CRITIQUE OF KANT’S DEONTOLOGICAL FORMALISM OF AUTONOMOUS

MORALITY

Paul Gerard Horrigan, Ph.D., 2018.

Kant describes his deontological ethical formalism of autonomous morality1 in works

such as his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), his Critique of Practical Reason

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Studies on Kant’s moral philosophy: N. PORTER, Kant’s Ethics: A Critical Exposition, S. C. Griggs & Co.,
Chicago, 1886 ; W. M. WASHINGTON, The Formal and Material Elements of Kant’s Ethics, Macmillan, New
York, 1898 ; G. KRÜGER, Philosophie und Moral in der Kantischen Kritik, J. C. B. Mohr, Tübingen, 1931 ; W. T.
JONES, Morality and Freedom in the Philosophy of Kant, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1940 ; H. J. PATON,
The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant’s Moral Philosophy, Hutchinson, London, 1947 ; D. ROSS, Kant’s
Ethical Theory: A Commentary on the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, The Clarendon Press, Oxford,
1954 ; L. W. BECK, A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
1960 ; P. A. SCHILPP, Kant’s Pre-Critical Ethics, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1960 ; M.
GREGOR, Laws of Freedom: A Study of Kant’s Method of Applying the Categorical Imperative in the Metaphysik
der Sitten, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1963 ; T. C. WILLIAMS, The Concept of the Categorical Imperative: A Study
of the Place of the Categorical Imperative in Kant’s Ethical Theory, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1968 ; H. B.
ACTON, Kant’s Moral Philosophy, Macmillan, London, 1970 ; H. E. JONES, Kant’s Principle of Personality,
University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1971 ; P. HUTCHINGS, Kant on Absolute Value: A Critical Examination
of Certain Key Notions in Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Of His Ontology of Personal
Values, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1972 ; K. WARD, The Development of Kant’s View of Ethics, Basil
Blackwell, Oxford, 1972 ; R. P. WOLFF, The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant’s Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals, Harper & Row, New York, 1973 ; O. NELL, Acting on Principle: An Essay on Kantian
Ethics, Columbia University Press, New York, 1975 ; B. AUNE, Kant’s Theory of Morals, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, NJ, 1979 ; V. ROSSVAER, Kant’s Moral Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Categorical
Imperative, Universitetsforlaget, Oslo, 1979 ; R. P. STEVENS, Kant on Moral Practice, Mercer University Press,
Macon, GA, 1981 ; T. AUXTER, Kant’s Moral Teleology, Mercer University Press, Macon, GA, 1982 ; J. G. COX,
The Will at the Crossroads: A Reconstruction of Kant’s Moral Philosophy, University Press of America,
Washington, D.C., 1984 ; J. E. ATWELL, Ends and Principles in Kant’s Moral Thought, Martinus Nijhoff,
Dordrecht, 1986 ; V. J. SEIDLER, Kant, Respect and Injustice: The Limits of Liberal Moral Theory, Routledge &
Kegan Paul, London, 1986 ; B. CARNOIS, The Coherence of Kant’s Doctrine of Freedom, Chicago University
Presss, Chicago, 1987 ; P. C. LO, Treating Persons as Ends: An Essay on Kant’s Moral Philosophy, University
Press of America, Lanham, MD, 1987 ; H. E. ALLISON (ed.), Kant’s Practical Philosophy, “The Monist,” 72
(1989) ; O. O’NEILL, Construction of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1989 ; R. J. SULLIVAN, Immanuel Kant’s Moral Theory, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1989 ; R. L. VELKLEY, Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundations of Kant’s Critical
Philosophy, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989 ; VARIOUS AUTHORS, Kant e il problema etico. Nel
secondo centenario della pubblicazione della ‘Critica della ragione pratica,’ Antonianum, Rome, 1989 ; H. E.
ALLISON, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990 ; L. A. MULHOLLAND,
Kant’s System of Rights, Columbia University Press, New York, 1990 ; F. O’FARRELL, Per leggere la “Critica
della ragione pratica,” Gregorian University Press, Rome, 1990 ; G. TOGNINI (ed.), Introduzione alla morale di
Kant, La Nuova Italia Scientifica, Rome, 1993 ; R. J. SULLIVAN, An Introduction to Kant’s Ethics, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1994 ; V. S. WIKE, Kant on Happiness in Ethics, SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 2001 ;
M. W. BARON, Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1995 ; P. GUYER
(ed.), Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Critical Essays, Rowman & Littlefield, Totowa, NJ, 1998 ;
A. W. WOOD, Kant’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999 ; G. F. MUNZEL, Kant’s
Conception of Moral Character. The ‘Critical’ Link of Morality, Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment, University
of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999 ; R. LOUDEN, Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings,
Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2000 ; S. ANDERSON-GOLD, Unnecessary Evil: History and
Moral Progress in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 2001 ; M. TIMMONS (ed.), Kant’s
Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002 ; S. J. KERSTEIN, Kant’s

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(1788), his Religion Within the Pure Limits of Reason Alone (1793), and his Metaphysics of
Morals (1797).

The moral law, according to Kant, cannot come from the experience of objective reality;
it is the a priori condition of the will. Moral obligation, he says, is universal, absolute and

Search for the Supreme Principle of Morality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002 ; G. BANHAM,
Kant’s Practical Philosophy: From Critique to Doctrine, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2003 ; H.
BIELEFELDT, Symbolic Representation in Kant’s Practical Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
2003 ; P. STRATTON-LAKE, Kant, Duty and Moral Worth, Routledge, London, 2004 ; R. DEAN, The Value of
Humanity in Kant’s Moral Theory, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2006 ; A. REATH, Agency and Autonomy in
Kant’s Moral Philosophy, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2006 ; S. BACIN, Il senso dell’etica. Kant e la costruzione
di una teoria morale, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2006 ; A. W. WOOD, Kantian Ethics, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2008 ; G. E. MICHALSON, Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008 ; M. BETZLER, Kant’s Ethics of Virtue, Walter de Gruyter, New
York, 2008 ; S. SEDGWICK, Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: An Introduction, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2008 ; T. E. HILL (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Kant’s Ethics, Wiley-Blackwell,
Chichester, West Sussex, 2009 ; K. AMERIKS and O. HÖFFE, Kant’s Moral and Legal Philosophy, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2009 ; S. M. SHELL, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA, 2009 ; J. K. ULEMAN, An Introduction to Kant’s Moral Philosophy, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2010 ; S. ANDERSON-GOLD and P. MUCHNIK (eds.), Kant’s Anatomy of Evil, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2010 ; A. REATH and J. TIMMERMANN (eds.), Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason:
A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010 ; J. TIMMERMANN, Kant’s Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010 ; B. J. BRUXVOORT
LIPSCOMB and J. KRUEGER (eds.), Kant’s Moral Metaphysics, De Gruyter, Berlin, 2010 ; J. GRENBERG, Kant
and the Ethics of Humility: A Story of Dependence, Corruption, and Virtue, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2010 ; H. E. ALLISON, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 2011 ; M. D. WHITE, Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity and Character,
Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2011 ; P. R. FRIERSON, Freedom and Anthropology in Kant’s Moral
Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011 ; K. A. MORAN, Community and Progress in Kant’s
Moral Philosophy, Catholic University of America Press, Washington, DC, 2012 ; J. SILBER, Kant’s Ethics, De
Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 2012 ; T. E. HILL, Virtue, Rules and Justice: Kantian Aspirations, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 2012 ; J. TIMMERMANN (ed.), Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A
Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013 ; O. O’NEILL, Acting on Principle: An Essay on
Kantian Ethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013 ; J. CALLANAN, Kant’s Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals (Edinburgh Philosophical Guides), Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2015 ; C. W.
SURPRENANT, Kant and the Cultivation of Virtue, Routledge, London, 2014 ; S. NYHOLM, Revisiting Kant’s
Universal Law and Humanity Formulas, De Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 2015 ; L. DENIS, Moral Self-Regard:
Duties to Oneself in Kant’s Moral Theory, Routledge, London, 2015 ; O. SENSEN (ed.), Kant on Moral Autonomy,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015 ; R. STERN, Kantian Ethics: Value, Agency and Obligation, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 2015 ; D. SCHÖNECKER and A. W. WOOD, Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork for the
Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015 ; J. GRENBERG, Kant’s
Defense of Common Moral Experience: A Phenomenological Account, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
2015 ; A. M. BAXLEY, Kant’s Theory of Virtue, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015 ; D. G.
SUSSMAN, The Idea of Humanity: Anthropology and Anthroponomy in Kant’s Ethics, Routledge, London, 2015 ;
L. DENIS and O. SENSEN (eds.), Kant’s Lectures on Ethics: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2015 ; M. CHOLBI, Understanding Kant’s Ethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016 ; R.
DOS SANTOS and E. E. SCHMIDT (eds.), Realism and Antirealism in Kant’s Moral Philosophy, De Gruyter,
Berlin and New York, 2017 ; A. WOOD, Formulas of the Moral Law (Elements in the Philosophy of Immanuel
Kant), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017 ; E. KAZIM, Kant on Conscience, Brill, Leiden, 2017 ; M.
TIMMONS, Significance and System: Essays on Kant’s Ethics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017 ; L.
PAPISH, Kant on Evil, Self-Deception and Moral Reform, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2018 ; M. MERRITT,
Kant on Reflection and Virtue, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2018 ; R. AUDI, Means, Ends, and
Persons: The Meaning and Psychological Dimensions of Kant’s Humanity Formula, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 2018.

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necessary; but he observes that what is universal, absolute, and necessary cannot derive its origin
from the things of experience; therefore, he teaches, moral obligation, grounding itself in the
transcendental idealist gnoseological critique as a response to Humean phenomenalist
skepticism, must be due to a principle anterior to experience, to an a priori form. This pure form,
having no empirical connections, and, consequently, is alone capable of being universal and
necessary, is the categorical imperative, expressed in various formulations, such as the principle:
‘Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become through your will a universal law of
nature’ or ‘Act in accordance with a maxim which can serve as a universal law.’

Man’s perfection of practical reason or will consists in not allowing oneself to be

influenced by any other motive except the categorical imperative itself, which is absolute and not
hypothetical. Such independence of will as regards any real motive of action, such power of self-
submission to none but the absolute categorical imperative, is called by the philosopher of
Königsberg the ‘autonomy of practical reason,’ the pure determination of rational will, or
‘freedom,’ which is the exclusive fount of morality.

Describing Kant’s ethical formalism centered upon the a priori form of all moral laws,
namely, the categorical imperative, Thonnard writes that, for Kant, “theological morality, just as
much as the morality of utility or of pleasure, destroys the universality and necessity of human
morals by placing the determining principle of the will in sensibility.

“In order to safeguard true morality, only one way is possible for Kant. One must explain
its value without appealing to its object; one must not look for the matter, but for the form of
law. The form which is characteristic of moral laws is pure obligation, demanding for each
morally good act absolute disinterestedness; duty done purely for the sake of duty. Everything
can then be explained by seeking in practical reason an a priori form which is parallel to the
forms of understanding (Verstand). Just as the latter imposes its twelve categories on nature in
order to set up a universal and necessary science, so practical reason possesses a kind of category
or a priori form. The functioning of this latter form is dependent on the basic structure of human
nature, and thus can be imposed on all human acts and on all men in order to build a universal
and necessary morality. This category is the categorical imperative, the a priori form of all
moral laws which it distinguishes from maxims or rules of sensibility by giving them the value of
absolute obligation, just as concepts give phenomena their scientific value.

“…By means of the categorical imperative, practical reason formulates a fundamental,

synthetic a priori judgment which is the supreme principle conferring a moral value on all
particular laws.”2

In Kant’s deontological ethical formalism, moral obligation is imposed by oneself, by

one’s autonomous will. He not only eliminates the subjective ultimate end but also the absolute
ultimate end, from his system of ethics. Maritain observes: “In the same way that he eliminates
the subjective ultimate end, Kant also eliminates the absolute ultimate end, which similarly has
no part in the proper structure of the Kantian ethic…It is not only in the name of pure
disinterestedness of ethical motivation, it is also and above all in the name of the autonomy of

2
F.-J. THONNARD, A Short History of Philosophy, Desclée, Tournai, 1956, pp. 690-691.

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the will that for Kant the absolute ultimate end must be eliminated from the constitutive structure
of ethics and from the proper domain of the moral life.

“For Kant, God plays no role in this domain. It is true, His existence is one of the
postulates of the practical reason; but, as we have already indicated, it is only after the fact and
outside the proper structure of ethics, once the universe of ethics has already been entirely
constituted in and for itself, that this universe requires us to believe in the unknowable objects
thus postulated (immortality, free will, God), objects which owe to the universe of ethics the
existence we attribute to them. In their intimate origin in the thought of Kant (haunted as he was
by metaphysics, which he sought to save in his own way), were these ‘postulates of the practical
reason’ really present as presuppositions, in particular, and most importantly, the belief in that
intemporal Freedom which from the heights of the intelligible world fixes our empirical
character once and for all and from which the world of morality is suspended? In any case their
function in Kant’s system is not at all that of presuppositions.3 The Kantian postulates are not,
like the postulates of Euclid with respect to geometry, indemonstrable assertions which play a
necessary role in rationally establishing the ethical theory. They are indemonstrable assertions
which, once the ethical theory is rationally established, practical reason requires us to believe in
order to bring our speculative reason and the universe of our objects of thought, the picture we
have of things, into harmony with practical reason, and with the already completed edifice of
morality. Since everything in this picture which is knowable and is the object of science belongs
only to the phenomenal order, constructed or fabricated by our understanding through its a priori
forms, it is the universe of the practical and of morality which, out of a need for harmony and
final unification, makes as it were a present to the speculative universe of that which surpasses
the phenomenal and belongs to the order of the absolute, in the form of postulates or objects of
belief in which the transcendental Ideas at last find employment, and this in order that the world
of thought may be adjusted to moral action. I am quite aware that the Kantian conception of
belief is highly debatable, for in opposing ‘belief’ to ‘knowledge’ he opposes it not only to
science (that is, to evident knowledge) but to all knowing. Belief cannot, consequently, consist in
knowledge of a non-evident object through the testimony of somebody who has evidence of it
(as faith for the theologians consists in knowledge of divine things through the testimony of the
first Truth); it is an adherence by which we affirm without knowing it something which no one
attests and in which nevertheless we must ‘believe’ in the name of the exigencies of moral
action. That this theory of philosophical or moral belief and of postulates is logically
inconsistent, and that in the last analysis it is worth no more, in spite of all the seriousness of
Kant’s convictions, than the common idea of religion as a ‘comforting illusion’ answering our
needs, however, lies outside our present concern. What is important here is that it makes out of
God an appendix to morality, not its foundation.

“We have said that the Kantian notion of the autonomy of the will requires that the
absolute ultimate end be excluded from the proper and constitutive domain of ethics. It is also
because the practical reason, or the pure rational will (these two notions are apparently identical
for Kant)4 is absolutely autonomous, that is to say, it is not submitted to any other law than that

3
Cf. I. KANT, Critique of Practical Reason, Part I, Bk. II, ch. 2.
4
I. KANT, The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics, translation by O. Manthey-Zom, Appleton-
Century, New York, 1938, section II, p. 29: “…the will is nothing but practical reason.”

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which it gives itself, or rather, which is one with itself.5 In other terms, the dignity of the person
is such that, in the words of Rousseau, it can only obey itself. This perfect autonomy first of all
excludes God as Legislator from the proper and constitutive domain of morality, since in
dividing good from evil the eternal reason and will of God as Legislator…would impose upon us
from without the law of Another. The pure practical reason is alone the legislator. And this same
perfect autonomy also excludes God as absolute ultimate end from the proper and constitutive
domain of morality; it excludes from this order the subsistent Good, which must be loved above
all things, and in the love of which the supreme motivation of the moral agent must consist.”6

Kant’s system of ethics is a moral philosophy that is essentially deontological or duty-

centered, not teleological and eudaimonistic. For Kant, the good, taken simply and purely, is
found only in a good human will, and this good human will is one that acts from duty and not
from a natural inclination. Moral worth can only be found in acts done from duty; actions done
not from the motive of duty have no moral worth for they lack the form of morality, that is, that
which gives these actions their moral quality, which is nothing but the respect for the law (which
is what Kant means by duty). Consequently, a human act is not good because of the end to which
it leads but solely because of the motive of duty from which it is performed. In his Groundwork
of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant explains that “the moral worth of an action does not lie in the
effect which is expected from it or in any principle of action which has to borrow its motive from
the expected effect. For all these effects (agreeableness of condition, indeed even the promotion
of the happiness of others) could be brought about through other causes and would not require
the will of a rational being, while the highest and unconditional good can be found only in such a
will. Therefore the pre-eminent good can consist only in the conception of the law in itself
(which can be present only in a rational being) so far as this conception and not the hoped-for
effect is the determining ground of the will. This pre-eminent good, which we call moral, is
already present in the person who acts according to this conception and we do not have to expect
it first in the result.”7

The ‘law’ which Kant speaks of, and which respect for which must be the motive of an
act to make it moral, is none other that the pure notion of law as such. If any action that one is to
do be a moral one must ask himself: “Can I make the principle or maxim on which this action
rests into a universal law binding for all persons?” He writes: “The shortest but most infallible
way to find the answer to the question as to whether a deceitful promise is consistent with duty is
to ask myself: Would I be content that my maxim (of extricating myself from difficulty by a
false promise) should hold as a universal law for myself as well as for others? And could I say to
myself that everyone may make a false promise when he is in a difficulty from which he
otherwise cannot escape? I immediately see that I could will the lie but not a universal law to lie.
For with such a law there would be no promises at all inasmuch as it would be futile to make a
pretense of my intention in regard to future actions to those who would not believe this pretense

5
I. KANT, op. cit., section II, p. 59: “Autonomy of the will is that property of the will by which it gives a law to
itself (irrespective of any property of the object of volition). This then is the principle of autonomy: never to choose
otherwise than so that the maxims of one’s choice be also comprehended in the same volition as universal law.” Cf.
I. KANT, Critique of Practical Reason, translated by L. Beck, Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1956, Part I, Bk. 1, ch.
1, 28, p. 33.
6
J. MARITAIN, Moral Philosophy, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1964, p. 103.
7
I. KANT, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, section 1.

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or – if they overhastily did so – who would pay me back in my own coin. Thus my maxim would
necessarily destroy itself as soon as it was made a universal law.”8

Man, unlike the brute, has a concept of law and can consciously conform his conduct to
principles by means of his autonomous will. Command, which is an imperative expressing the
ought, is an objective principle of law which is binding on the will. Such an imperative may be
merely hypothetical, that is, the use of means towards a particular end, or categorical, which
must be done absolutely. Kant says: “If the action is good only as a means to something else, the
imperative is hypothetical; but if it is thought of as good in itself, and hence as necessary in a
will which of itself conforms to reason as the principle of this will, the imperative is
categorical…There is one imperative which directly commands a certain conduct without
making its condition some purpose to be reached by it. This imperative is categorical. It concerns
not the material of the action and its intended result but the form and principle from which it
results. What is essentially good in it consists in the intention, the result being what it may. This
imperative may be called the imperative of morality…There is, therefore, only one categorical
imperative. It is: Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it
should become a universal law.”9

What makes an act morally wrong in the world of Kantian deontologism? In making an
exception for oneself, thus contradicting the law in one’s own favor: “When we observe
ourselves in any transgression of duty, we find that we do not actually will that our maxim
should become a universal law. That is impossible for us; rather, the contrary of this maxim
should remain as a law generally, and we only take the liberty of making an exception to it for
ourselves or for the sake of our inclination, and for this one occasion.”10 Why is such conduct
reprehensible, morally wrong? Because it subjects other human persons as means to oneself as
end, thus perverting the entire realm of ends according to which each human person must be
treated as an end in himself or herself and never merely as a means. The dignity of the human
person demands it. But such a principle concludes to the fact that if one must not subject other
human persons as means to oneself as end, then I myself am not subjected as means to another as
end. Who then, imposes the moral law, moral obligation, upon me? An extra-subjective God who
really exists? No, says Kant the agnostic. Then who? Myself (autonomy of the will): “Reason,
therefore, relates every maxim of the will as giving universal laws to every other will and also to
every action toward itself; it does not do so for the sake of any other practical motive or future
advantage but rather from the idea of the dignity of the rational being, which obeys no law
except that which he himself also gives…He is thus fitted to be a member in a possible realm of
ends to which his own nature already destined him. For, as an end in himself, he is destined to be
legislative in the realm of ends, free from all laws of nature and obedient only to those which he
himself gives. Accordingly, his maxims can belong to a universal legislation to which he is at the
same time also subject…Autonomy is thus the basis of the dignity of both human nature and
every rational nature.”11

8
Ibid.
9
I. KANT, op. cit., section 2.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.

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 Critiques of Kant’s Deontological Ethical Formalism of Autonomous Morality12

Austin Fagothey’s Critique of Kant’s Ethical Formalism: Though Kant’s austere duty-
centered ethics served as a buttress against the prevalent materialism and self-serving hedonism
of his time, it nevertheless is riddled with a number of serious defects that make it unacceptable
as a system of ethics, namely, defects as regards the motive of duty, the categorical imperative,
the autonomy of the will, and the source of obligation. Austin Fagothey gives us a critique of the
Kantian deontologist moral system by pointing out these defects: “1. To rest all morality on the
motive of duty is unnatural and inhuman. Kant nowhere says that an act not done from duty is
immoral, only that it is nonmoral; nor does he say that to be moral it must be done from pure
duty alone. All he says is that unless the motive of duty is present it cannot be moral, and, if it is
done from both duty and inclination, only the motive of duty can give it its morality. But even
this is overplaying the role of duty. Is it only her sense of duty and not her love for her child that
gives morality to a mother’s devotion? Is it only cold obligation and not large-hearted generosity
that makes relief of the poor a moral act? Certainly a sense of duty will be present in such cases,
but love and generosity are always esteemed as higher motives than mere duty and give the act a
greater moral worth. We fall back on duty only when other motives fail. Duty is rather the last
bulwark against wrong acting than the highest motive for right acting. How could Kant explain
heroic acts, such as giving one’s life for one’s friend? These are always thought the noblest and
best, precisely because they go beyond the call of duty. Kant is then faced with this dilemma:
either he must deny that heroic acts are moral, and thus fly in the face of all human evaluations,
so as to make his ethics useless in practice; or he must make heroic acts a strict duty, thus putting
a burden on human nature that it cannot bear and robbing these acts of the very quality that
makes them heroic.

“2. That the moral law commands us with a categorical imperative is undoubtedly true,
and Kant emphasizes it well, but his formulation of it is faulty. The moral imperative is properly:
‘Do good and avoid evil,’ plus the more definite principles derived from this, rather than Kant’s
formula: ‘So act that the maxim from which you act can be made a universal law,’ which is only
a negative rule. Evil ways of acting could never become universal laws, for they are self-
destructive; but there are also good ways of acting that can never become universal laws, such as
a life of celibacy. Hence the reason for the moral goodness of an act is not the fact that it can be
made a universal law. Kant might answer that we can will celibacy to be a universal law for a
definite type of person in definite circumstances; but this answer is no help, for if we start
making exceptions of this sort the term universal law loses all meaning. It finally narrows down
to just one single case. To use Kant’s own example, I might will that anyone in my particular
predicament could get out of it by lying, and still have the law universal for that class of people.
To determine the goodness of an act wholly from the maxim which governs it and not from the
end to which it naturally leads is to adopt a purely subjective norm of morality. All three
determinants, the nature of the act, its motive, and the circumstances, must be considered, and
not the motive alone. It is difficult to square Kant’s view here with the acceptance of intrinsic
morality.

12
For Jacques Maritain’s detailed critique of Kant’s deontological ethical formalism of autonomous morality, see
chapter 6 of his Moral Philosophy, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1964.

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 “3. Kant’s recognition of the dignity of the human person is one of the most admired
parts of his philosophy. But he carries it so far as to make a created person impossible. We must
never use each other merely as a means, but God may do with us what He pleases, short of
contradicting His own attributes. To make the human will autonomous does violence to the
rights of God the Creator. Kant is forced to this position by his rejection of the traditional proofs
of God’s existence, thus paying the price for faulty metaphysics. In Kant’s system our reason for
accepting God’s existence is ultimately that we will His existence, for we need Him to justify
morality to ourselves. As Kant says, this is a practical faith rather than a reasoned conviction.
But here is another dilemma. Really God either does or does not exist; if He does not exist, we
cannot will Him into existence simply because we feel a need of Him; if He does exist, the
human will cannot be wholly autonomous but is subject to the law God imposes on us.”13

Fagothey goes on to explain that moral obligation does not come from oneself for “one
cannot have authority over oneself and be subject to oneself in the same respect, be one’s own
superior and inferior. A lawmaker can repeal his own laws. If man made the moral law for
himself, he could never violate it, for he cannot will both its observance and its violation at once,
and his act of violation would simply be an act of repeal. Such a law could impose no
obligation.”14 So, if moral obligation does not come from oneself, then from who? Who is the
ultimate source of all moral obligation? God: “Who imposes moral obligation? The one who has
established the end and the means and their necessary connection. This objective order of things,
commanded by God’s intellect and carried out by His will, is what we have called the eternal
law, whose created counterpart is the natural law, faintly and imperfectly reflected in human law.
Thus God, the Eternal Lawgiver, is the ultimate source of all moral obligation…Only he who
determines the necessary connection between the observance of the moral law and man’s last
end, and makes the attainment of the last end absolutely mandatory, can be the ultimate source of
moral obligation. But only God determines the necessary connection between the observance of
the moral law and man’s last end and makes the attainment of the last end absolutely mandatory.
Therefore only God can be the ultimate source of moral obligation…Moral obligation must come
from God, who alone determines by the eternal law the necessary connection between the
observance of the moral law and man’s last end, and makes the attainment of the last end
absolutely mandatory. This determination of His intellect and will He manifests to us through the
natural law, which is the proximate source of all moral obligation; from it alone positive laws
derive their binding force.”15

J. Ming’s Critique of Kant’s Categorical Imperative: “The theist philosopher and the
Christian theologian must needs take another view. Man is not an end in himself, but is
essentially subordinate to God as his ultimate end and supreme good; nor is he autonomous, but
is necessarily subject to God as his supreme Lord and lawgiver. Man, conceived as a law unto
himself and an end in himself, is emancipated from God as his master and separated from Him as
his supreme good; conceived, moreover, as autonomous and independent of any higher authority,
he is deified. This is not building up true and lofty morality, but is its complete overthrow; for
the basis of morality is God as the ultimate end, highest good, and supreme lawgiver. Kant
utterly ignores the nature of both intellect and will. Human reason does not enact the moral law,

13
A. FAGOTHEY, Right and Reason, C.V. Mosby Company, St. Louis, 1959, pp. 195-196.
14
A. FAGOTHEY, op. cit., p. 197.
15
A. FAGOTHEY, op. cit., pp. 200-201, 206.

8
but only voices and proclaims it as the enactment of a higher power above man, and it is not
from the proclaiming voice that the law derives its binding force, but from the majesty above that
intimates it to us through our consciences.

“Nor do the universality and necessity of a law determine the will. What really attracts
the will, and stirs it as a motive to action, is the goodness of the object presented by the intellect;
for the rational appetite is by its nature an inclination to good. Hence it is that the desire of
perfect happiness necessarily results from rational nature, and that the supreme good, clearly
apprehended by the mind, cannot but be desired and embraced by the will. Hence, too, a law is
not presented as obligatory, unless its observance is known to be necessarily connected with the
attainment of the supreme good. It is, therefore, wrong to denounce the pursuit of happiness as
immoral or repugnant to human nature. On the contrary, a paralysis of all human energy and
utter despair would result from bidding man to act only from the motive of stern necessity
inherent in law, or forbidding him ever to have his own good in view or to hope for blessedness.

“The theory of the categorical imperative is, moreover, inconsistent. According to it the
human will is the highest lawgiving authority, and yet subject to precepts enjoined on it; it is
absolutely commanding what is objectively right, and at the same time reluctant to observe the
right order. Again, the categorical imperative, as also the autonomy of reason and the freedom of
the will, belongs to the intelligible world, and is, therefore, according to the Critique of Pure
Reason, absolutely unknowable and contradicted by all laws of experience; nevertheless in
Kantian ethics it is characterized as commanding with unmistakable precision and demanding
obedience with absolute authority. Such a contradiction between Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
and his ‘Ethics,’ between theoretical and practical reason, induces in morals a necessity which
resembles fatalism.”16

D. Mercier’s Critique of Kant’s Categorical Imperative: “The Categorical imperative is

no moral standard by which good and evil may be distinguished, nor is it a true moral law.
Moreover the principles on which Kant bases his argument are false. Proof of the first part: By
its definition a moral rule is a practical judgment, and therefore a judgment concerning the
relation of an act with its end. But the Kantian theory of a moral act does away with the idea of
any real end. Consequently it makes any relation of an act to an end impossible and therefore
rules out any true norm of morality.

“Proof of the second part: Obligation, which is the essential note of a law, is a certain
necessity, put upon the will, of freely acting in a determined way. But it is inconceivable that the
will should be drawn to act except by a final cause, that is, by the representation of a good to be
willed. Hence the categorical imperative which claims to exclude all real final causes from the
sphere of the moral will cannot produce any real obligation and consequently it is not a law in
the proper sense.

16
J. MING, Categorical Imperative, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 3, Robert Appleton Co., New York, 1908.

9
 “Proof of the third part. It is not true that the notes of universality and necessity that are
characteristic of the moral law cannot derive their origin from the data of experience when these
are put to the service of the spiritual faculties of man’s soul.17

“It is not true that human nature is or can be its own end, and that in consequence the
perfection of the practical reason consists or can consist in an absolute autonomy.

“Finally, it is not true that reason forbids us to follow the natural attraction we experience
towards the enjoyment of our happiness; it is only necessary that the desire of this enjoyment
should be rightly directed, in order to make it compatible with the highest standard of morality of
which human nature is capable. Our love when perfectly ordered seeks God, our objective end,
primarily and above all things, and secondarily that subjective happiness which results from the
possession of God.”18

Celestine Bittle’s Critique of Kant’s Ethical Formalism: “Kant’s endeavor to free

morality from the bane of English empiricism was laudable; but his own teachings suffer from a
number of serious defects and errors.

“First. Kant builds his system of morality upon the principle of the ‘good will’ and claims
that the will is only then ‘good in itself’ when it performs actions, not merely ‘in accordance
with’ duty, but exclusively ‘because of’ duty, from ‘pure reverence for the moral law.’ To
perform an action out of personal inclination or from a motive of self-interest, Kant asserts,
makes this action ‘legally good,’ but not ‘morally good,’ even though the action be in conformity
to the moral law. This is an unheard-of doctrine. Do we really judge that only those actions are
‘morally good’ which proceed exclusively from a pure sense of duty, and that personal
inclination and self-interest destroy the morality of an act? Not at all. We consider almsgiving
from a motive of compassion, neighborly assistance from a motive of friendliness, conjugal
affection of spouses for each other and parental affection toward children and filial affection
toward parents from a motive of love, to be morally good acts, even though they are not
performed from a motive of pure and strict duty. According to Kant, the motive of charity would
have no moral value at all, and acts performed out of charity would not be morally good.
Everybody acknowledges that many heroic acts in time of peace and war go far ‘beyond the call
of duty,’ because duty does not demand such supreme sacrifices under the circumstances. Yet
such acts are considered to be of the highest moral character, because ‘greater love hath no man
than that he lay down his life for his friends.’ What a distortion of moral values and principles to
consider such acts of supreme devotion and loyalty toward one’s country and fellow men only
‘legally’ but not ‘morally’ good! Kant’s principle is definitely at variance with the common
conviction of mankind, because mankind always judges acts performed out of love and charity to
be of greater moral value than those done merely from a sense of duty.

“Again. The will or practical reason, Kant claims, must be autonomous, i.e., not subject
to any law but to a law of its own making; otherwise there would be no freedom but compulsion.

17
Cf. D. MERCIER, A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy, vol. 1 (Psychology 89-92), Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trubner and Co., London, 1921, pp. 240-247.
18
MERCIER, A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy, vol. 2 (Ethics 56), Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co.,
London, 1921, p. 249.

10
Man is his own supreme end and the sole maker of laws for his moral conduct. On the other
hand, Kant postulates the existence of God as the Creator of all things, including man. Yet God
can make no laws for man’s moral conduct, and man is not subject to such laws, because that
would be ‘heteronomy’; to perform an act out of obedience to God’s command would not be a
morally good act! Such a doctrine means a complete deification of man and a subversion of the
whole moral order. The final supreme end of man, as we have shown, is the glorification of God,
and the realization of this supreme end can only be achieved if man leads a life in conformity
with God’s attributes.

“If man’s will is ‘autonomous’ and makes its own moral laws, then morality is
completely individualistic, dependent solely on the individual’s own will. Morality should then
differ from individual to individual. As a matter of fact, why should the individual will burden
itself with any laws of morality at all? We are conscious that we are subject to the moral law as
something independent of our wishes and desires, and we are in no way conscious that we
ourselves are the authors of the moral law which binds our will.

“Finally. According to Kant, the norm of morality consists in the categorical imperative
of the autonomous practical reason (will). The categorical imperative, in its final formulation, is
expressed as follows: ‘Act on maxims which can at the same time have for their objects
themselves as universal laws of nature.’19 Hence: ‘Morality then the relation of actions to the
autonomy of the will, that is, to the potential universal legislation by its maxims.’20 Such a norm,
however, is useless for practical purposes. How is the ordinary man to know whether his maxims
of conduct are fit to become universal laws? The norm of morality must be accessible to the
generality of persons, because all persons without exception are bound by the law of morality in
their daily conduct. Most persons, however, are not capable of judging whether their maxims of
conduct ‘can at the same time have for their objects themselves as universal laws of nature.’
Even the learned will find it difficult to apply Kant’s expression of the categorical imperative to
human conduct. In order to know whether our maxims are capable of universal legislation, we
must have a norm over and above these universal laws. That norm, as we have shown, is the
rational nature of the whole man as an individual, as a social being, and as a creature subject to
God.”21

Thomas Higgins’s Critique of Kant’s Ethical Formalism: “1. No one can deny that duty
done for duty’s sake is noble and praiseworthy, but we cannot admit that only such acts are good.
A man who follows his conscience out of a desire for eternal beatitude, or out of fear of losing it,
acts well, though not perfectly. Not every self-regarding motive is reprehensible.

“Kant appears unable to distinguish good that we must do from good that we are
counseled to do. We are seldom obliged to do the heroic, but whoever, over and above the call of
duty, does the heroic through self-sacrifice or the pure love of God, assuredly does what is
eminently good. An act of this kind is, in fact, better than one done for duty’s sake. Certainly no

19
I. KANT, Critique of Practical Reason, Abbott translation, fourth ed., rev., Longmans, Green, London, 1889, p.
56.
20
I. KANT, op. cit., p. 58.
21
C. BITTLE, Man and Morals: Ethics, Bruce, Milwaukee, 1953, pp. 159-161.

11
one would claim that a girl is obliged to surrender all her earthly goods and prospects to devote
herself to the service of the aged and poor, but all mankind would call such an act good.

“2. What is the exact meaning of his ultimate imperative, namely, act only on that maxim
whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law? From his
examples of deceitful promises, suicide, neglect of talents, etc., we gather that each moral law
must be thoroughly self-consistent, that it may not contradict and destroy itself, that it must be
applicable universally to human nature as such, and hence that reasonableness is the soul of law.
To this one can agree. But Kant’s over-all principle has universal application only if all good is
obligatory. When we apply it to supererogatory works it becomes absurd. A man could will to
quit society for the sake of divine contemplation, but he could never will that all men do the
same. An individual may virtuously choose to be a celibate, but a universal law of nature
enjoining celibacy would be evil. Simeon Stylites sitting on his pillar was an object of awe and
veneration, but it would be impossible for the entire human race to imitate him. These courses of
action are morally good, but only on condition that they do not become universal laws.

“3. Have the Kantian dictates of autonomous reason objective validity? Inasmuch as they
are proffered as embodiments of reasonableness, and as reasonableness to be such must be valid
for all rational beings, they would appear to be objective. Kant indeed says they are valid for all
men.22 He deduces them ultimately from the autonomy of the will, and freedom, he says, is the
key which explains the will’s autonomy.23 But what objective reality has the freedom of the will
for Kant? The freedom of the will, the immorality of the soul, and the existence of God are
postulates of Kant’s practical reason, assumed but unprovable. We carefully note that what Kant
calls practical reason is the will24 demanding obedience to moral law: what we call intellect, he
calls the speculative or pure reason. But are these postulates known by the intellect? Kant says
no: ‘the above three ideas of speculative reason are still in themselves not cognitions.’25 If there
be any reality behind them we do not know and we cannot know. Kant plainly says: ‘The
question then: How a categorical imperative is possible can be answered to this extent that we
can assign the only possible hypothesis on which it is possible, namely, the idea of freedom; and
we can also discern the necessity of this hypothesis, and this is sufficient for the exercise of
reason, that is, for the conviction of the validity of this imperative, and hence of the moral law;
but how this hypothesis itself is possible can never be discerned by any human reason.’26 Again,
‘Reason would overstep all bounds if it undertook to explain how pure reason can be practical,
which would be exactly the same thing as to explain how freedom can be possible.’27

“If, then, the dictates of the practical reason are deduced from the freedom of the will,
and if the intellect cannot validate the freedom of the will, how can these dictates be validated? If
the basis on which they rest are unprovable assumptions, why are not also they?

22
I. KANT, Critique of Practical Reason, Abbott translation, fourth ed., rev., Longmans, Green, London, 1889, p.
105.
23
I. KANT, op. cit., p. 65.
24
I. KANT, op. cit., p. 60.
25
I. KANT, op. cit., p. 232.
26
I. KANT, op. cit., pp. 81-82.
27
I. KANT, op. cit., p. 79.

12
 “The root of the difficulty is Kant’s epistemology, according to which the intellect can
know only the appearances of things, the phenomena, but it can never penetrate to the thing as
such, the noumena.28 As a consequence, Kant has handed on to modern life a God-idea which is
only a hollow shell, the content of which is whatever anyone chooses to make of it. He has done
the same for moral principles; the words and the formulae remain but their content and meaning
are the sport of individual whim.”29

Kenneth Dougherty’s Critique of Kant’s Ethical Formalism: “It is conceded that duty is a
legitimate motive for obeying law but denied that duty is the source of moral obligation. Duty is
dependent on right. Duty is never self-explanatory. Man has a duty to live morally because man
is destined to God, his Ultimate End. God has the supreme right over His creature who must
dutifully abide by the moral law in pursuit of his destiny, the Supreme Good. God alone is the
source of man’s moral obligation as the Ultimate End of man.

“The human will is itself a blind faculty. It can only pursue duty because the intellect
informs it of duty. The will follows the intellect. The identification of moral obligation with duty
established primarily in the will can only lead to sentimentalism, a purely subjective norm of
morality. A person of good will has objective moral significance only because his will
illuminated by the intellect seeks what is objectively good. The formal idealism of Kant,
however, prohibited him from mastering a truly objective ethics. God, free will, the immortal
soul, good and evil are not merely good subjective notions. They have real significance as the
realistic philosophy of Thomism demonstrates in Metaphysics and Rational Psychology.

“The moral obligation of Kant’s autonomous will is only an obligation in name. The
categorical imperative that a person live so that his actions reveal a universal law of action that
holds for everyone, cannot morally bind us, if it is merely the product of our own good will. The
human will cannot bind itself. It cannot be at the same time superior and inferior, the judge and
the judged. St. Thomas asserts: ‘No one by his own actions imposes a law.’30 ‘No one properly is
coerced by himself.’31 The moral law has moral obligation only from a Supreme Lawgiver or it
is a farce.”32

Charles C. Miltner’s Critique of Kant’s Ethical Formalism: “Our first objection to this
view is drawn from speculative philosophy. In his analysis of judgment, Kant maintains that, in
addition to analytic and synthetic judgments, there is also a synthetic a priori judgment, and that
the ‘categorical imperative’ is of this nature. But it is shown in Logic that such a judgment is a
gratuitous assumption, that every judgment can be classified as either a priori or a posteriori, as
analytic or synthetic. The ‘categorical imperative’ is therefore without foundation.

“But even though it be conceded as possible, it does not provide any norm for
distinguishing good from evil action; for one has no way of knowing whether his action may
serve as a principle of universal legislation or not. The fact that there are certain instances in

28
I. KANT, op. cit., p. 70.
29
T. HIGGINS, Man as Man: The Science and Art of Ethics, Bruce, Milwaukee, 1949, pp. 57-59.
30
Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 93, a. 5.
31
Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 96, a. 5.
32
K. DOUGHERTY, General Ethics, Graymoor Press, Peekskill, NY, 1959, pp. 146-147.

13
which one might be sure that one’s action could be taken as a universal model is due to the fact
that one recognizes an order of things that is, and which imposes itself upon him as a necessary
one. It is not due to any act of autonomous reason.

“Next, Kant fails to show whence this dictate of reason, this so-called ‘categorical
imperative,’ derives its character of unconditional or absolute necessity. One may rightly ask:
‘Why must I do what this judgment demands? I do not feel myself necessitated by it. Quite the
contrary, I feel altogether able to ignore it.’ Merely to assert that one must is not to prove it.

“His assumption that one’s will is good whenever it chooses what the law prescribes, and
only because the law prescribes it, as a universally accepted notion, is unwarranted. ‘For so far is
it from being true that this can be supposed to be common doctrine, that quite the contrary seems
to be the fact. For men often call actions upright which are not commanded by any law, e.g., if
one gives his services spontaneously to the poor and the sick, or serves his country gratis. Much
less are men persuaded that these actions are then only good or praiseworthy when they are done
solely on account of legal precept; for by common opinion one may most honestly act from a
motive or mercy or love of neighbor.’33

“Finally, the theory involves the contradiction that man is an end in himself. But man, we
have shown, is by nature a dependent being, and so ordained to an end outside of and higher than
himself.”34

Joseph F. Sullivan’s Critique of Kant’s Ethical Formalism: “Kant’s moral rationalism

must be rejected: 1) The whole Ethical system of Kant is based on an entirely false assumption.
For the fundamental assumption in Kant’s system is the principle that that will alone is morally
good which obeys the law solely out of respect for its authority, i.e., which acts conformably to
law from the pure sense of duty. In proof of this strange assertion, Kant appeals to common
psychological experience. But is this principle really a common psychological experience? Do
men really judge that the will performs a moral action only when moved and determined by the
pure sense of duty? Do men really think that any other motive but the sense of duty destroys the
morality of an action? This is surely not the case. For many actions are regarded by all as
morally right and good, even though they do not proceed from the pure sense of duty. Thus the
woman who is moved by her mother’s love to attend to her sick child, the philanthropist who
helps his fellow men out of sympathy and pity, the men and women who, though not in duty
bound, devote themselves to the service of the sick – these and many others, in the opinion of all
right-thinking men perform morally good and praiseworthy actions. So far, indeed, are men from
regarding the sense of duty as the only source of morality, that they are wont to attach the highest
moral worth to heroic acts of charity, of patriotism, of benevolence, etc., precisely because they
are performed without being enjoined by strict duty. It is clear, then, that in the opinion of men
the sense of duty is not the only source of morality.

“2) Kant’s categorical imperative – “Act so that the maxim of the will may be capable of
becoming a universal law” – is not the ultimate norm of good and evil in human conduct. For
there are many morally good acts that could not possibly become a law for all. A healthy man

33
V. CATHREIN, Philosophia Moralis, B. Herder, Freiburg, 1940, p. 100.
34
C. C. MILTNER, The Elements of Ethics, Macmillan, New York, 1949, pp. 103-104.

14
has duties that could not bind a sick man. Our duties depend often on circumstances of person,
time and place. For these Kant makes no allowance. Moreover, some courses that are morally
good and lawful are good only as long as they do not become a universal law. It is lawful, for
instance, for a man to remain a bachelor. But all could not do so.

“3) Kant’s theory of the Autonomy of Reason supposes that every distinction of good and
evil in human conduct is merely subjective. For if human reason is the only norm of morality,
and there is no ulterior norm by which to judge the morality of our actions, human conduct will
be good or bad morally according as reason judges it to be good or bad; human reason will not
judge actions to be good or bad because they are so in themselves. But this is obviously the same
as saying that moral goodness and evil depend on human reason, and that the distinction between
good and evil in human conduct is merely subjective; because if the distinction between good
and evil is objective, there must likewise be an objective norm according to which reason judges.

“4) Kant’s Autonomy of Reason is contradicted by inner experience. Our consciousness

testifies that reason is not a law unto itself, that it does not create and generate obligation, but
simply points out to us the law and makes duty and obligation known to us. While reason
manifests what is right and what is wrong, what is obligatory and what is optional, it does not
make it so. It shows in what way we should act, but does not create an obligation. We have here
something similar to what takes place in the knowledge of truth; Reason is not free to declare
certain things true or false, but it must conform to evidence. It perceives truths that exist
independently of itself. In the same way, the moral good is not made, but only perceived, by
reason. Hence, in neither case can reason be called autonomous, since it must conform to the
nature of things.”35

Coffey’s Critique of Kant’s Deontological Formalism. Peter Coffey critiques Kant’s

deontological ethical formalism in the second volume of his Epistemology as follows: “If we can
show that Kant’s method of vindicating the reality of a moral obligation superior to all self-
interest is a failure; that such obligation cannot be grounded on any need or dictate of our nature
so long as the speculative reason is debarred from seeking or finding objective grounds for it;
that he cannot validly or consistently derive from such a dictate of duty the three conclusions
proposed for our belief concerning God, freedom and immortality; and finally, that his two
Critiques are, in fact if not in intention, mutually inconsistent and contradictory, that the conflict
between them is inevitable, essential, fundamental, it will be sufficiently clear that so far from
achieving what he wished and intended, his effort to defend human certitude only leads once
more to the wilderness of scepticism.

“I. The deduction of the categorical imperative as pure universal form or law of moral
conduct fails to establish a real and effective moral obligation. Kant’s deontological ethical
formalism is avowedly concerned with existing realities, with the moral conduct of actual men:
its aim is to establish an effective moral obligation. Its method precludes its doing so. And for
this reason: from abstract judgments of the ideal order it is impossible to deduce an affirmation
concerning an existence. But the categorical imperative is an abstract formula of the ideal order.

35
J. F. SULLIVAN, General Ethics, Holy Cross College Press, Worcester, MA, 1931, pp. 85-87.

15
Therefore the actual existence of an effective moral obligation (and of its three ontological
conditions) cannot be deduced from the categorical imperative.36

“What Kant expresses in such a variety of formulae as the moral law is not an object of
actual experience, but an abstraction. Examine the formulae given above. They are all abstract
and universal. Kant has confused the abstract formulation of certain conditions of morality with
proof or vindication of the fact of moral obligation. We need not examine those conditions on
their merits. The stoic rigorism of some of them is not above criticism. But such as they are,
where are they to be found? Disinterestedness, for example, as a condition of moral conduct,
where is it realized? Where, if not in the concrete acts of men’s individual wills? And so of the
other veritable conditions of morality. But the acts of the will are elicited in view of an end:
without an end in view there would be no ‘motive’ of action, and consequently no action. If the
end is in conformity with man’s rational nature the act is morally good ; otherwise it is not. From
such concrete data, embodied in concrete moral acts, reason abstracts the conditions essential for
a morally good act, and then erects them into a universal norm or standard or criterion of moral
acts. But the abstract formulation of such a standard or rule is not the proof of a real and
effective moral obligation. The conditions or circumstances by the presence of which the
existence of a duty or obligation are revealed to us do not constitute the real and effective
obligation. To be morally obliged or bound in duty and to act accordingly, implies this: that we
wish an end absolutely, that we see a definite act to be necessary for the realization of this end,
and that we freely will or elicit to perform the act as a means to the end. But, then, the question at
once arises: Is there any end which imposes itself absolutely on the will? And if so, what is it? It
is for man’s intelligence, for his reason, to find out. And so we pass from the domain of action to
that of speculation, from the dictate of duty by the practical reason to the analysis of this dictate
by the specu lative reason. And, contrary to Kant’s contention, the primacy inevitably passes
from the former to the latter.

“Nor does Kant’s actual procedure fail to betray an unconscious indication of this
inevitable denouement. ‘So act that human nature be never a means, but always an end.’ In other
words: ‘Subordinate your personal interest to the good of humanity, and will this always as
supreme end.’ But why should I? Is the good of humanity the supreme end of life, the supreme
determinant of my conduct? A question which it is obviously the task of the speculative reason
or intellect to answer by rational reflection and investigation.

“Again, look at Kant’s account of the categorical imperative. Man’s moral conscience, it
is alleged, reveals an absolute or categorical imperative which must be interpreted as the dictate
of an autonomous will. But the dictate of duty de facto revealed by introspection is not revealed,
and cannot be interpreted, as imposed autonomously by the will or practical reason. An
‘autonomous’ will is one that should necessarily will its own perfection, finding in itself the
adequate object of its volition, wholly uninfluenced by any end or object or motive outside or
extrinsic to itself. But only the Will that is Divine, Infinite, All-Perfect, can will in this way. The
will of the human individual is not thus self-moved or self-sufficient. Nor can it will in vacuo, as
it were. It must will this or that or the other concrete end presented to it by the intellect as a good:
only by such good, as ‘motive,’ can it be solicited or ‘moved’ from its state of indetermination to

36
The attempt to make such an inference is compared by Taine to an attempt to hang one’s hat on the painted image
of a nail in the wall. Cf. Mercier, Critériologie Générale, Louvain, 1911, §86, pp. 191-192.

16
elicit any definite, specific act of volition. And such is the law of every will that is contingent
and finite. Only the Will that is Imperfectible, All-Perfect, Infinite, ‘Actus Purus,’ can elicit a
self-originated volition, an absolute beginning of activity. Thus Kant’s doctrine of the human
will as autonomous really deifies the human will.

“II. Kant’s postulates of the Practical Reason cannot be validly or consistently deduced
from the categorical imperative or dictate of moral duty.

“A. And first as to his doctrine of freedom. How can he speak of free acts of man after
concluding in the Critique of Pure Reason that whatever happens in space and time is ruled by
the absolute determinism of phenomenal antecedents according to the law of physical causation?
How can determinism prevail universally in the world of space and time if a free principle,
residing in the noumenal domain of the real human will, can intervene in the flow of physical
events and break their physically determined continuity? Either there is no real relation between
the two domains, the noumenal domain of free volitional action and the phenomenal domain of
physical determinism, or there is such relation. If there is none such, if free volition is confined
to the noumenal world, how can it serve to explain the actual moral conduct of men in the actual
world of space and time? When Kant argues, and rightly, that ‘you must’ implies ‘you can,’ it is
because he sees in any such definite, concrete human act as e.g. telling the truth at one’s own
expense, an exercise of moral conduct, and infers as a necessary implication of this act the
freedom of the man to tell the truth rather than lie. But this is bringing down freedom from the
noumenal domain and admitting its real relation, its real contact, with man’s actions in the
physical domain of space and time. And what now becomes of the universal determinism? Kant,
as we have seen already, tried to face this difficulty.37 But how? By taking the soul in two senses,
as the noumenal Ego and as the phenomenal Ego, as a noumenal reality for belief and as a
phenomenal object for knowledge. By recognition of this distinction, he says, ‘we can without
any contradiction think of the same will when phenomenal (in visible actions) as necessarily
conforming to the law of nature, and so far, not free, and yet, on the other hand, when belonging
to a thing by itself, as not subject to that law of nature, and therefore free.’38 But how ‘without
any contradiction’? Is the contradiction not palpable? Kant denies that there is any contradiction;
and his reason for the denial is that while the speculative reason can know the will only as
phenomenal (and not free), it can think the will as noumenal (and free), and therefore cannot
deny the possibility of free will as noumenal, while the practical reason demands free will as a
noumenon and justifies our belief in it as really free: to which he would add the further plea that
contradiction can be only between conflicting ‘knowledges,’ or conflicting ‘beliefs,’ but is
unintelligible and impossible as between any ‘knowledge’ and any ‘belief,’ inasmuch as these
are wholly separate and mutually exclusive domains of human experience. But all this is of no
avail. For firstly, on his own theory he ought to judge human free will to be an impossibility. The
human will, on his own admission, is the will that conditions the moral acts of men, acts that are
performed in the physical world of space and time. He might, indeed, judge to be possible a
world of unknown and unknowable beings endowed with free will, beings wholly apart from the
world of human experience. But how can he, without inevitable contradiction, judge free will to
be possible and operative in the actual moral conduct of human beings existing and acting in this
world of human experience, if he holds all the events in this world, including the moral acts of

37
Cf. vol. I, §54, p. 193.
38
Critique (Pref. to 2nd edition), p. 699 – quoted vol. 1, ibid.

17
men, to be rigidly and adequately determined by their physical or phenomenal antecedents? And
secondly, is there in man only one Ego, one will, considered under two different aspects?39 If so,
the contradiction is there: such Ego or will cannot be both free and not free: nor will it remove
the contradiction, or satisfy us as rational beings, to be told that we only know the will as not
free, but can transcend this knowledge by believing the will to be free, and console ourselves
with the thought that it is belief, not knowledge, that attains to the reality of things.40 Or is it that
there are two real and really distinct domains of reality, the one including the noumenal Ego or
will, and the other including the visible universe of men and things? If this were so, and if the
former had no influence on or in the latter, then it is not about the former that reasonable men
will trouble themselves, but about the actual men and things of human experience.41 While if the
noumenal (free) will has a real influence on the flow of events in the phenomenal universe the
contradiction of maintaining this universe to be ruled by rigid determinism remains inevitable.

“B. Kant’s attempt to infer the immortality of the soul from the dictate of moral duty is
inconsistent with his own principles. His argument comes to this, that although morally right
conduct is essentially disinterested, and can never be in view of happiness, nevertheless
reflection on the notions of virtue and happiness shows that there is an evident incompatibility in
conceiving virtue to be for ever divorced from happiness; and since they are often divorced in the
present life, where the lot of the just man is so allied with suffering, there must be a future life
where virtue will have its reward.

“But if it were analytically evident, from mere consideration of the notions, that virtue
and unhappiness are incompatible, as Kant contends, then such analysis should enable us to see
that virtue and happiness are essentially inseparable. But they are not, as indeed Kant himself
admits and experience of life abundantly proves. If, therefore, the one does involve the other, the
connexion must be proved or made clear synthetically. But it cannot according to Kant’s own
principles, for the Critique of Pure Reason teaches that synthetic judgments are valid only within
the limits of sense experience, while the soul and a future life fall beyond these limits.

“As a matter of fact the belief that virtuous conduct will have its reward, or ought to have
its reward, is not a belief the validity of which is self-evidently valid. That it will have its reward
requires to be proved. And that it ought to have its reward, well, perhaps, the persuasion is no
more than an illusion, prompted by the wish that is father to the thought? These difficulties can,
of course, be solved, and the general argument from duty to immortality defended as valid. But
Kant’s doctrine concerning the scope and validity of the judgments that must enter into such an
argument precludes Kant himself from all right to use it. His claim that the practical reason,
being above the laws that govern the speculative reason, can use the argument legitimately to
ground belief in immortality, we shall examine below.

“C. In inferring the existence of God from the categorical imperative Kant employs the
principle of causality inconsistently with his own teaching as to the limits of the valid application

39
Cf. §129, supra, for Kant on phenomena as ‘secondary’ realities.
40
In other words the speculative reason of man will inevitably assert, and rightly assert, its claim to primacy, to
explore all the motives and grounds, whether subjective or objective, of all human beliefs or assents, and to evaluate
these accordingly.
41
Cf. MAHER, Psychology, chap. xxii., pp. 474-475.

18
of this principle. The union of righteousness and happiness in a perfect and consummated good
must, he argues, ultimately take place. But it can take place only if brought about by a Supreme
Being, a Sovereign Legislator of the moral order, Who wills to realize the bonum consummatum.
Therefore such Supreme Being exists.

“But what can such inference avail, if the principle of causality is not objectively valid or
applicable beyond the domain of phenomena?

“Before considering Kant’s claim to the lawfulness of such reasoning in support of our
belief in the postulates of the practical reason, – a point which belongs to the relation between
the two Critiques, – we may note here a few other obvious defects in his procedure. From his
stoic conception of moral duty he totally excludes the motive of happiness. Man’s desire for
happiness is natural. Moreover the virtuous man deserves, merits happiness, as the reward of
well-doing: even on Kant’s admission. Nay, more, a man is bound to be virtuous, and so to
render himself worthy of happiness. And yet Kant would have it that if a man desires the
happiness which he ought by his conduct to deserve, such desire of his cannot be a morally good
act inasmuch as it is wanting in the essential element of disinterestedness! The truth of course is
that while disinterestedness is a perfection of the moral act, the full measure of disinterestedness
which would exclude all consideration of self and all thought of individual well-being is not
essential to morally righteous conduct.

“Again, the unquenchable aspirations of man towards an ideal of moral goodness, beauty,
righteousness, above and beyond the satisfactions of individual interests; his inborn reverence,
respect, admiration for this ideal, are boldly emphasized in Kant’s theory. ‘Two things,’ he
exclaims, ‘fill the soul with admiration and respect, the starry heaven above us and the moral law
within us.’ This is undeniably so. But then both of them alike raise problems for the human
mind. What is the import or significance of such feelings? It is all very well to say: ‘I wish, I
desire, that the moral order be respected; I experience an imperative need to respect it; my nature
impels me to respect it; the moral dignity of man, the good of humanity, etc., demand it.’ All that
only raises a problem (and not quite accurately, thus expressed), but does not solve it. What right
have I to assume a priori that such needs, impulses, aspirations are not illusory? How do I know
that the subordination of my personal satisfactions to a dictate of duty or a moral law is right or
reasonable, and not a mere self-deception? Therefore I must seek and find, by rational
investigation of my own nature and the universe and what they imply, a rational basis for, and
justification of, those moral dictates in obedience to which I am expected to shape my conduct
and direct my life. And so we find ourselves once more led to the thesis of intellectualism, that
man can attain to a reasoned certitude regarding his spontaneous assents, whether these be
speculative or moral or religious, if, and only if, he can find for such assents a ground or motive
that will be objectively valid under the scrutiny of reflecting reason. Natural promptings of the
will, aspirations of the heart, impulses of feeling and sentiment, may serve as immediate motives
of spontaneous assents, and as provisional practical guides of conduct; but the ultimate ground of
human certitude must be approved by reflecting reason, and with reflecting reason the last word
on certitude must ever rest.

“The Two Critiques Compared. Inconsistencies of Kant’s System as a Whole. – The

student of Kant will be struck by the fact that both of Kant’s Critiques are reasoned, that both are

19
works of the same individual human intellect, exploring, interpreting, arguing, reasoning,
apparently in the same way and according to the same general laws which guide and govern
rational processes. When examining the first Critique we had occasion more than once to notice
certain inconsistencies and certain peculiar problems it suggested concerning its own scope and
significance.42 We have now briefly to compare the two Critiques with a view to seeing whether
their conclusions conform at least to the negative test of consistency (156) in considering their
claim to acceptance as forming a satisfactory philosophy of human experience as a whole.

“For a time it was thought by many that it was only when he realized the destructive
bearings of the first Critique upon the fundamental moral and religious beliefs of mankind that
Kant tried to avert the impending disastrous consequences by seeking a new basis for those
beliefs in his second Critique; that he had not conceived and intended from the beginning the
destruction of the ‘ancient metaphysics’ as a necessary preparation for the transference of the
basis of those beliefs from the scientific domain to the domain of the will, or regarded this
transference itself as the only sure way of defending religion and morality against the sceptical
attacks of reason. But from Kant’s correspondence it appears that he had before him
throughout,43 the whole general outline of the system embodied in the two Critiques, and that
therefore he always regarded their respective conclusions not only as mutually compatible, but as
mutually complementary and as forming together one logical and perfectly consistent whole.
That his intention was the very reverse of sceptical or destructive of moral and religious certitude
is beyond all question. And that he could have regarded the two Critiques as mutually
complementary is also intelligible. For the conflict between them is de facto not quite explicit
and obvious.

“When Kant set himself to the task of meeting the scepticism of Hume he was probably
impressed by the formula with which Leibniz had countered the empiricism of Locke: ‘Nihil est
in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu, nisi intellectus ipse’ (71). While sense experience is
of objects allied to material conditions of time-and-space phenomena, reflection on our
intellectual activity reveals this as determining the necessary, a priori judgments of science, and
as thereby disclosing an intelligible world which is beyond the control of positive science
altogether. When, therefore, the dictate of moral duty reveals itself in man’s conscience as
absolute, it cannot on the one hand ground itself on principles of the speculative reason which
are concerned only with the scientific knowledge of the objects of sense experience, but neither
on the other hand has it anything to fear from them since it is wholly beyond the range of their
proper sphere of application. The conflict, therefore, between the two Critiques is not direct or
apparent.

“But is the conflict between their directive principles nevertheless really there? It
certainly is ; and by an inevitable logical necessity.

“What, for instance, can be the significance of the distinction between the speculative
reason and the practical reason?44 Are they two distinct faculties? There appears to be no

42
Cf. especially vol. 1, §59; also §§46, 54, 56, 58.
43
Cf. MERCIER, op. cit., §109, pp. 247-250.
44
Kant sometimes seems to identify what he calls the practical reason with the will, or again, at times, with man’s
moral conscience. But the will, considered in itself, is not a cognitive faculty at all, not a faculty which apprehends

20
ground whatever for thinking so. They are rather two aspects or domains of the activity of the
human intelligence (or intellect, understanding, reason). They are simply one and the same
human intelligence, conceiving, judging, reasoning, in the domain of speculative reality (or
‘things’), and of practical reality (or ‘acts’), respectively. The theoretical or speculative reason,
then, would be intellect employed in the investigation of that which is; and the practical reason
would be the same intellect employed in the investigation of that which ought to be – or, human
conduct in its ethical aspect.

“But if so, this single faculty must in all its functions be subject to the same general laws.
If, as theoretical or speculative, it can attain only to sense phenomena, it should as practical have
the same confines. On the other hand, if, as practical, it can attain to the realities of the domain
of moral duty, so should it, as speculative, be able to attain to the realities of the domain of
sense. Concerned as we are with only a single faculty, man’s intelligence or reason, there can be
only two alternative answers to the inevitable question: Can it attain to reality or can it not? We
must choose one: we cannot choose both.

“If it can, inasmuch as moral duty both transcends phenomenal conditions and is an
object of certitude, why cannot substances and causes be also ‘noumena’ or metaphysical
realities likewise transcending phenomenal conditions, and be therefore objects of certitude on
the same title as the realities of the moral order?

“If it cannot, for the reason that, owing to the absence of phenomenal or sensible matter
whereby alone reality could ‘be given’ or ‘appear,’ the spontaneity of the intellect endeavouring
to apprehend it would be without an ‘object,’ why should the reality called the ‘categorical
imperative,’ or the realities supposed to be implied by it, be capable of certain attainment, seeing
that they too are not presented in ‘sensible matter’ as ‘objects’?

“Kant, however, made the fatal mistake of endeavouring to show that the intellect cannot
attain to certitude about substances and causes, that the supposed metaphysical knowledge of
these is an illusion, whereas the knowledge embodied in physics and mathematics is genuine;
and his only way of making this negation plausible was by contending that genuine scientific
certitude is confined to phenomena that fall within the limits of sense experience, – to the sense
appearances which are the objects of physics and mathematics. But having taken up this position
he could escape the sensism and scepticism of Hume only by maintaining the reality of a world
beyond the scope of sense, a purely intelligible domain, and the possibility of attaining to
certitude concerning it. The question, however, then was: How can such certain attainment be

or judges or assents or reasons: hence it has been described as of itself a ‘blind’ faculty: its function is to will,
desire, ‘intend’ ends, to ‘choose’ means, etc., under the enlightening influence of the higher cognitive faculty, the
intellect, manifesting objects as ‘good.’ Hence Kant must rather have meant by the practical reason the faculty
which discerns, judges, dictates, reasons, and delivers verdicts, concerning objects of the practical or moral order,
human acts and human conduct, i.e. concerning matters in which the exercise of free will is directly involved. The
question is, then, is such faculty distinct from the intellect or reason which judges speculative matters? And the same
question applies to man’s moral conscience. Conscience, as a faculty, is universally regarded by scholastics, and
indeed by philosophers generally, as the intellect itself dictating a judgment concerning the lawfulness or
unlawfulness of a definite act to be there and then performed or avoided by the person judging. While the special
aptitude of the intellect to discern the truth of first principles of the moral order has been described by scholastics
and others as synderesis (15). Cf. supra, p. 243 n.

21
possible. After he had declared that the human intellect cannot attain to certitude about any
reality, that all its necessary and universal judgments reveal merely mental phenomena or sense
appearances moulded by the forms of its own activity,45 how was he to get it into certain contact
with the purely intelligible, real or noumenal domain of being?

“He tried to do so by seizing on one single fact of his own consciousness, assuming a
similar fact to be present in every other person’s consciousness, and by analysing rationally its
implications. This fact was the concept or notion, which he found within his mind, of moral duty,
moral obligation, moral law. This content of his consciousness he interpreted, not very
accurately, as we saw above, but no matter, as a ‘categorical imperative,’ i.e. an absolute dictate
binding necessarily and universally. But, granting all that, the reader will surely ask what
possible use could Kant make of it for grounding certitude about reality, seeing that he had just
declared all necessary and universal judgments, all notions or concepts, to be capable of
manifesting either (1) merely mental products of subjective, a priori forms with sensuously
given materials, where there are such materials, or else (2) mere empty mental forms themselves,
mere regulative modes of the mind’s activity, where there are no such sensuous materials, modes
which it would be an illusion (according to his own teaching) to mistake for realities. Either
those moral notions and dictates are revealed to us, and apprehended by us (as de facto they are),
in the concrete, individual data of our conscious experience, – in our individual moral feelings,
sentiments, impulses, choices, decisions, etc., as these arise in our direct consciousness: but if so,
they can (on Kant’s theory) reveal just mere mental phenomena, pure and simple, like our other
concepts and judgments; and the objective reality of the noumenon which they suggest to us
remains exactly as doubtful and unattainable as that of any other noumenon of experience. Or
else those moral notions and dictates are devoid of all empirical content, independent of anything
revealed in the consciousness of our actual moral life, objects of pure intellectual intuition. But
then, if it is alleged that because they are such they manifest realities to us, and that we thus
attain to certitude about reality, (1) why can we not have, a pari, a similar intellectual certitude
of suprasensible realities through the (speculative) concepts and judgments we form regarding

45
First it was represented as attaining to certitude as to how the reality which directly affects us in external and
internal sensation (the ‘noumenon of experience’: the real external world and the real Ego: what the ‘ancient
metaphysics’ called material substances or subjects, and material causes or agencies) appears; then as attaining to
certitude only about mental phenomena or appearances, which were thus, as secondary entities (129), distinguished
and isolated from their corresponding ‘noumena of experience’: so that these latter were thus made just as remote
from the intellect as the ‘metaphysical noumena,’ God, the soul, freedom, immortality, the moral order, the realities
to which the three ideas of the pure speculative reason point. Nevertheless, Kant in places distinguishes and
contrasts those two sets of noumena, as to their certain attainability by the human intellect. Cf. MERCIER, op. cit.,
§144, p. 397: ‘Kant often contrasts knowledge of the noumena of experience with knowledge of metaphysical
reality. Why? Can I know the empirical noumenon, or can I not? If I cannot, where is the use of contrasting my
ignorance of it with my ignorance of metaphysical reality. If on the other hand the empirical real, or noumenon of
experience, does lie within the scope of my knowledge, why can I not pass from certitude regarding such empirical
realities to certitude concerning metaphysical realities, seeing especially that ex hypothesi the latter are a necessary
condition of the existence of the former.’
The reader will recognize, in what are here referred to as ‘noumena of experience’ and ‘metaphysical realities’
respectively, the intelligible realities of the domain of sense (sensibilia per accidens: material substances and
causes), of which we have proper concepts, and intelligible realities transcending the domain of sense (spiritual
substances and causes; the human soul as free, spiritual and immortal; pure spirits; God), of which our concepts are
only analogical (supra, §114, p. 76, n. 1; pp. 80-81; §125, pp. 143-144). And in the rational inferribility of the latter
from the former he will see the fundamental reason of the possibility of a speculative metaphysics, and the
condemnation of Kant’s metaphysical agnosticism.

22
substance, cause, soul, spirit, God? And secondly, (2) is it not inconsistent of Kant to claim the
power of attaining to certitude about reality for the very faculty of intellect to which he had
already repeatedly denied all such power? Why should not such reputed attainment of
suprasensible reality be still an illusion? Why should it not still be de facto only the thought or
idea of a mere empty mental form? And finally, (3) even supposing it to be a certain attainment
to reality, the insuperable difficulty would still remain of either leaving one of the noumenal
realities, which is human freedom, up in the clouds of a Platonic mundus intelligibilis, or else
bringing it down to the concrete world of actual human experience, to the inevitable destruction
of the universal determinism which on Kant’s own theory prevails there.46

“It is sometimes urged, and this will be our last point, that while the certitude attainable
by the speculative exercise of reason is conditioned by external experience, the certitude
attainable by its practical exercise is conditioned only by internal experience. Or, to put it in
another way, ‘human experience, taken in its totality…has two distinct starting-points: sense
data, the subject-matter of scientific knowledge; and the categorical imperative of conscience,
the basis of moral and religious beliefs.’47 And this being so, may not analysis of each of these
domains show us that though certitude concerning reality is unattainable by reason proceeding
from the former starting-point by way of external (speculative) experience, it is attainable by
reason proceeding from the second by way of internal (practical, moral) experience? May not
such analysis lead us to the conclusion that the sense data of consciousness which reveal to
reason the physical domain, and the suprasensible data of conscience which reveal the moral and
religious domains, are totally heterogeneous and mutually isolated for reason? If, then, it be
shown that reason can ground the certitude of its moral and religious beliefs in reality on the
latter set of data, and that through the former set it can attain to knowledge, but only of
phenomena, not of reality, is not moral and religious certitude thereby made absolutely proof
against the sceptical inroads of science?

“In this plea for Kantism we have a plausible mixture of good intentions and bad
philosophy. But its plausibility is destroyed even by Kant’s own teachings. The only point we
need notice in it is the insinuation that, from the point of view of human certitude about reality,
different values attach to the two sources of experience. But what are the two sources referred
to? Not internal and external experience, in the sense of consciousness of the Ego and awareness
of an external universe. For we have seen48 that Kant holds all our consciousness of what goes on
in the Ego to be conditioned by our awareness of an external, spatial universe; and that,
moreover, both the spatial or external and the temporal or internal data can, according to his
theory, reveal only mental phenomena, and not realities. The distinction, therefore, which he
seeks to establish between two sources of our experience, must be the distinction between
conscious data of the physical order and conscious data of the moral order. But neither can this
effectively serve his purpose; and for two reasons.

“Firstly, because the moral data from which he derives the categorical imperative and its
implications, being data of conscious experience,49 should on his own theory reveal only mental

46
Cf. supra, pp. 332-334.
47
Vol. 1, §46, p. 172.
48
Vol. 1, §61, p. 214, n. 1; supra, §97, p. 7, n. 4; §100, p. 15; §134, pp. 202-205.
49
Cf. Vol. 1, §56, pp. 199-200.

23
phenomena, only an ‘empirical’ Ego, and not any reality. For after all the individual man has
only one mind, one consciousness, the processes and data of which must therefore conform to
the same law so far as their value for certitude or insight into reality is concerned.

“And secondly, the heterogeneity of the two domains of conscious data is not absolute;
nor can they be rightly or reasonably held to form two totally isolated and separate domains of
mental life. Moral concepts and judgments are of course different from our concepts and
interpretations of physical or sense data. They are not derived or derivable from the immediate
data of any of the senses: just as concepts of the domain of one sense cannot be derived from the
data of another sense: the concept of colour, for instance, cannot be derived from the auditory
data of consciousness. But moral concepts and principles are nevertheless derived from other
concrete, individual data revealed in our conscious experience. Conscious impulses, aspirations,
sentiments, affective and volitional tendencies, choices, decisions, feelings of responsibility,
duty, obligation, of regret, remorse, shame, or of the approval of conscience for our conduct,
these are all concrete individual facts or data of direct consciousness or intuition, not of sense
consciousness, of course, but of intellectual consciousness (95), consciousness of the higher or
intellectual and volitional departments of our mental life. It is from such concrete, individual,
conscious data, directly revealed to each of us in his own mental life, externated in his own
moral conduct, and inferred to be also in his fellowmen from similar externations apprehended in
their moral conduct, it is from such data that we derive the concepts of duty, responsibility,
moral obligation, moral sanctions, etc., which enter into all moral principles, dictates and
judgments. The ‘ought’ of moral conduct is, of course, not a datum of sense. It is, however, a
datum of intellect. Nor is it given to intellect, or apprehended by intellect, in the data of sense,
any more than God, or the free, spiritual, and immortal soul, or the intellect itself, or the will, are
given in sense data. It is, however, given to intellect in our immediate intellectual awareness of
the conscious, suprasensible, or spiritual activities, yearnings, aspirations, impulses, of our own
intellect and will, as a specific characteristic of these data. Our intellectual apprehension of it as a
thought-object, and of other thought-objects of the same suprasensible order, we have already
asserted to be mediated by sense, inasmuch as we consider all our suprasensible mental activities
to be conditioned by the prior operation of sense perception and sense consciousness. This we
believe to be the proper interpretation of Locke’s aphorism as qualified by Leibniz (71, 74, l00,
105, 114). But even if the conscious data to which the concept of the ‘ought’ with all its
implications applies, could be attained by an intellectual intuition that would be in no way
conditioned by sense, and even if the ‘ought’ as a concept were a pure a priori form applied by
the mind to such data, consistency would demand that its function and application obey the same
laws, and be subject to the same limitations, as the other a priori forms of the mind (for those
moral data are data of human consciousness, and the concept of the ‘ought’ is a concept of the
human intellect): but then the concept and its implications could enable us to attain merely to
phenomena, and not to reality.

“As a matter of fact the concept of moral obligation, and all other moral concepts, are
formed by the human intellect through the same procedure, and in obedience to the same laws, as
are revealed in its formation of speculative concepts. The notion of moral obligation is a complex
notion. On analysis it reveals a necessary relation as obtaining between a free act and an end
which imposes itself absolutely on the will. Analyse in turn the judgment which asserts this
relation and you will find in it the categories of relation, final cause, action, efficient causality.

24
And there we are back into the domain of the ‘speculative reason.’ Nor can the postulates of the
practical reason be established if the principle of causality be denied objective and real validity.

“The attempt, therefore, to vindicate consistency for Kant’s thought as expressed in the
two Critiques is found to break down hopelessly. The splitting up of the human intellect into two
separate faculties, and of the whole domain of human experience into two water-tight
compartments of ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief,’ will not and cannot satisfy human reason reflecting
on the grounds of its spontaneous assents. For ‘belief,’ no less than ‘knowledge,’ is an assent. If,
therefore, it has no grounds that reason can see and pronounce to be objectively valid, it is not a
‘reasonable belief,’ an obsequium rationabile. Religious belief must then cease to be intellectual,
doctrinal, dogmatic,50 and degenerate into a mere sentimental pietism. It will be the non-
dogmatic religion which eschews all ‘creed’ and identifies itself with moral righteousness. But
moral conduct, in turn, being based on a subjective dictate of duty, a dictate that is alleged to
emanate from the ‘autonomous’ will of the individual, i.e. from an authority for which the
individual’s reason can find no objectively valid credentials, – must inevitably tend to lose its
character as duty and to become a matter of individual feeling or caprice. For the binding force of
an obligation is incompatible with its being self-imposed, and equally incompatible with its
having no credentials that reason can recognize and accept as adequate.

“Kant’s deontological ethical formalism was to foster men’s moral and religious beliefs
by justly limiting the scope of knowledge; by destroying the ancient pretensions of the human
mind to knowledge of the metaphysical, moral and religious domains; by grounding those
beliefs, among the ruins of the speculative reason, on a foundation that was to have nothing to
fear from the impotent attacks of its castigated knowledge. But transcendental idealist
deontological ethical formalism was all the while itself an effort of that same human mind or
reason, playing itself a suicidal trick which really involved those beliefs in the same abyss of
agnosticism in which it sought to bury knowledge. The history of religion and morals during the
last century under the influence of a widely prevalent anti-intellectualism bears out only too well
the justice of our strictures on such a philosophical attitude towards human certitude.”51

Zacchi’s Critique of Kant’s ‘Critique of Practical Reason.’ Angelo Zacchi, O.P. critiques
Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason in the fifth edition of his Dio as follows: “Il primo
rimprovero, che si può fare a Kant, è quello di essere riuscito a mettere pienamente d’accordo le
sue due «Critiche», e di avere sostenuto nella «Critica della ragione pratica» delle tesi, che mal si
reggono, quando si accetti la dottrina della «Critica della ragion pura». Malgrado tutti i suoi
sforzi, Kant non è riuscito, appellando alla ragione pratica, a salvare seriamente quei veri, che
aveva dichiarato inaccessibili alla ragione speculativa.

“Anche mantenendosi sulle generali, è evidente che non si può ammettere l’esistenza di
Dio e dell’anima immortale, quando si è precedentemente affermato che gli argomenti addotti
per dimostrarla, oltre che insufficienti, sono anche falsi, e si risolvino tutti in antinomie e
paralogismi. Come accettare le tesi, che sono state dichiarate indimostrabili? Non si tratta di tesi
di per se stesse evidenti, ma di tesi, che hanno bisogno di essere dimostrate. E neppure ci

50
Cf. supra, §141, p. 231, (f), where it was pointed out that Kant’s theory necessarily reduces Christianity (and
indeed all positive religion) to a mere symbolism.
51
P. COFFEY, Epistemology, vol. 2, Peter Smith, Gloucester, MA, 1958, pp. 330-344.

25
troviamo dinanzi a facoltà di diverso ordine, in modo che quello che è fuori della sfera di una,
possa essere dentro la sfera dell’altra; quello che è irraggiungibile per una, possa essere
raggiungibile per l’altra. No, la ragione teorica, nella sua potenzialità, non differisce
essenzialmente dalla ragione pratica. Ragione teorica e ragione pratica non sono che due forme
d’attività di uno stesso principio intellettivo. Esse obbediscono alle stesse leggi fondamentali, e
hanno la medesima potenzialità. Se una è condannata ad operare esclusivamente dentro la sfera
dei fenomeni, non si capisce come l’altra possa oltrepassare questa sfera, e raggiungere il mondo
dei noumeni.

“La finzione, a cui Kant si appiglia per tradurre in postulati della ragione pratica le tesi
indimostrabili di Dio e dell’anima, ripugna tanto all’etica quanto alla logica. «Egli propone cioè
che la ragione praticamente supponga essere vero ciò che teoricamente sa essere falso: …per
usare il linguaggio kantiano, la ragione sa che l’anima, il mondo e Dio non sono enti reali, cose
in sè, ma semplici idee, a cui non corrisponde nessuna realtà oggettiva (l’anima è l’idea
psicologica, il mondo l’idea cosmologica, Dio l’idea teologica); eppure nei suoi pensamenti e
nelle sue deliberazioni deve comportarsi come se (als ob) quelle idee, che non rappresentano
alcun oggetto reale, avessero la massima realtà oggettiva: cioè deve supporre, deve fingere, che
esistono realmente gli oggetti di quelle idee i cui oggetti non possono avere se non una esistenza
immaginaria.52 Ed in cose dichiarate così crudamente immaginarie, illusorie, chi mai potrebbe
ancora aver fede? O che fede potrebbe mai essere quella di chi le credesse? O non dovrebbe
essere così finta la fede, come è finto il suo oggetto?».53

“Se, uscendo dalle generali scendiamo ad esaminare in particolare la «Critica della

ragione pratica», allora il suo contrasto con la «Critica della ragion pura» si fa anche più
manifesto.

“La legge morale del dovere è la base sulla quale Kant pretende ricostruire il mondo
metafisico della libertà, dell’anima e di Dio; mai può ritenersi questa base davvero stabile e
sicura, se si accettano i principi da lui professati nella «Critica della ragione pura»? È più che
lecito dubitarne.

“Come mai egli, dopo aver rifiutato ogni valore oggettivo alle nozioni ed ai principî della
metafisica, può illudersi di proporre quale verità indiscutibile l’esistenza del dovere, che,
analizzato anche nella sua più semplice espressione, suppone evidentemente le nozioni
metafisiche di relazione di causa e di fine?54 Come mai, dopo aver rinnegato la ragione
speculativa, può parlare dell’esistenza del dovere, che nel modo formulato da esso suppone
evidentemente l’appoggio di una lunga dimostrazione, e quindi di nozioni e di principî, che solo
la ragione speculativa può somministrare?

52
«Lo stesso Kant ragguaglia il valore delle sue idee a quello di un focus imaginarius, cioè di un punto fittizio, da
cui per un’illusione necessaria c’immaginiamo che partono certe linee, le quali hanno tutt’altra sorgente: illusione
simile a quella che ci fa vedere gli oggetti dietro lo specchio: «So wie die Objecte hinter der Spiegelfläche gesehen
werden».(Appendice alla Dialettica Trascendentale). Ed ecco tutta la realtà che il criticismo s’è degnato di lasciare,
bontà sua, all’anima, al mondo e a Dio!».
53
A. FRANCHI, Ultima Critica, seconda ed., vol. 1, p. 68.
54
Il dovere anche nella sua espressione più semplice importa una relazione tra l’atto libero e il bene al quale si deve
tendere come ad un fine.

26
 “Kant parla della legge del dovere come di un fatto di evidenza immediata; ma non è
facile che tutti la pensino così. Anche prescindendo dai caratteri di assoluta indipendenza e di
assoluta autonomia, ch’egli pretende riscontrare in questa legge, si possono fare contro
l’esistenza stessa della legge molte obiezioni, alle quali è pur necessario rispondere, se si vuole
che sia al disopra di ogni dubbio e fuori di ogni contestazione.

“Per esempio, supposta l’esistenza del dovere, egli ne deduce logicamente la libertà, non
essendo comprensibile il dovere senza la capacità di adempierlo; ma si potrebbero invertire le
parti, e passare dalla negazione della libertà alla negazione del dovere, che senza la prima non
può sussistere.55 Si potrebbe dire: nel mondo dei fenomeni, nel quale operiamo, tutto è sottoposto
al determinismo più rigoroso; ma senza libertà non concepibile il dovere; dunque, non esistendo
la libertà, non esiste nepurre il dovere, e quello che indichiamo con un tale nome, è una pura
illusione.

“Parimente, anche supposta la voce della coscienza, che commanda di fare il bene, a
costo di qualunque sacrifizio, chi ci assicura che questa voce non c’inganna? Chi ci assicura che
l’istinto morale è davvero il più alto è il più nobile, e deve avere il passo sopra tutti gli altri istinti
non meno di esso forti e profondi? Senza l’aiuto della metafisica l’ottimo Kant non potrà mai
dare una risposta sufficiente a questi dubbi.

“Nè vale dire: siamo sicuri dell’esistenza della legge del dovere, perchè tutti gli uomini
sono irresistibilmente portati ad ammetterla. Anche il valore ontologico dei primi principii viene
ammesso da tutti gli uomini, con irresistibile impulso, e nondimeno Kant si crede autorizzato a
dubitarne. Se è lecito dire, per esempio: siamo irresistibilmente portati ad ammettere che ogni
effetto ha una causa, ma non siamo sicuri che così sia, sarà pure lecito dire: siamo
irresistibilmente portati a ritenerci obbligati a fare il bene, ma non siamo sicuri che questo
obbligo esista realmente.

“Se nella costruzione kantiana la base stessa è così poco solida, ognuno può imaginare
cosa sarà del resto.

“Già i caratteri attribuiti da Kant alla legge del dovere costituiscono due pregiudiziali
contrarie allo scopo della sua dimostrazione. Infatti si comprende benissimo come dall’esistenza
di una legge che è in noi, ma non è da noi, si possa risalire fino ad un legislatore supremo; non si
capisce però come ciò sia possibile quando, con Kant, si è dichiarato che la legge morale è
autonoma, e che la volontà nostra è legge a se stessa. Si comprende pure benissimo come sia
permesso ammettere la esistenza di una vita sopraterrena, in base ad una legge, la quale esige una
sanzione, che non può aversi su questa terra; ma non si comprende come ciò sia permesso
quando con Kant si è detto che la legge esclude ogni motivo di operare estraneo ad essa, che si
deve fare il bene per il bene, e non per il desiderio di una ricompensa.

“Ma anche prescindendo da queste due pregiudiziali sfavorevoli, è certo che

l’argomentazione kantiana non sembra troppo efficace. Nella parte che riguarda l’esistenza di
Dio – la sola che ora c’interessi – essa può essere così sintetizzata. L’armonia tra la virtù e la

55
Per essere un soggetto morale l’uomo ha da esser libero. Se non lo presupponiamo libero non potremo mai
ritenerlo capace di moralità.

27
felicità deve realizzarsi; perchè vi è evidente incompatibilità tra la virtù e la infelicità. Ma
l’armonia finale della virtù colla felicità non può essere realizzata, senza supporre l’esistenza di
un essere supremo; dunque l’essere supremo esiste.

“Ora una tale argomentazione, oltre al contenere un complesso di affermazioni, che nella
loro inevidenza esigono di essere chiarite, e che non possono esserlo senza l’aiuto della ragione
speculativa, non concorda neppure coi principî professati dallo stesso Kant.

“Questi infatti parla dell’obbligo di renderci degni del premio della felicità, quando ha già
dichiarato che bisogna fare sempre il bene per il bene, e che è immortale operare per l’interesse
individuale, e in vista della felicità. Dichiara evidente l’incompatibilità della virtù colla infelicità,
quando ha già riconosciuto che la felicità non sempre tiene dietro alla virtù, e che l’uomo spesso
non può essere giusto che a prezzo della sua felicità.

“L’argomentazione inoltre si appoggia chiaramente sul principio di causalità. Vi si parla

di un effetto – la futura armonia della virtù e della felicità – che suppone una causa adeguata:
Dio. Eppure Kant ha precedentemente sostenuto che questo principio manca di ogni valore
oggettivo, e in ogni caso è applicabile solo al mondo fenomenico! Se si vuole che il
ragionamento conchiuda, si deve dargli un’altra forma più larga, più chiara, più solida; si deve
sopratutto rinunziare ai pregiudizi antimetafisici. Ma finchè esso resta così imperfetto e privo
dell’appoggio indispensabile delle nozioni e dei principî di ordine ideale, non riuscirà a
convincere nessuno.

“Kant ha creduto di poter fare a meno della metafisica, ma ha fabbricato sull’arena.

“Si è illuso di poter sostituire il credere al sapere, la ragione pratica alla teorica; ma in
questa sostituzione ha finito col travolgere tutto nella rovina, colpendo a morte, insieme al
sapere, anche il credere, insieme alla ragione teorica, anche la ragione pratica. Egli ha detto: non
posso conoscere se il mondo metafisico esiste, ma le esigenze morali m’impongono di supporre
che esiste, e devo volere che esista, devo vivere come se realmente esistesse. Ha dimenticato
però che, oltre alle esigenze morali, ci sono anche le esigenze razionali. Ha dimenticato che, in
forza di queste ultime, ci ripugna di supporre e volere come esistente quello di cui non si può
provare l’esistenza. Per supporre e volere qualche cosa è necessario esser certi che possiamo
supporla e volerla; e per essere certi che possiamo supporla e volerla, occorrono dei motivi di
ordine speculativo. La certezza è ferma adesione dell’intelletto, e implica motivi capaci di
convincere e conquistare l’intelletto medesimo; implica motivi razionali. Altra cosa è la
propensione, che ci porta a cercare la certezza della verità morali e religiose, altra cosa
l’adesione ferma e stabile, che costituisce la certezza stessa. La prima è di carattere sentimentale
istintivo; ma la seconda è propria dell’intelletto. La prima può preparare la via alla seconda e
anche confermarla; ma non può sostituirla. La certezza vera è una sola: quella di ordine
speculativo, e poggia su motivi intellettivi. Il giorno che vengono a mancare questi motivi, il
giorno che col criticismo si viene a togliere ad essi ogni valore reale, non si può parlare di vera
certezza, neppure di quella, che si può avere in un atto di credenza puramente razionale. Il
relativismo soggettivo col quale il criticismo mina la certezza della conoscenza teorica, inquina
così anche la certezza che si appoggia alle esigenze di ordine pratico. Perciò vale contro Kant il
dilemma: o la fede per cui ammettiamo i postulati della ragione pratica è vera conoscenza, che ci

28
permette di vedere i nessi necessari di questi postulati con l’ordine morale, e allora valgono
contro di essa tutte le critiche mosse da Kant alla ragione teorica; o è fede cieca, istintiva, e allora
si potrà parlare di certezza soggettiva, mai di certezza oggettiva fondata cioè sulla realtà e verità
delle cose ammesse.

“Concludendo, l’insuccesso del tentativo kantiano di fondare l’ordine metafisico sulla

morale, è evidente. Senza l’aiuto della ragione speculativa, la ragione pratica non può costruire
nulla di sicuro e di stabile. Senza supporre il valore ontologico delle nozioni e dei principî
d’ordine ideale, tutto l’edificio elevato da Kant nella «Critica della ragione pratica» va in rovina.
Nè la esistenza e la natura della legge morale, che ne costituisce la base, nè i nessi della legge
morale con i tre postulati della libertà, dell’immortalità dell’anima e di Dio, possono essere
accertati, quando si rifiuti di ammettere il predetto valore ontologico. Non vi è dunque via di
messo: o tornare al dommatismo metafisico, rinnegando la «Critica della ragione pura», o cadere
nello scetticismo morale e religioso, rinnegando la «Critica della ragione pratica». Una
conciliazione tra le due Critiche non sembra possibile.

“Quanto si è detto del criticismo deve ripetersi del neocriticismo, che alla scienza
vorrebbe sostituirla in ogni caso la credenza; all’adesione, che si basa sulle ragioni dell’intelletto,
quella che viene imposta dalla libera volontà.

“La pretesa di escludere dalla certezza i motivi intelletuali, come si è già dimostrato, è
semplicemente assurda. O che la mente si porti con l’adesione certa su di una verità che di per sè
stessa le s’impone, o che si porti, dietro l’impulso della volontà, su di una verità che le rimane in
sè stessa oscura, suppone sempre una evidenza, una luce, una visione. Nell’adesione certa che
costituisce la scienza, suppone la evidenza della verità, cioè la entità o intelligibilità della cosa
che le s’impone e le si manifesta. Nell’adesione certa che costituisce la fede, suppone l’evidenza
della credibilità, cioè l’evidenza della testimonianza e della autorità del testificante. Senza una
qualche luce, che brilli alla nostra intelligenza, questa non uscirà mai dallo stato di incertezza,
non ostante tutti gli stimoli e tutti i commandi della volontà.

“La volontà è impotente a troncare tutti i dubbi e tutte le incertezze, e ad imporre

l’adesione ferma e stabile ad una dottrina, nè intrinsecamente, nè estrinsecamente evidente; ma
quando anche lo fosse, potremmo ulteriormente chiedere: qual’è la causa che determina questo
impero della volontà? È forse un giudizio riflesso per cui si dichiara fondata la certezza imposta?
No, perchè torneremmo alla tesi intellettualista, che assegna come ragione ultima dell’adesione
certa, un motivo di ordine intellettuale. È forse un impulso cieco, istintivo, sentimentale? Ma
allora sacrificheremmo senza pietà tutte le esigenze razionali dell’uomo, il quale, passando dal
momento spontaneo al momento riflesso è solito domandarsi sempre il perchè di tutte le sue
azioni. Allora non ci differenziamo affatto dagli scettici, chè anch’essi, pur negando la certezza
che poggia su motivi riflessi, non contestano la certezza spontanea e istintiva, che è capace di
giustificarsi. Allora si riuscirà ad evitare la scetticismo momentaneamente, finchè cioè, sotto
l’azione provvisoria dei motivi istintivi, sentimentali, utilitari, ecc., si chiuderanno gli occhi
dell’intelligenza. Ma lo scetticismo diventerà inevitabile, appena la forza dei motivi predetti
verrà a mancare, e, ripiegati su noi stessi, cercheremo, senza riuscure a trovarlo, il perchè della
nostra fede istintiva, il perchè della nostra cieca adesione.

29
 “Anche per il neo-criticismo dunque vale il dilemma opposto al criticismo: O accettare la
metafisca, o rinnegare anche la morale e la religione. O accettare il valore ontologico e
trascendente dei concetti e dei principii razionali, o rassegnarsi a cadere inevitabilmente nello
scetticismo.

“I fatti purtroppo stanno a confermare la verità del dilemma. Dell’opera di Kant e di

Renouvier, non ostante le loro rette intenzioni, non resta oggi che la parte negativa. Essi hanno
fatto degli increduli, ma non sono riusciti a fare dei credenti. E coloro i quali, senza rinunziare ai
pregiudizi antintellettualistici, non hanno avuto il coraggio di gettarsi nelle braccia dello
scetticismo, stanno cercando per le loro credenze morali e religiose una base più solida e più
sicura di quella del criticismo vecchio e nuovo. Superare Kant, ecco il sogno di quanti hanno
scelto per loro Vangelo la «Critica della ragione pura»!”56

Bittle’s Critique of Kant’s Doctrine of Autonomous Morality and Concept of Moral

Obligation. Bittle critiques Kant’s doctrine of autonomous morality and concept of moral
obligation as follows: “Immanuel Kant divorced morality from religion and God. He was the
great protagonist of modern independent autonomous morality.

“Kant admits the existence of a natural law and of the unconditional obligation of
obeying the natural law. His entire moral philosophy is based on the unconditional character of
moral obligation. He denies, however, that God is the source of the law and its obligation.

“According to Kant, man’s practical reason or will (for Kant both are identical) is
nomothetical and autonomous: that is to say, man’s practical reason or will is the sole author of
all moral law, and it is independent of any and all external authority. An action is morally good
only then, when it is performed out of pure respect for the law and not merely in conformity with
the law.

“To maintain that God is the source of natural law and its obligation, would be
‘heteronomy.’ To obey the law out of love of God or out of obedience to His will would destroy
the ‘autonomy’ of man’s practical reason and make him subject to external authority; and that,
Kant contends, is contrary to the very essence of true morality. The life and death of Christ,
motivated as it was by love of man and obedience to God, would not, according to Kantian
principles, be ‘morally good’ in any true sense of the word.

“Since obligation or duty belongs to the very essence of the law, Kant was forced to place
the origin of obligation or duty in the practical reason of man, because practical reason is the
sole lawmaker for human conduct. Obligation finds its expression in the categorical imperative.

“Evaluation. Kant’s theory, that duty or obligation derives its origin from man’s
autonomous practical reason, is indefensible.

“For one thing. The practical reason or will, says Kant, is nomothetic, meaning that the
human will is the maker of its own laws. Obligation, Kant admits, flows from law. If follows,
then, that the human will imposes obligations upon itself by making its own laws. Such a
56
A. ZACCHI, Dio, fifth ed., Ed. F. Ferrari, Rome, 1952, pp. 160-166.

30
doctrine destroys the very concept of the moral order. Morality, then, is not objective but purely
subjective. If the practical reason can make a law, it can also abrogate it; and if the law is
abrogated, there is no obligation. Then why should man restrict his freedom of action by making
any laws at all? Or, if he was foolish enough to make laws, why does he not abolish them when
they turn out to be contrary to his convenience and pleasure? It is plain matter of fact that we are
not conscious of having made the laws of our moral conduct through the free decision of our
own will; on the contrary, we feel subject to the law as something beyond our control. We may
desire to be free from laws and obligations, but we are incapable of escaping their binding force;
and this fact would be inexplicable, if Kant’s doctrine were true. On the other hand, if it were
claimed that man’s will is not free to make and unmake its own laws, man’s will would be
determined by an inner necessity to make its laws and abide by them. Whence this necessity?
Certainly not from the free will of man, because where there is freedom there is no necessity, and
where there is necessity there is no freedom. Hence, this necessity could only originate through
some outside agency. This agency would have to be a rational being, because moral law and
moral obligation belong to the rational order. Only God, the Creator of rational beings, could
impose such a necessity upon the wills of all men. In that case, however, law and obligation
derive their origin, not from the will of man, but from God. According to Kant’s teaching of the
nomothetic will, obligation is eliminated.

“Moreover, if Kant’s theory of the origin of law and duty were true, the foundations of
the social order would be destroyed. Society is the union of a number of individual persons
forming an organized group for the purpose of pursuing common interests and ends. It is
characteristic of human society that it consist of a governing body which has the authority to rule
and impose obligations and also consist of subjects which are ruled and have the duty to obey the
laws laid down by the governing body. Some, therefore, have the authority to rule and others the
duty or obligation to obey. But whence this authority? Kant’s theory of personal autonomy
cannot account for social authority, and as a consequence it cannot account for social obligation.
The mere fact that a majority has the power to impose its will on others does not constitute
legitimate authority; otherwise a mob of bandits would have the legitimate authority to rob and
plunder. Might is not necessarily right. According to Kant, each person’s will is autonomous and
nomothetic and each person’s will is its own end; an action is not morally good if directed
toward an end outside the person’s individual will, because the laws which each one must obey
originate in his own will. Each individual is supreme in his own right and each is autonomous.
No individual, therefore, can make laws for another and demand obedience from him; obedience
to another would serve an outside interest and end that would be immoral. That such a doctrine
undermines the foundation of the entire social order is clear, because it destroys the authority of
society to make laws and demand obedience. Just as a series of zeros, no matter how many they
may be, will never result in a positive number, so the mere summation of mutually autonomous
wills can never give rise to authority in society where the will of the majority would have not
only the might but the right to impose laws on the rest. The social order rests precisely on this,
that the individual feels bound in conscience to obey the superior will of society because society
has the inherent right to demand obedience to its legitimate authority. Such authority can
originate in natural law, and natural law can have its authority from God as the author of the
natural law, but Kant does not admit that natural law or any law derives its binding force from
God. Under the conditions set forth by Kant, no rational account can be given of ‘social

31
obligation,’ because the autonomy of the individual wills is not the adequate source of social
rights and duties.”57

Collins’s Critique of Kant’s Doctrine of Autonomous Morality. James D. Collins critiques

Kant’s doctrine of autonomous morality as follows: “The transcendental method leads Kant to
trace the universality and necessity of the moral law to the pure practical reason or pure will
itself, since these traits must have a nonempirical but practical source. Hence the categorical
imperative also entails the autonomy of the will. ‘Autonomy of the will is that property of it by
which it is a law to itself independently of any property of objects of volition. Hence the
principle of autonomy is: Never choose except in such a way that the maxims of the choice are
comprehended in the same volition as a universal law.’58 If the will regulates its choice by any
other consideration than the fitness of its own maxims to serve as principles of universal law,
then it is leaving its own pure autonomy and must discover a ground for its choice in some other
object. But to do so, is to submit the will to the condition of heteronomy or determination by
something else. Instead of giving a law to itself, the heteronomous will receives its law from an
alien source, resident in the objects of will. Whether these objects be empirical considerations
(such as happiness) or rational motives (such as perfection or the will of God), they provide only
conditional reasons for choice and hence only hypothetical, nonmoral imperatives. Furthermore,
Kant maintains that the heteronomous will loses its freedom, since it submits to a determining
principle outside of itself. The will is free, negatively, when it escapes determination from
without; positively, it is free when it legislates universally for itself. Only the will that is a law
unto itself is also a free will. Yet moral freedom escapes anarchy, since ‘a free will and a will
under [self-imposed] moral laws are identical.’59

“The strength and appeal of Kant’s doctrine on moral autonomy lie in the defense of free
self-determination and personal responsibility for one’s plan of life. But in adjusting these sound
convictions to his systematic requirements, he is led to set up an artificial antithesis between
moral freedom and a theistic foundation of morality. In his previous, epistemological discussion
of the antinomy between freedom and necessity, Kant had described freedom, negatively, as the
absence of determination by a phenomenal series of causes. Now, in a moral context, he regards
freedom as being the absence of decisive, moral influence by objects outside the will itself. He
has a consistent reason for not accepting sensuous needs and inclinations as the ultimate
determinants of morality, due to their subordinate position in respect to the entire man. But there
is no similar reason for rejecting the reference of human actions to the eternal law of God, as the
ultimate moral standard. Since the law of God is not phenomenal, submission to it does not
involve a deordination in man. Nor does it lead to a submission of the human will to a series of
phenomenally necessitated causes…

“As for the positive meaning of freedom – the giving of universal law to oneself – there
are various ways in which this can be done. Here, Kant might have used his distinction between
the infinite will and the finite will, not only to establish the relation of obligation for the latter,

57
C. BITTLE, op. cit., pp. 222-225.
58
I. KANT, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, II (Beck, 97); cf. I. KANT, Critique of Practical Reason, I,
I, no. 8 (Beck, 144-145). For a discussion on this principle, consult A. E. GLEASON, A Critique of Kantian
Autonomy, “The New Scholasticism,” 8 (1934), pp. 223-239.
59
I. KANT, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, III (Beck, 102).

32
but also to determine the precise sense in which the finite will can be a law unto itself. There is a
marked difference between a pure-and-finite will and a pure-and-infinite will, so that Kant’s
appeal to the requirements of pure will is not sufficiently determinate to support the burden of his
doctrine on moral autonomy. Within his perspective, the will of the finite, rational agent is pure
and unconditioned, insofar as it is not determined in its choices by some anterior event in the
series of phenomenal causes. But it is not ontologically unconditioned in its own nature, since it
remains the will of a finite, created nature.

“Within the order of ‘pure wills,’ the will of man is not an all-holy will but a will under
obligation. It is in the light of this capital Kantian distinction that the problem of autonomy must
be posed, rather than in terms of the noumenon-phenomenon dichotomy. It is no derogation from
the integrity of a pure-and-finite will, that its moral goodness should be a measured one, one that
derives from its free conformity with the goodness and law of the pure-and-infinite will of God.
The moral ideal for man is to manifest not simply ‘the good will’ in general, but precisely that
uprightness of will which is appropriate to the human condition of being.60 The human will can
give universal law to itself, but only in the way befitting a derived and finite being, not in the
absolute manner of the underived and infinite being. What the finite person can do is to
appropriate the divine law as his own, interiorize it, and reaffirm it as the animating principle of
his moral life. He can take upon himself the responsibility for working out the more particular
precepts and applications of the divine law, for cultivating the moral virtues, and for making the
prudential judgments and actual elections of concrete moral life. These are inalienable and free
acts, resting upon the integrity and inviolability of human freedom, and yet they are incompatible
with any claim to absolute self-legislation and unconditioned autonomy.

“The finite person gives himself the moral law in a rational, free and creaturely way,
when he recognizes the ordination of his nature and will toward an infinite good, existing
concretely in God. The bond of finite beings to the Infinite Being, who is their creator and goal,
is an unconditioned one and establishes a strict, moral obligation, rather than a hypothetical one.
The relation of conformity with the law of God is not contingent upon our choosing to will a
certain end: it is consequent upon our being rational creatures, with a natural ordination to the
good. Similarly, actual union with the infinitely good God realizes our own perfection, without
reducing God to the status of a means to that perfection, since the perfective union with God is
achieved through a liberating love of Him for His own sake. A theistic ethics is an ethics of love
as well as duty, since it respects the natural tendency in man to relate himself in a properly
creaturely way to his Creator. To seek the foundation of morality in this relationship of the finite
will to God, is to undercut that Kantian alternative between autonomy and heteronomy.

60
See M. DE CORTE, Le concept de bonne volonté dans la morale kantienne, “Revue de Philosophie,” N.S., 2
(1931), pp. 190-221. Because Kant correlated his distinction between nature and freedom with his underlying
dualism between the sensible and intelligible orders, he was unable to integrate in a single doctrine the consideration
of the will precisely as a natural tendency and as free. Since the phenomenon-noumenon dichotomy placed nature
and freedom in opposition, he was led to treat moral freedom as an absolute autonomy of lawmaking reason,
unregulated by whether or not the freedom was rooted in a will, whose natural tendency is toward an infinite good
other than itself. When he did attempt to think nature and freedom together, Kant was unable to defend freedom
coherently, in respect to will concidered as nature. The problem of the Kantian opposition between freedom and
nature is treated at length by J. MARITAIN, Freedom in the Modern World, Scribner, New York, 1936, pp. 3-46.

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 “It still remains to be determined more specifically, however, why Kant felt dissatisfied
with the theistic foundation of morality, as he viewed it. His answer is given in a significant
passage, where he holds that even the empty, rationalistic notion of the greatest possible
perfection ‘is better than the theological concept, which derives morality from a most perfect
divine will. It is better not merely because we cannot intuit its perfection [that of the divine will],
having rather to derive it only from our own concepts of which morality is foremost, but also
because if we do not so derive it (and to do so would involve a most flagrant circle in
explanation), the only remaining concept of the divine will is made up of the attributes of desire
for glory and dominion combined with the awful conceptions of might and vengeance, and any
system of ethics based on them would be directly opposed to morality.’61

“These remarks reveal the twofold ground of Kant’s opposition to a theistic ethics: a
more proximate, ethical reason, and a more basic, epistemological reason. In direct, ethical
terms, he thinks that a theistic ethics must identify the divine perfection exclusively with God’s
will, considered apart from His infinite wisdom and goodness. This would lead to an
irresponsible, theological voluntarism, in which man’s lust for domination would be exalted into
the command of God’s holy will. Although it is prudent to oppose such a theological
voluntarism, Kant does not consider whether every doctrine of the eternal law rests upon an
exclusive foundation in the divine will. His argument from the dire ethical consequences fails to
reckon with the non-voluntaristic doctrines on the eternal law and the will of God. Behind this
immediate ethical appraisal, however, stands Kant’s fundamental epistemological objection.
According to his theory of knowledge, the human mind can have neither intuitive nor
demonstrative knowledge of God and His infinite perfections. The only way to give real content
to the concept of a perfect divine will, then, is to transfer it to the practical order of moral faith.
But, at once, a vicious circle develops. For, the attempt is being made to secure the foundations
of morality upon one’s own moral notions (the content of moral faith), which themselves are said
to stand in need of a foundation. Insensibly, the theistic ethician injects the drives of human
power into the concept of the divine will, leading inevitably to an amoral, theological
imperialism.

“Manifestly, Kant’s major difficulty with a theistic foundation of morality was

epistemological: the inability of a nonintuitive intellect to gain strict knowledge of God’s
supersensuous perfection. Because he made no provision for a speculative demonstration of
God’s existence, Kant had no metaphysical basis for determining anything about His nature and
perfections of intellect and will. Hence he could only regard the doctrine on the divine
perfection, goodness, and will as employing empty concepts, which had to be filled either by
begging the question of their determinate content or by extrapolating into the divine will an all-
too-human content. His objections told against an ethics based on the speculatively empty
concept of a perfect, divine will; they did not bear upon an ethics that secures a metaphysical
basis in the speculative demonstration of God’s existence and infinite, existential perfection of
nature. Epistemological considerations were also decisive in rendering ineffective and irrelevant
for the question of moral autonomy, Kant’s private convictions about the infinite and the finite
modes of being, the self-sufficient and the dependent intellects, the underived and the derived
wills. Since these convictions were lacking in any metaphysical groundwork, they could not be

61
I. KANT, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, II (Beck, 99). Both Kant and Hume advance humanistic
reasons for their attempt to de-theize ethics.

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employed significantly by Kant in determining the central issue of the relation of the human will
to the moral law.”62

62
J. D. COLLINS, A History of Modern European Philosophy, Bruce, Milwaukee, 1954, pp. 526-530.

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