ABSTRACT
At the end of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant introduces something new into ethical thinking and into the idea of what it is to be enlightened. There are two features embedded in Kant's moral theory that it is useful to explore further. These are the notion of personhood and the idea of freedom as rational autonomy. In Habermas’s Kantian discourse ethics, however, whether a norm is universalisable is decided through actual agreement, rational consensus amongst the community of speaking subjects. Kant’s moral theory thus leads directly to the idea that persons, rational agents, have a special value and are deserving of moral respect. For Kant, external influence also includes the influence of our own desires, feelings and inclinations. For a more recent take on Kantian ethics that seeks to address these problems, we can turn to the work of the contemporary thinker Habermas.
