ABSTRACT
Kant, rejecting all empirical ends as a satisfactory basis for the categorical moral law, ultimately secures the priority of the right by positing a certain view of the subject. This is the transcendental or noumenal subject, one who is capable of standing outside of time and causality and exercising an autonomous will. On Kant's account, moral agency is only possible by a subject's participation in an ideal, super-sensible, intelligible world, one which is independent of the subject's social and psychological inclinations. While Kant believed that our knowledge of this metaphysical conception of the agent was necessarily vague and obscure by reflecting on the requirements of freedom that such a conception of the agent was a necessary presupposition of moral knowledge, or indeed, of any knowledge at all. For Kant, it is the subject's participation in the transcendental realm which ensures that its identity is given prior to and independent of whatever attachments it might contingently form in the phenomenal world.
