ABSTRACT
Kant’s analysis, while it incorporates Hobbes’s, does not limit practical rationality to an instrumental role, to the adoption of the most effective means to personally desired or desirable ends (the totality of which constitutes the agent’s happiness). To act or will according to law is to act or will rationally or coherently for Kant. Thus a free will is a rational will. Morality then implies freedom, which implies rationality, so that moral action must be rational. For Kant, as for other philosophers, reason aims at and creates coherence within whatever domain it operates, and coherence is the mark and measure of rationality. Kant’s distinction between ground and obligation here may be similar to the newer distinction between prima facie and overriding obligations. He would probably have resisted the notion of an obligation that is merely prima facie, since he holds that all obligations bind rational agents necessarily, rather than sometimes.
