Kant's Moral Anti-Realism

To annihilate the subject of morality in one's own person is to root out the existence of morality itself from the world, as far as one can. Immanuel Kant writing on suicide, Metaphysics of Morals, 6:423. ¹

To some Kantians it may seem obvious that Kant was a moral anti-realist since he appears to have admitted his anti-realism repeatedly by invoking transcendental idealism in ethics. But to other Kantians it appears just as obvious that Kant was a moral realist given his claims that we are obligated to morality categorically, that we must believe that God exists to buttress the moral order of the world, and that when we think about the world as it is in itself as a noumenal world, we must employ reason and reason's child, morality. These different claims about Kant's moral theory stem from two sources: disagreements about the proper definition of moral realism and disagreements about Kant's own moral theory. This paper will first briefly survey different claims about Kant's realism or anti-realism and provide a definition of moral realism; then the bulk of the paper will show that the metaphysics in Kant's moral theory, when properly understood, is anti-realist.

1. Current Interpretations of Moral Realism in Kant

There is no firm agreement about whether Kant was a moral realist or moral anti-realist. ² I will review three positions that exemplify different general approaches to Kant's metaethical theory: John Rawls's anti-realist constructivism, Allen Wood's realist focus on the rational will, and Karl Ameriks's strong moral realist metaphysics.

Rawls takes Kant to offer a constructivist theory in which the categorical imperative is, roughly speaking, understood as a procedure for testing maxims. The result of the procedure will be a set of permissible maxims that form the content of morality; these are said to be constructed because they do not reflect any prior moral order. The categorical imperative procedure itself is not the result of construction but rather "laid out" on the "basis [of] the conception of free and equal persons as reasonable and rational, a conception that is mirrored in the procedure" and "elicited from our moral experience." ³ Thus, practical activity by agents who view themselves with a resulting collective self-conception provides the basis for a procedure that in turn provides the content for morality. On this view Kant is seen as a moral anti-realist because morality is not independent of the practice and self-conception of certain types of beings. ⁴

Wood focuses on the nature of the rational will as such, not any particular activities or thoughts of particular beings. He sees Kant as holding that the truth of moral statements stems from reason itself, identical for Kant with the rational will. The basis of the independent truth of moral statements, then, is the nature of reason itself, not the practice or thoughts of particular beings endowed with reason. Reason itself provides the ground for the derivation of particular moral principles. Wood holds that "since Kant holds that moral truth is irreducible either to what people think or to the results of any verification procedures, he is a moral realist in the most agreed-upon sense that term has in contemporary metaphysics and metaethics." ⁵ Wood allows for the possibility in principle for us to be mistaken regarding moral principles because our judgment might err, individually or collectively, by failing to agree with the idea of the rational will. The real moral principles are not dependent on our actual beliefs about them. ⁶

Ameriks takes Kant to insist on a strong metaphysical grounding for morality. He sees Kant as a realist insisting on an independent standard of morality that can be known by human reason yet is not created by it: ⁷ "In practical philosophy we move beyond appearances, we have absolute truth" of the real standards of morality in...