Material ends of reason: Kantian formalism, pure intelligent existence, and the possibility of a deduction of the postulate of freedom

In recent years a number of Kant scholars have all used the same highly suggestive text from the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to argue that an objective moral principle can be derived from a subjective necessity of rational psychology. Their efforts are part of a larger project to strengthen and extend the formalist tendencies of Kant's ethics. These scholars all seek ways to enhance the plausibility of a supreme value of a certain kind of autonomy---the supreme value of the freedom of human beings to set ends according to their private conceptions of value, subject only to a formal constraint of mutual noninterference in the pursuit of ends. While I argue that the views of these scholars are implausible, I concede that in a certain sense their views are consistent developments of Kant's own thought. Kant failed to devote sufficient attention to an account of what I call substantive or material ends of reason as an existence-determining account of what I call substantive or material ends of reason as an existence-determining form---he recognized their importance, but he failed to develop a systematic account of such ends. Understanding or true judgment, and material support of finite rational existence are the only two broad classes of such ends; they define the disinterested good or proper functioning of finite rational nature and make it possible to define a good will as a will which pursues these end-types alone. Without a justification of the necessity of an explicit presupposition of freedom, the concept of disinterested moral obligation can never be justified. In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant argues that the moral law as a fact of reason is all the justification of freedom that is possible or required. While I argue that the doctrine of the moral law as a fact of reason is implausible, I also argue that a justification of the necessity of an explicit presupposition of freedom is possible, but only as a mark of a new creation, intelligence endowed with causality, which comes into being as a conception of human existence as pure rational existence when cognition of subjection to disinterested morality confronts a temptation to transgress.