Kantian autonomy and the authority of moral judgment

This dissertation examines the connection between moral judgment and autonomy in Kant's critical philosophy. In part one I argue that Kant characterizes the act of making a moral judgment in terms of the exercise of a special kind of authority and that the source of this authority is the autonomy of the person. This view has its roots in his account of theoretical judgment. Where his predecessors thought of judgments as complex representations, Kant thinks of the act of making a judgment as essentially a matter of making a claim to speak for everyone. The representation of objects or states of affairs by means of a judgment is understood as a function of this more basic characteristic. In his practical philosophy Kant uses this idea to distinguish moral claims from other forms of practical judgment. Genuine moral judgments are normatively inescapable. On this model, to make a moral judgment is to make an impartial claim about the constraints imposed on conduct by our shared humanity.; In part two I explain how autonomy confers the authority we exercise as practitioners of moral judgment. After reviewing Kant's argument for the idea that only autonomy can ground moral judgment, I address two common obstacles to appreciating his view. First, there is the suspicion that the very idea of autonomy as self-legislation is, as G.E.M. Anscombe famously put it, an "absurdity." The problem seems to be that you cannot meaningfully bind yourself, since if you have the power to bind, then you also have the power to release. My treatment of this issue focuses on a debate in contemporary ethics between Christine Korsgaard and G.A. Cohen. I argue that both of these philosophers overlook Kant's own response to the objection, which is to be found in his claim that one can be meaningfully bound to self-imposed laws by the respect felt towards what he calls one's "moral personality."; Then I address a second long-standing complaint, namely, that Kantian autonomy is hopelessly mired in an untenable conception of freedom and rational agency. I argue that this objection stems from a failure to recognize the extent to which Kant separates the theoretical question of freedom from the practical question of autonomy. My claim is that in the practical domain, the problem is not freedom vs. determinism but, rather, autonomy vs. heteronomy. The issue for Kant is not whether we, as individual agents, have the strength to break the causal chains of nature. Instead, the issue is whether we have the ability to base our decisions on rational considerations that do not stem from desires and inclinations. He argues that each of us does have this ability, and that it rests on our capacity to identify with our moral personality, or, our "proper self." Moral autonomy depends on this capacity for identification. On the reading I propose, the problem of autonomy pertains to questions regarding the structure of the self rather than questions regarding the scope of natural causality or the nature of transcendental idealism.