. 52 (2:230).

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