ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Immanuel Kant has an account of the moral law’s status as a Fact of Reason which is neither viciously circular nor dogmatic, and which would nevertheless fall short of constituting the sort of deduction which Kant explicitly denies people. One of Kant’s most puzzling remarks is the claim, at the end of the Groundwork, that “people do not indeed comprehend the practical unconditioned necessity of the moral imperative, but they nevertheless comprehend its incomprehensibility. Kant has treated the ideas of Good and Evil as categories of practical judgment and action, while the moral law is supposedly conceptually prior to them all. Kant’s account of role that the unity of apperception plays as the “highest principle of the critical philosophy” is notoriously obscure. The logical autonomy of the practical reasoning is all Kant needs to protect the moral law from theoretical challenges.
