ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to grips with Immanuel Kant’s account itself and to indicate how, for all its philosophical extravagance, it keeps in view plausible and even ordinary conceptions of moral motivation. Kant contrasts felt or sensible incentives with incentives of pure reason. That is, he contrasts them with incentives that do not emerge from feeling but that have instead an origin in pure reason. Kant’s theory of practical reason makes motivational feeling intrinsic to the cognitive grasp of the supreme moral norm. Kant wishes to make an ontological claim and a claim with a priori implications for the psychology of human rational motivation. He is claiming that the feeling of respect for the law is a sui generis incentive. Kant distinguishes between the positive feeling of respect for the law and a closely related negative feeling of pain produced by the direct determination of the law on our will.
