Abstract

This work systematically explicates and defends four key claims in Kant's moral philosophy: The human will is some form of practical reason. The supreme criterion for determining the morality of our choices is provided by an a priori moral law. We find this law to be a source of felt value; it commands unqualified respect. We must suppose the human will is free. ;Traditionally, Kant has been read as holding that these claims imply that the responsible moral agent is a noumenon whose will is a pure practical reason structured completely a priori by the moral law. I show that this position must be rejected on philosophical grounds because it implies that the agent is not free, has an impotent and vacuous will, and is neither obligated nor capable of acting out of a sense of respect for the moral law. ;I argue an alternative reading of Kant is textually sound and philosophically superior. This alternative view, which is explicated and defended in detail, holds that: The human will is empirical practical reason. The moral law is an a priori structure which is always applied a posteriori. It is not constitutive but regulative. The feeling of respect is an intuition of the formal pattern of the subjective time order which results insofar as the a priori structure of empirical practical reason directs or commands the movement of our attention. The responsible moral agent is neither a phenomenal object or a noumenal object but rather a subject, a being of a third and distinct ontological kind. ;In working out such an interpretation, I also reconstruct Kant's account of the relations between the faculties of imagination, understanding, reason, and will, holding them to be simply alternative employments of a single, underlying power of synthesis. I also recharacterize the fundamental project of Kant's critical enterprise in order to locate his moral philosophy within it, arguing that his central concern is with how judgment is possible.