J Value Inquiry

DOI 10.1007/s10790-014-9448-7

Moral Objectivity: A Kantian Illusion?

Carla Bagnoli

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Some moral claims strike us as objective. It is often argued that this shows morality to
be objective. Moral experience – broadly construed – is invoked as the strongest
argument for moral realism, the thesis that there are moral facts or properties.1 Realists,
however, cannot appropriate the argument from moral experience. In fact, construc-
tivists argue that to validate the ways we experience the objectivity of moral claims,
realism must be rejected.2 There is a general agreement that ethical theory bears the
burden of proof of explaining the objective-seeming features of our moral experience.3
By contrast, Bernard Williams argues that all such attempts to accommodate
moral experience fail because there is a systematic mismatch between the
objectivist requirements of ethical theory and the agent’s subjective experience of
moral objectivity. Williams’ critique is illuminating in that it points to the relation
between the objective features of moral claims and the subjective experience of
moral agents. Williams complains that the preoccupation with objectivity caused

1
See e.g. Jonathan Dancy, ‘‘Two conceptions of Moral Realism,’’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 60 (1986): 167–187.
2
Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
3
While disputing objectivity, antirealists commit themselves to account for the objectivist pretensions of
moral claims. Anti-realists agree with the traditional view that moral experience supports realism, John L.
Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Penguin, 1977), pp. 30–35, 50–63; Allan Gibbard,
Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), chapters. pp. 8–13; Michael Smith, ‘‘Objectivity
and moral realism: On the significance of the phenomenology of Moral Experience,’’ in Reality,
Representation, and Projection, eds. John Haldane and Crispin Wright (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993), pp. 235–255; Terry Horgans and Mark Timmons, ‘‘What Can Moral Phenomenology Tell
Us About Moral Objectivity?’’ Social Philosophy and Policy 25 (2008): 267–300.

C. Bagnoli (&)
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Largo Sant’Eufemia 19, Modena 41121, Italy
e-mail: carla.bagnoli@unimore.it; carla.bagnoli@gmail.com
URL: http://unimore.academia.edu/CarlaBagnoli

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ethical theorists to neglect the study of the moral life.4 I agree with Williams that
this neglect undermines ethical theory, but I shall argue that Kantian constructivism
provides the resources to adequately address the problem.
The specific variety of constructivism I defend takes moral claims to be practical
cognitions, and it is concerned with their rational validity as well as with their
bindingness.5 This cognitivist form of constructivism starts with Kant’s analysis of
respect as a promising starting point for a phenomenological defense of objectivity.
Kant takes the moral feeling of respect to show that we are responsive to the
categorical demands of morality. Unlike the realist, Kant does not try to
demonstrate an ontological relation between how things appear to us and how
they stand independently of us. Rather, his argument establishes that our experience
of morality is congruent with the objectivist aspirations of morality. My contention
is that constructivism best accounts for this congruence by taking the feeling of
respect as the subjective condition of the reality of practical reason. Surprisingly,
this results in a far more ambitious claim than the realist can defend. While the
realist argument is pro tanto, Kantian constructivism purports to provide a
conclusive argument for the objectivity of practical reason. Kantian constructivism
survives Williams’ critique and presents some important advantages over traditional
accounts of the role of moral experience in foundational arguments.

1 The Appeal to Moral Experience

Some moral claims strike us as authoritative beyond dispute.6 The fact that we
experience such claims as authoritative seems to count toward their objectivity. For

4
Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985), p. 93, chapter 6.
5
Constructivism is cognitivist and irrealist in that it holds that moral judgments carry genuine moral
cognitions and thus can be either true or false, but they are not made true by mind-independent facts.
Rather, the truth of moral judgments consists in their being entailed from the standpoint of pure practical
reason. This characterization is helpful in so far as it captures both Kant’s rejection of the realist claim
that moral judgments are made true by some facts independent of the standpoint of pure practical reason,
and his defense of objective practical knowledge, see Carla Bagnoli, ‘‘Constructivism in Meta-ethics’’,
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2011 Archive, pp. 1–51. As an interpretation of Kant, this is
less problematic than other constructivist interpretations because it does not qualify as a form of anti-
realism, cf. Robert Stern, Understanding Moral Obligation, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012), pp. 7–40. For a large extent, it is in agreement with Stephen Engstrom who places Kant in the
tradition of practical cognitivism, see Engstrom, The Form of Practical Knowledge, (Cambridge Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2009), Stephen Engstrom, ‘‘Constructivism and practical knowledge’’, in
Constructivism in Ethics, ed. C. Bagnoli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), see also Carla
Bagnoli, ‘‘Morality as Cognition’’, Analytic Philosophy, Vol. 53 No. 1 March 2012, pp. 60–69; Carla
Bagnoli, ‘‘Constructivism about Practical Knowledge’’, in Constructivism in Ethics, ed. C. Bagnoli
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 153–182.
6
I focus on the objectivity of moral demands or obligations because this is the case where the traditional
realist and rationalist arguments from moral phenomenology seem to converge. There is a disagreement
about the features of the moral experience to be listed as ‘‘objective-seeming features’’, cf. David Brink,
Moral Realism and the Foundation of Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 25–29; David
McNaughton, Moral Vision (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 19, 48, 56; Mark Timmons, Morality
without Foundations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 74–106.

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the skeptic appearances are illusory.7 If there is a genuine phenomenon to be

explained, that is a ‘‘merely subjective’’ phenomenon, which does not prove the
objectivity of moral claims. However, skeptics accept that the burden of proof is on
them, and thus are in search of an explanation of the authority of moral claims as
well as objectivists. Objectivists treat the authority associated with moral claims as a
phenomenon that is constitutive of morality. They hold that the phenomenon of
subjective authority shows something important about the objectivity of moral
claims; but what, exactly?
For the realist, moral claims strike us as objective in the same way ordinary objects
and properties do. We see that rape is wrong like we see that the cliff is dangerous.8
The surface grammar of moral discourse supports this analogy: moral judgments are
often in the declarative mode, and thus similar to statements of fact. Moreover, our
moral beliefs seem to contain references to moral properties, facts, or knowledge.
Finally, in practical deliberation as much as in theoretical deliberation, we assume that
there are correct answers to questions about what to do; we acknowledge past mistakes
and admit the possibility of error.9 By contrast, the rationalist holds that the possibility
of error and the assumption of correctness do not support realism. Moral claims bind us
categorically because there is a correct way to reason about them.
The contrast between the realist and the rationalist models of objectivity is
generally drawn in terms of their respective ontological commitments.10 The realist
defends ‘‘ontological objectivity,’’ that is, the view that moral claims are objective
because there are facts of the matter that they represent. The rationalist defends the
view that moral claims are objective because they result from correct reasoning. The
rationalist argument for objectivity seems both less ambitious and problematic than
the realist argument insofar as the former is said to lack the substantive ontological
commitments of the latter. But this characterization fails to capture the distinctive
strategies and ambitions of the two theories. Rationalism does not necessarily
oppose realism at the level of ontological commitments. In fact, it can be defended
in combination with the realist ontological claim that there are moral facts that
reason discovers or grasps. The interesting contrast between two forms of
rationalism emerges when we pay attention to the way reason is supposed to relate
to moral reality. On a realist version of rationalism, which we shall call
‘‘recognitionalism,’’ reason perceives or discovers truths in the world.11 On the
7
I will be concerned here with skepticism as a meta-ethical rather than normative position, following
Mackie’s use the term in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.
8
McNaughton, Moral Vision, 57. For a critique of this model see Author, Article 3.
9
See David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundation of Ethics, pp. 25–29.
10
See Terry Horgans & Mark Timmons, ‘‘What Can Moral Phenomenology Tell Us About Moral
Objectivity?’’; Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, pp. 32 ff.
11
In drawing this contrast between recognitional and constructivist theories, I follow Berys Gaut, ‘‘The
Structure of Practical Reason,’’ in Ethics and Practical Reason, eds. Garret Cullity and Berys Gaut
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 161–187. I defend constructivism in a very specific sense, as an account
of the authority or obligatoriness of moral obligations. See Carla Bagnoli ‘‘Constructivism in Meta-
ethics’’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2011 Archive, pp. 1–51; ‘‘Morality as Cognition’’,
Analytic Philosophy, Vol. 53 No. 1 March 2012, pp. 60–69; Carla Bagnoli, ‘‘Constructivism about
Practical Knowledge,’’ in Constructivism in Ethics, ed. C. Bagnoli (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), pp. 153–182.

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constructivist version of rationalism, moral truths are requirements of practical

reason, and determined by practical reasoning rather than independently of it. Both
versions of rationalism oppose the skeptical claim that there are no moral truths, but
they hold different conceptions of how they relate to practical subjects. On the
realist conception, practical subjects recognize, apprehends, or respond to what is
already there, prior to and independently of their rational activity. On the
constructivist conception, instead, practical subjects importantly contribute to the
reality and authority of moral truths by reasoning. To clearly account for this
contribution is the main purpose of this paper.
Williams is right that this way of approaching the subjective experience of
morality is disappointing. The appeal to our subjective experience of the apparent
objectivity of moral claims does not directly contribute to building a definitive case
for the realist or the anti-realist.12 To tip the balance between these options, one is
required to enter the meta-ethical disputes and admit of ‘‘a mysterious ability to spot
the immutable fitness of things,’’13 or instead treat moral properties as redundant
rather than necessary, queer rather than ordinary, analogous to primary rather than
secondary qualities, and inert rather than motivating. Independently of these meta-
ethical preferences, the appeal to moral experience has no decisive weight in the
debate about moral objectivity. That is, moral experience does not constitute a
distinctive and independent argument, since its significance depends on factors that
are independent of moral experience, and concern theoretical, semantic, metaphys-
ical, and epistemological considerations about moral discourse. By contrast, Kantian
constructivism takes the subjective experience of practical subjects as central in
building its case for objectivity. Indeed, it starts precisely with characterizing this
experience.

2 The Argument of Congruence

A driving concern of Kantian ethics is that its deliverances should make sense to the
agent. This concern is reflected in the way Kantians conceive of ethical theorizing.
The task of ethical theory is to provide a philosophical understanding of common
moral cognitions that is self-transparent, and such that it justifies the demands of
morality as appropriate for the sort of agents we happen to be. To pursue this
complex task, the place to start is with our common experience of moral claims. A
philosophical explanation of morality should be congruent with the experience that
the agent has of moral claims. Since moral claims are experienced as authoritative,
an adequate philosophical account of moral cognitions should not undermine their
authority. Kantian constructivism is the view that the authority of moral claims

12
Cp. Don Loeb, ‘‘The Argument from Moral Experience,’’ Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10
(2007): 469–484, p. 483. In contrast, to Loeb, my diagnosis is that this impasse depends on the failure of
this tradition of meta-ethics to properly address the agent’s moral experience, see Carla Bagnoli, ‘‘The
Exploration of Moral Life’’, in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, ed. J. Broackes (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), pp. 193–221.
13
Simon Blackburn, ‘‘Error and the Phenomenology of Value’’, in Morality and Objectivity, ed. Ted
Honderich (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 186.

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depends on the fact that we are by constitution responsive to the requirements of

practical reason. Its basic claim is that there is an intrinsic relation between the
subjective and objective aspects of practical reason. The objective aspect of
practical reason is its requirement of rational validity, and it is typically expressed in
reasoning. Its subjective aspect is authority and it is exercised via a specific sort of
moral sensibility. To be endowed with practical reason is to be capable of reasoning
and responsive to rational requirements.
One important task of the Critique of Practical Reason is to offer an account of
our responsiveness to reason. To show that there are objective standards of practical
reason requires us to show that such standards can guide all practical subjects. If
moral objectivity is not an illusion, it must be possible for reason to have a synthetic
use. That is, the moral law must be applicable to embodied minds, sensitive to
natural incentives. The philosophical investigation of the scope and workings of
practical reason is both metaphysical and psychological, in that it aims at furthering
our understanding of ourselves as ‘‘animals endowed with reason’’.
In contrast to the realist’s appeal to moral experience, Kant does not seek to find
out whether moral experience carries ontological purport. In fact, Kant firmly
opposes using introspection as a source of insight into the workings of reason. This
is not only because he believes that we are opaque to ourselves, and thus finds self-
examination and introspection completely unreliable as epistemological methods.14
More importantly, I believe, the rejection of introspection as a philosophical method
reveals something crucial about Kant’s distinctive view of the standards of
objectivity. We can regard moral obligations as objective only if they are the
deliverances of practical reason; and furthermore, we can regard practical reason as
real only if it obliges us.15
I shall argue that Kant invokes our common experience of morality to point out
that it is congruent with the objectivist demands of ethical theory, and that this
congruence is an integral part of his conception of objectivity. On this reading, Kant
appears to agree with Williams that ethical theory fails to prove the objectivity of
pure reason if it ignores the experience of practical subjects.16 At crucial steps in his
argument, Kant draws from examples of moral life, which are supposed to indicate
that we take ourselves to be responsive to the moral demands, even when such
demands undermine our interests. The point of these examples is to show that we do
feel the bonds and constraints of morality, and thus we are susceptible to the
requirements of practical reason. Listening to the sad story of Ann Boleyn awakens
14
‘‘It is absolutely impossible by means of experience to make out with complete certainty a single case
in which the maxim of an action otherwise in conformity with duty rested simply on moral grounds and
on the representation of one’s duty. It is indeed sometimes the case that with the keenest self-examination
we find nothing besides the moral ground (…); but from this it cannot be inferred with certainty that no
covert impulse of self-love, under the mere pretense of that idea, was not actually the real determining
cause’’, Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, ed. A. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4: 407/61. The rejection of introspection is in line with
Kant’s repudiation of the Cartesian and rationalist methods of inquiry, see Onora O’Neill, Constructions
of Reason, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 3–28, especially pp. 6–7.
15
Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 4: 389.
16
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, ed. A. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), vol. 5, p. 114.

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our awareness of morality and makes us feel our own dignity.17 Imaginary examples
play the same role:
Suppose someone asserts of his lustful inclination that, when the desired object
and the opportunity are present, it is quite irresistible to him; ask him whether, if a
gallows were erected in front of the house where he finds this opportunity, and he
would be hanged on it immediately after gratifying his lust, he would not then
control his inclination. One need not conjecture very long what he would reply.
But ask him whether, if his prince demanded, on pain of the same immediate
execution, that he give false testimony against an honorable man whom the
prince would like to destroy under a plausible pretext, he would not consider
possible to overcome his love of life, however great it may be. He would perhaps
not venture to assert whether he would do it or not, but he must admit without
hesitation that it would be possible for him.18
These thought experiments are supposed to establish that we are cognitively aware
of the practical law, and that this fact is cognitively prior to our consciousness of our
freedom.19 The first case shows that we conceive of our actions, even those driven
by natural inclinations, as willed rather than compelled. The mere idea of a sanction
that applies in the future works as a deterrent and is sufficient to make the agent
reconsider whether to act on lust. The second case shows how moral obligation
operates in us: it forces itself upon us and obligates us directly. Its effect on our
mind is so powerful that it is possible to regard it as a motive even when it goes
against our most natural and deeply rooted love for life. This is not to establish that
reason always provides the strongest motive, but that it is authoritative. The claim is
meant to be epistemological: upon consideration of these cases, the agent ‘‘judges,
therefore, that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it and
cognizes freedom within him, which, without the moral law, would have remained
unknown to him.’’20 Moral experience provides us with moral knowledge, but this is
not knowledge of anything external to us. It is knowledge of the mechanism itself of
moral consciousness.
Kant obscurely talks of this subjective awareness of the moral law as ‘‘the fact of
reason’’ (Factum der Vernunft). Our moral consciousness does not depend on
anything prior to it and cannot be grounded on any empirical facts. In the light of
previous considerations, it is quite appropriate to characterize the argument from the
fact of reason as a phenomenological argument insofar as it importantly refers to our
subjective moral consciousness as a basis for the objectivity of moral claims.21
17
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 152, 156.
18
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 30. Similar examples are offered in v 5: 155–157.
19
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 6, 30–31, 42–47, 55, 71–80, 91, 105; see also 30, 151, 155–158.
Kant considers from ‘‘whence the cognitive awareness of the unconditionally practical status start,
whether from freedom or from the practical law’’, Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 29.
20
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 30; see also 5: 155–157.
21
In his Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Martin Heidegger judges Kant’s account of respect as ‘‘the
most brilliant phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon of morality’’, Heidegger, (1927), 136; cf.
also, Edmund Husserl, ‘‘Kant and the Idea of Transcendental Philosophy’’, trans. Southwestern Journal of
Philosophy, 5 (1974): 14.

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However, there is a significant scholarly disagreement about its role in Kant’s

theory. Some interpreters take Kant to be advancing a realist argument, where the
fact of reason is a basic and ‘‘brute’’ fact that plays a foundational role.22 To avoid
this conclusion, constructivists have often chosen to downplay the role of the fact of
reason in Kant’s argument for the justification of ethical objectivity.23
In contrast to both these interpretations, I hold that the fact of reason plays a
significant role in the overall argument for the objectivity of morality, and that it
directly supports constructivism. The argument of the fact of reason responds to a
specific threat against the objectivity of morality: the claim that reason is inert and
cannot bind us with categorical authority.24 The fact of reason indicates that we are
aware of the activity of practical reason in us. This is an expression of the productive
activity of reason, rather than an empirical or metaphysically independent fact.
Kant’s argument purports to establish the reality of practical reason by establishing
its subjective authority, having argued separately for the standards of rational validity.
The purpose of the argument of the fact of reason is not to establish that there are
objective standards of rational validity, but that such standards have a firm grip on us.
The content of moral claims are valid for all rational beings insofar as they are rational;
but for animals endowed with reason, the further question arises as to how valid moral
claims are rationally binding. In order to prove that moral claims are objective, Kant
needs to prove that agents with interests and desires are capable of being bound by
claims that are independent of such inclinations and interests. His argument is that
reason binds us under the guise of respect or reverence for the law. Respect is thus said
to be the ‘‘subjective aspect of the objectivity of practical reason’’: it is the element that
explains how moral obligations are rationally binding for rational agents with
inclinations and desires. Key to the success of this argument is the notion of moral
experience. Unlike any other sort of experience, moral experience proves by itself the
reality of practical reason.25 The argument shows that the very idea that something is
right makes us aware of the fact that this idea is binding for us. In the example of false
testimony, despite his natural desire for life, the agent is certain of his duty. Through
this awareness he is also certain of his autonomy.26 This awareness does not guarantee
that he will always act on the basis of moral demands, but it ensures that he can.

22
See, for instance, Karl Ameriks, Interpreting Kant’s Critiques (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), pp. 263–282; cf. Pauline Kleingeld, ‘‘Moral Consciousness and the ‘fact of reason’’’, in Kant’s
Critique of Practical Reason. A Critical Guide, ed. Andrews Reath (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), pp. 55–72. Charles Larmore is right that constructivists have culpably disregarded the fact of
reason, The Autonomy of Morality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 83–84. This paper
is partly an attempt to redress this mistake.
23
See, for instance, Onora O’Neill, ‘‘Autonomy and the Fact of Reason in the Kritik der praktischen
Vernunft, pp. 30–41,’’ in Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, ed. O. Höffe (Berlin: Akademie
Verlag 2002), pp. 81–97. See also P. Łuków, ‘‘The Fact of Reason: Kant’s Passage to Ordinary Moral
Knowledge,’’ Kant Studien 84 (1993): 204–221.
24
Rawls ‘‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory’’, in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman
(Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 303–358, 340; Rawls, ‘‘Themes in Kant’s Moral
Philosophy, in Collected Papers, pp. 497–528, 523–524.
25
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 42.
26
Cf. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:155f

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On this reading, the argument of the fact of reason points to a congruence

between the objectivist aspirations of morality and our subjective awareness of
them. Realists object that the mere congruence between the demands of a theory and
the subjective conception of these demands is too weak to prove anything like the
reality of practical reason. But for the constructivist congruence is the effect of a
stronger thesis that the fact of reason is establishing. The constructivist argument
instructs us to consider the subjective aspect of practical reason as a constitutive
aspect of its reality. This amounts to uncovering its constitutive relation to moral
sensibility, in the guise of respect.
In contrast to the realist argument, Kant’s phenomenological considerations
about respect are not the starting point for proving a fix moral ontology. The feeling
of respect represents the condition of possibility of the reality of practical reason.
This difference results in a far more ambitious claim than the realist can defend.
While the realist argument from phenomenological introspection is pro tanto, Kant
promises a distinctive and conclusive argument for the objectivity of practical
reason. The question is whether he delivers what he promises, and I hope to begin to
settle the matter by considering what he actually promises.

3 Williams’ Objection of Misrepresentation

Read as a phenomenological argument for the objectivity of practical reason, Kant’s

argument of congruence faces an important objection put forward by Bernard
Williams. Williams argues that both the realist and the Kantian argument from
moral experience fail because there is a systematic mismatch between the
objectivist requirements of ethical theory and our subjective experience of moral
objectivity:
Suppose that the ethical life could be objectively grounded in one of these
ways. One could come to know that it was so grounded by developing or
learning philosophical arguments which showed that ethical life satisfied the
appropriate condition, of being related in the right way to practical reason or to
wellbeing. But ethical life itself could continue to involve various experiences
and judgments of the kind that present themselves as ‘objective’ – and what
they present is not the objectivity that, on these theories, they would genuinely
possess. They are not experienced as satisfying any such condition.27
Our experience does not concur with any theoretical reconstruction of ethical
objectivity. But the misrepresentation occurs in both directions. The subjective
experience fails to be up to the standards of objectivity that ethical theories
propound. Conversely, such theories inevitably misrepresent the agent’s experience
of the objectivity of moral claims. We shall call this the objection of misrepre-
sentation. The most important merit of Williams’ critique is that it is directed to the
relation between the alleged rational validity and subjective authority of moral
claims. The thrust of the argument is that ethical theory inevitably misunderstands

27
Williams, ‘‘Ethics and the Fabric of the World’’, pp. 172–182, 175.

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the nature of our need for objectivity because it misconstrues such a need in terms of
a search for objective facts. At first sight, this argument does not seem to affect
Kant’s conception of objectivity, but Williams holds that realist and Kantians
commit a similar mistake.
Williams’ distrust of Kantian ethical theory is interestingly intertwined with his
critique of the model of objectivity that he associates with the search for truth in
science. This model requires the agent to step outside herself and, from that
external point of view, evaluate her dispositions, projects, and desires in toto.
Likewise, the Kantian argument for objectivity requires that we criticize our reasons
from ‘‘the standpoint of impartiality’’, as if they were external to us.28 Kant’s
mistake is to take the standards of objectivity that are appropriate in factual or
theoretical deliberation to hold for practical reflection, as well. Williams objects that
Kant’s argument fails to establish that the agent thus acquires moral motives for
action, or that morality is rationally binding, given that we have particular desires
and personal projects. According to Williams, this failure is fatal to the Kantian
conception of morality as sovereign. To prove the sovereignty of morality Kant
would need to show that the agent acquires an interest in morality and changes his
reasons for action as a result of deliberation. Instead, there is no expectation of
change in the agent’s reasons for action in factual deliberation, where the agent is
intent upon determining the facts of the matter. The impersonal strategy of
detachment, which Williams sees at work in Kant’s argument, cancels this essential
difference between practical and factual deliberation. It makes the change in our
reasons unintelligible, and thus defeats the purpose of practical deliberation. For
Williams, the commitment to objectivity exposes Kant to a problem analogous to
what Richard Rorty names ‘‘the threat of withdrawal on the part of the world’’ that
we are trying to know.29 I shall argue that this charge is based on a misreading of
Kant’s argument.

4 Respect and the Kantian illusion of objectivity

Williams gives Kant credit for capturing an important aspect of morality, namely,
its categorical authority. On Kant’s view, moral claims are authoritative in such a
manner that they are neither external imposition; nor are they inventions of sorts.30
The demands of practical reason are felt as constraints, and as such are burdensome.
This burdensome aspect is particularly vivid in the phenomenology of deliberation,

28
The perspective of reflection is the same in practical as in theoretical deliberation, and requires the
agent ‘‘to stand back from his desires and interests, and see them from a standpoint that is not that of his
desires and interests. (…) That is the standpoint of impartiality’’, Williams, Ethics and the Limits of
Philosophy, pp. 65–66.
29
Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, pp. 66–67. Cf. Richard Rorty, ‘‘Solidarity or
objectivity?’’ Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 21–34.
30
‘‘The recognition of practical necessity must involve an understanding at once of one’s own powers
and incapacities, and of what the world permits, and the recognition of a limit which is neither simply
external to the self, nor yet a product of the will, is what can lend a special authority or dignity to such
decisions’’, Williams, Moral Luck, pp. 130–131.

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especially when reasoning prohibits the immediate satisfaction of the agent’s desires
or recommends their postponement. There is, however, another important aspect of
the experience of acting on the basis of reasons, which is obviously less apparent
when reasoning directs us against our arrogance or curbs the pretenses of our natural
self-love. This other aspect is that the demands of reason are not perceived as simply
external to us. To account for this experience, Kant argues that moral obligations are
authoritative insofar as they are autonomous or self-legislated. It is the subjective
appreciation of this feature that lends special authority to our choice. For Kant, the
fact that moral claims are authoritative counts decisively toward their objectivity.
Respect represents the subjective aspect of this claim; that is, it is the subjective
experience of autonomy. In other words, the feeling of respect is the ‘‘phenom-
enological signature’’ of autonomous actions – that is, actions guided by practical
reason.31
Given the variety of moral experiences, Kant’s way of grouping moral
phenomena as marked by respect may seem utterly arbitrary, and it certainly
requires an argument.32 Aside from these issues about the scope of application of his
argument, however, the worry is that the subjective authority of moral claims seems
to have very little to do with their objectivity. According to Williams, Kant
acknowledges the discrepancy between the objectivist requirements of his theory
and the phenomenology of moral life, and his account of respect is a way of
recognizing this gap:
Kant saw the point himself. In acknowledging the categorical demands of
obligation or recognizing a moral requirement (the kind of thing expressed in
saying, for moral reasons, ‘I must’), one does not experience it as an
application of the demands of practical reason, but as something more
immediate than that, something presented to one by the situation. That is one
reason why Kant identified an empirical psychological surrogate of one’s
rational relations to morality, in the emotional phenomenon of the sense of
reverence for the Law. That feeling does, on Kant’s theory, represent

31
Williams thinks that what Kant takes to be distinctive of morality is something that pertains to a larger
phenomenon – that of ‘‘practical necessity’’; see Williams, ‘‘Practical Necessity’’, in Moral Luck,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). For Kant, morality is the condition of possibility of all
other evaluative activities. This claim confirms Williams’ diagnosis that for Kant, morality occupies a
special position. However, this is not because morality represents a definite domain of special objects, or
because it demands deliberative priority, as Williams supposes. It is, rather, because moral activity is the
‘‘most complete’’ form of rational activity. Moral agency exhibits a distinctive form of practical necessity
only in the very specific sense that it represents the most complete realization of the ideal of practical
rationality, which is nevertheless present in all sorts of choice. To take morality as the transcendental
ground of all valuing indicates that there is no ontological dichotomy between moral and non-moral
activities. Interestingly, these remarks bring Kant closer to Williams’ concerns. Kant would indeed
concur with Williams that acts falling under the category of practical necessity are ‘‘expressive of
character’’, and thus qualify as one’s own in ‘‘the most substantial way’’, Williams, ‘‘Practical Necessity’’,
p. 130. More importantly, Kant would also agree that such ‘‘conclusions of practical necessity […] are
indeed the paradigm of what one takes responsibility for’’, Williams, ‘‘Practical Necessity’’, p. 130.
32
To be sure, an adequate moral phenomenology should account for the varieties of moral experiences.
The Kantian approach does not deny the relevance of cross-cultural and intra-cultural differences, but it
points at some shared structural features of morality.

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objectivity, but it also misrepresents it, by making it seem something different

from what it is.33
Williams’ diagnosis of misrepresentation rests on a particular reading of respect as
an emotion. Respect is ‘‘an empirical psychological surrogate of one’s rational
relations to morality.’’34 It is this ‘‘emotional phenomenon of the sense of reverence
for the Law’’35 that explains how the subject feels immediately constrained and
inescapably compelled by moral obligations. The sort of misrepresentation that the
subject is said to commit in the Kantian story is thus different – and more radical,
than the sort of misinterpretation that occurs in the realist picture. On the realist
view, the subject misrepresents the objectivity of moral claims insofar as she looks
at them from her situated and partial perspective. The realist misrepresentation is
merely a matter of degrees. By contrast, the Kantian view misrepresents ethical
objectivity by ‘‘making it seem different from what it is;’’36 that is, he mistakes the
subjective feeling of respect for the objective reality of the moral law. The
consequences of the Kantian misrepresentation are disastrous:
When we know what the recognition of obligation is, we are building ethical
life around an illusion. Even on Kant’s own view, this experience involves a
misrepresentation, but it is a necessary and acceptable one, a consequence of
transposing objectivity from the transcendental level to the psychological. But
if the experience is special only in the psychological mode, then it is worse
than misrepresentation since there is nothing (or nothing special) for it to
represent.’’37
Since Kant does not defend an ontological conception of objectivity, to cast the
issue at stake in terms of representation is misleading. On the constructivist
interpretation, Kant does not merely transpose objectivity ‘‘from the transcendental
to the psychological level’’. Rather, the argument of the fact of reason points out
that for the practical reason to be objective its demands must be recognizable and
authoritative. The moral phenomenon of respect shows that we are sensitive and
responsive to the demands of morality. Thus, in appealing to respect, Kant does not
merely downshift from the transcendental level to the psychological level. Rather,
he is proposing a complex model of objectivity where the criteria of rationality are
required to be congruent with the sensibility of the agents to whom they apply, e.g.
rational and embodied agents.
This reply on behalf of the Kantian project does not fully address Williams’
critique, though. In his view, the appeal to respect proves that emotion mediates
between the agent’s representation of the moral norm and action. To be practical or
efficacious, reason appears to have its directives entrusted to empirical sensibility.
But this strategy for proving the efficacy of reason is self-defeating, since it makes

33
Williams, ‘‘Ethics and the Fabric of the World’’, pp. 175–176.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid.
36
Williams, ‘‘Ethics and the Fabric of the World,’’ p. 176.
37
Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 191.

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the very conception of practical reason inapplicable, hence, by Kant’s own

standards, unreal or lacking objectivity. In the next and final section, I shall respond
to this objection.

5 The Efficacy of Practical Reason

While Kant certainly thinks of respect as the subjective and affective counterpart of
the objectivity of the moral law, he hardly treats it as an empirical psychological
force, which vicariously undertakes the office of reason. In presenting the argument
of the fact of reason as a phenomenological argument in section §2, I noted that the
argument does not promise a way to access a further reality or a method for
deepening our understanding of the external reality. The argument remains at the
level of the agent’s own consciousness of the moral life. For this reason, there is no
risk of ‘‘a withdrawal on the part of the world’’, because the argument does not
move beyond the level of appearance.38 This is the most interesting difference
between the realist and the Kantian argument from experience. For the Kantian
constructivist, it makes sense to account for objectivity from the standpoint of the
agent’s self-consciousness. The case for objectivity rests on the moral status of the
feeling of respect. Respect is the subjective aspect of the ‘‘fact of reason’’, which is
supposed to show that practical reason is real because we are capable of rational
choice.39 The role of respect is to lend authority to the moral law, so that the moral
law becomes the subjective motive of action. Respect makes the objectivity of
reason present or ‘‘immediate’’, as Williams notes, but it is important to investigate
which sort of immediacy is at stake here.40 If reason aroused our interest only by
triggering some feelings, then the moral law would have no genuine authority on us,
and its aspiration to objectivity would be misplaced. Thus, it is crucial for Kant to
deny that reason needs any empirical surrogate. The authority of moral claims is not
supplied by a ‘‘pathological feeling’’.
Is this simply stipulated? Kant substantiates the distinction between pathological
and moral feelings by identifying their respective roles in practical reasoning. Both
pathological and moral feelings are grounded in our sensible nature. But they bind
us in distinctive ways and have distinctive ways of interfering with or participating
in the workings of practical reason, and thus being efficacious. Pathological
feelings, such as the sense of guilt, love, or compassion provide suggestions or
proposals for action that reason adjudicates. But they do not work as moral
incentives for conforming to morality. This is because, technically speaking, there is

38
In rebutting this objection, I thus find myself in agreement with McDowell: ‘‘Kant precisely aims to
combat the threat of a withdrawal on the part of the world we aspire to know. Kant undermines the idea
that appearance screens us off from knowable reality; he offers instead a way of thinking in which
appearance just is the reality we aspire to know (unless things have gone wrong in mundane ways)’’,
McDowell, ‘‘Toward Rehabilitating Objectivity’’, in Rorty in his Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (London:
Blackwell, 2000) pp. 109–128, 112. I will pursue this defense of Kant’s construal of objectivity by
interpreting the fact of reason as a phenomenological argument.
39
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 6, 31, 42–47, 55, 71–80, 91, 105.
40
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 79–81.

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no incentive to morality.41 In fact, if the demands of morality are objective, there

can be no incentives that intervene to bridge the gap between thinking and doing.
Respect is thus ‘‘morality itself subjectively considered as an incentive’’.42 That is,
it captures how the objectivity of practical reason feels like to those undergoing the
experience of being directly affected and bound by it. I hope to elucidate this thesis
via a comparison with two other views about the role of respect in the argument for
the objectivity of practical reason.
The skeptical view is that respect is the appropriate emotional reaction associated
with the social enforcement of some specific moral norms.43 The validity of moral
norms is determined by convention, actual agreement or sheer enforcement.
Skeptics deny anything like ‘‘the reality of practical reason’’, and they may argue,
for instance, that we have learned to associate respect with some conventional norm
that prohibits cheating. When acting in accordance with these norms, we feel
compelled to conform. Respect is a feeling on a par with other empirical feelings,
whose specific function is to motivate us to abide by norms.44 Respect is thus crucial
to the psychological mechanisms of cooperative interactions, but it has nothing to
do with grounding the objectivity or authority of morality on practical reason. A
most, it creates the illusion of objectivity.
The realist view is that respect is the emotional response due to or demanded by
the recognition of a property – the dignity of persons. In the realist interpretation of
Kant’s ethics, dignity is a value property that depends on autonomy, which is a
metaphysical property of the will.45 If there is no such metaphysical property,
respect is simply misplaced. The realist view identifies autonomy as the condition of
the appropriateness of respect. On neither of these readings can respect be said to
play any role in establishing the subjective authority of moral demands. For realists
respect is the emotional response to the apprehension of dignity.46 For skeptics, it
accounts for the internalization of moral norms.
The Kantian constructivist proposal promises to address Williams’ question and
vindicate moral claims as authoritative. On this view, respect is not a mere affective
response, since ‘‘this feeling is the only one that we can cognize completely a priori

41
Kant acknowledges auxiliary motives for morality, such as fear of punishment, a sense of honor, and
compassion, but when these are they only motives present, the action lacks moral worth, see Kant,
Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 156–157. I discuss the issue of moral incentive at length in ‘‘Emotions
and the Categorical Authority of Morality’’, in Morality and the Emotions, ed. C. Bagnoli (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 62–81.
42
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 76. See Carla Bagnoli, ‘‘Emotions and the Categorical
Authority of Morality’’, in Morality and the Emotions, ed. C. Bagnoli (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), pp. 62–81.
43
This option is obviously ruled out as an interpretation of Kant’s reverence for the law, which is
reverence for the capacity of self-legislation, and thus is distinguished from the reverence for specific
norms with contingent content.
44
For this reading, see Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, p. 269.
45
Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 4: 412.
46
Stephen Darwall suggests this reading when he writes that respect is ‘‘the fitting response’’ to the
distinctive value that persons equally have (dignity), Stephen Darwall, The Second Person Standpoint,
(Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 119–120, see also chapter 10.

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and the necessity of which we can have insight into.’’47 This qualification is indeed
puzzling, since it says that respect is sensible and yet a priori with respect to
empirical reason. But the basic idea is that respect is a subjective feeling peculiar to
the activity of agency. It is a priori because it can be aroused by the mere thought
that something is right. This is not to say that it precedes our moral activity of
reasoning in conformity with moral norms. Instead, respect is simply the subjective
awareness of the operations of such norms in us. It constitutes what it feels like for
us to perform practical reasoning. When deliberating about what to do, we feel
driven by the representation we have of reason’s requirements. The argument thus
points to the phenomenon of subjective moral authority. The claim is that, in
deliberating, the agent experiences her freedom as a given, a fact that she cannot
derive from higher principles or justify by further reflection on the nature of
agency.48
The realist may protest that it is unclear just what kind of support respect lends to
the objectivity of morality. How do we know that the feeling of respect is not simply
a subjective illusion? Is there a proof that our consciousness is not confabulating and
concocting stories that relate to nothing external? These questions arise because
there is an expectation that Kant’s argument works in a realist fashion, promising an
evidential relation between appearances and reality. But this expectation is
misplaced. The skeptical worry should be put aside, since for Kant, it is beyond
what reason can determine.49 The role of respect in the argument of the fact of
reason is not evidential. The feeling of respect is the subjective condition upon
which we can take ourselves to be agents. To be a moral agent is to be capable of
having one’s self-interest and self-love regulated by respect. This is no proof that we
are ever actually acting for the sake of duty, rather than driven by sensible desires or
interests, but it is an invulnerable condition upon which we take ourselves to be
agents.50
Kant appeals to respect in the context of the investigation of the conditions of the
possibility of practical reason. He wants to show that practical reason is not merely
conceivable, but that it is a real possibility. The argument of the fact of reason does
not amount to a ‘‘proof’’ that pure practical reason is objective, in the sense that one
can infer from the internal experience of respect the validity of the commands of
pure reason. This is because the fact of reason is not an objective genitive, but an
explicative genitive: it indicates a fact constitutive of consciousness.51 Respect is
the experience that shows the necessity of practical reason: given the fact of respect,
the unreality of practical reason is ruled out, necessarily. The argument does not
47
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 73/200.
48
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 31.
49
‘‘How a law can be of itself and immediately a determining ground of the will is for human reason an
insoluble problem and identical with that of how a free will is possible’’, Kant, Critique of Practical
Reason, 5: 72/198.
50
What we have to show a priori is not the ground, but ‘‘what must affect the mind insofar as it is an
incentive’’, Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 72/199.
51
See Paul Franks, ‘‘Transcendental Arguments, Reason, and Skepticism: Contemporary Debates and
the Origins of Post-Kantianism’’, in Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects, ed. Robert
Stern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 111–145, p. 125.

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prove that it is contradictory or incoherent to assume that practical reason lacks

reality. More modestly, the argument establishes that given the experience of
respect, this option is conceivable, but it is incompatible with the peculiar
conditions of our own sensibility.
This constructivist account avoids Williams’ objection of misinterpretation, since
the subjective experience of respect is shown necessary to confirm the sort of
objectivity that moral demands are supposed to have. Respect is not an empirical
surrogate for objectivity, but a constitutive aspect of practical reason. Moreover, this
interpretation of Kant’s argument is sufficient to refute conventionalism and
skepticism, since the facts of consciousness in this first-personal understanding are
not something that skeptics or conventionalists can deny. Both objectivists and
skeptics are in search of a convincing explanation of such facts. The Kantian
conception of objectivity does not arise out of the conviction that the standards of
ontological objectivity are inappropriately demanding in ethics. On the contrary, it
is motivated by the idea that such standards are not sufficient to support the
objectivity of practical reason. The proposal is to take respect as the subjective
experience of the rational validity of moral obligations.52

52
Previous versions of this paper have been presented at the Third Annual Conference of the
Northwestern Society of Ethics and Political Philosophy in 2009, at the International Kant Congress in
Pisa, and at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame in February 2011. I would like
to thank these audiences, and especially my commentator Paul Bloomfield, Karl Ameriks, Robert Audi,
Paul Hurley, Elijah Millgram, James Sterba, Abe Roth, and the referee of this journal for their helpful
comments.

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