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7 - Value and the inexplicability of the practical

from Part III - Morality beyond nature?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2015

Frederick Rauscher
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Summary

Chapter Seven moves from value in particular to the status of the practical point of view, or moral experience more broadly, in general. I reject the possibility of any non-natural, intrinsic value property and instead show that the value of humanity as an end in itself is nothing more than the highest rank in the order of ends that reason imposes on nature through the categorical imperative. The intelligible order of things is not an order of intelligible things but a rational ordering of natural things. Kant’s various discussions of this direct application of the moral law to experience identify this order as the moral or intelligible world. This is the way that practical reason applies to nature within the practical point of view. Culminating this chapter is a look at the limits to practical reason that Kant reveals in Groundwork III, where he admits that reason’s own structure that requires both systematic connection and unconditional explanation is responsible for the claim that there is a necessary moral law, and holds, in language similar to that of the Third Antinomy, that reason, the source of morality, is itself ultimately incomprehensible. This point suggests that Kant is an empirical moral idealism.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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