The Authority of Humanity Author(s): by DavidSussman Reviewed work(s): Source: Ethics, Vol. 113, No. 2 (January 2003), pp.

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The Authority of Humanity* David Sussman

In The Value of Rational Nature, Donald Regan challenges a central argument of much recent Kantian moral philosophy.1 For such contemporary Kantians as Christine Korsgaard and Allen Wood, the heart of Kants ethics is the claim that our capacities for rational deliberation and choice are unconditionally valuable. These Kantians hold that for Kant, the unconditional worth of our rational nature or humanity is presupposed by our ability to act for the sake of any values at all. According to this approach, morality is grounded in the norms that express a proper recognition of rational natures preeminent value as the sine qua non of all possible value. We are supposedly committed to these norms insofar as we aspire to any coherent and nondelusive experience of practical deliberation and choice. On this view, moral skepticism may remain a minimally coherent philosophical option, but only at the cost of a thoroughgoing nihilism about value in general.2 Regan does not deny that our rational nature has real value. He even accepts that this value may be an essential aspect of all value whatsoever. Regan allows that appreciative engagement by a rational subject may indeed be a necessary part of any truly good organic whole.3 He challenges only the claim that rational nature or rational choice is the sole original value from which the signicance of all other concerns is derived. Regans central objection is that this position is wildly implausible, if not downright incoherent. He argues that the exercise of rational
* Special thanks to Marcia Baron and two anonymous referees for this journal, as well as Harvards Center for Ethics and the Professions for fellowship support this year. 1. Donald H. Regan, The Value of Rational Nature, Ethics 112 (2002): 26791. 2. Christine Korsgaard, Kants Formula of Humanity, Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value, and Two Distinctions in Goodness, all in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 10633, 22549, 24975, and The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 122; Allen Wood, Kants Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 12432, and Humanity as End in Itself, in Kants Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Paul Guyer (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littleeld, 1998), pp. 16587. 3. Regan, p. 289. Ethics 113 (January 2003): 350366 2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/2003/113020006$10.00

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choice can itself have worth only through its relations to distinct and conceptually prior values, values to which such choice should be responsive. Rational choice is not good in and of itself, but only insofar as it is a capacity through which we can shape our lives in accordance with some more basic good. For Regan, to treat rational nature as the sole original value is only to fetishize the pointless spontaneity of the heroic existentialist.4 Regan rejects the radical subjectivism and projectivism about value that takes our projects to be good simply because we have chosen them: that choice requires standards, is the core of my complaint against the Kantian.5 The position that Regan attributes to Kant is indeed unappealing. Who could deny that there are some pursuits, such as bodybuilding or counting blades of grass, that are inherently worthless and remain so whether anyone clearheadedly chooses them? Who could deny that science or child rearing are by their very nature especially appropriate and reasonable objects of our concern, even were no one to care about them? When we try to gure out whether some pursuit is worthwhile, we normally focus on the character of the activity itself, not on ourselves and our attitudes toward it. When I argue with the bodybuilder, I do not refer to his desires or to mine, but to all the things that make bodybuilding patently ridiculous. If the bodybuilder can only reply by appealing to his own tastes and preferences, he has already conceded my point. This subjectivism about value appears inconsistent with the initial characterization of our practical experience from which the Kantian argument proceeds. For Regan, the core Kantian argument takes this form: 1. We cannot act without the belief that our projects are valuable. For practical purposes, then, we can say that we know our projects are valuable. 2. But we also see that our projects are not valuable unconditionally; they are not valuable just because of what they are. 3. The condition of their value is our choosing them. 4. Therefore, we ourselves must be valuable unconditionally. Only thus can we be the condition of other values.6 This argument does sound very much like the regress arguments that
4. Ibid., p. 278. 5. Ibid., p. 274. 6. Ibid., p. 271.

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Korsgaard and Wood develop.7 The approach has attracted much criticism for the move from claims 3 to 4. This inference assumes that if something is the unconditioned condition of value, it must itself have unconditional value. Regan is willing to allow this problematic move. He also accepts claim 1: that all valuing presupposes its objects to be of objective worth. What Regan attacks are claims 2 and 3, which together claim that something is of worth only insofar as it is the object of some minimally rational choice. So read, the premises seem only to show that the Kantians conception of value is incoherent. On the one hand, we are told that all rational choice presupposes its objects to be valuable independent of our thinking them so, such that our choices are accountable to some objective rational standards. But claims 2 and 3 go on to tell us that this necessary presupposition is itself necessarily false. Nothing can have value simply because of what it is, but only insofar as it is considered valuable by a rational agent. If so, then what the Kantian argument reveals is not the unconditional worth of humanity but rather a deep confusion in our own experience of valuing. To seriously value something, we must take it to be of some independent merit, but such merit can only come from our own evaluative attitudes and, thus, could never be truly independent. Regan argues that if rational choice is what the Kantian takes it to be, it is hard to see how there could be any value in it at all. Regan contends that if we do not presuppose any prior Moorean goods, rational choice can be little more than arbitrary self-launching. Such selflaunching could not really be evaluated as better or worse, correct or incorrect.8 At best, we might so launch ourselves and then retrospectively afrm the trajectory that we have taken. But we would be in bad faith to take the fact that we had committed ourselves in this way as the very justication for so doing. As Regan argues, it is difcult to see what might be valuable about such self-launching, or how such normatively unconstrained behavior could even count as choice at all.9 In retreat, we might cast radical spontaneity itself as a primitive, unanalyzable good. But while such a good would be aficted with all the epistemological and motivational problems of Moorean realism, it would also suffer the special drawback of having almost no intuitive appeal. Regan is surely right that there is something bizarre, if not inco7. Korsgaard, Kants Formula of Humanity; Wood, Humanity as End in Itself. In The Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard concludes: Kant saw that we take things to be important because they are important to usand he concluded that we must therefore take ourselves to be important (p. 122). 8. Regan, p. 275. 9. Ibid., p. 288.

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herent, in the thought that objective value could be created purely by individual exercises of rational choice. Few worries are more familiar or compelling than the thought that we have devoted ourselves to something shallow, trite, or just plain stupid, which might remain so despite our choice of it. Rational choice, insofar as it is to count as interestingly rational, must be sensitive to some such concerns. If so, then such choice cannot itself be the sole origin of value. Here I have no dispute with Regan. What I do deny is that on its most plausible reconstruction, the Kantian argument for humanity aims or needs to show that rational choice is the only original or nonderivative kind of value.10 Admittedly, Kant sometimes suggests that it is through rational choice that all value comes into the world, and in this respect Korsgaard and Wood are true to the text. However, this conclusion depends not just on the regress argument proper but on Kants generally Humean views about the nature and limits of nonmoral practical reasoning. Contemporary Kantians should dissociate themselves from these implausible views, which are also in tension with the rest of Kants moral psychology.11 Fortunately, the main thrust of Kants regress argument is independent of these further Humean claims. The argument is sufcient to establish the unconditional value of humanity, without committing Kant or the Kantian to any very specic views about the sources of value in general. I For Regan, the regress argument begins with the premise that (1) we cannot act without the belief that our projects are valuable. Here we are told that something is valuable just to the extent that there is some aspect of it that makes [some] pro-attitude appropriate [toward it].12 In thinking our projects valuable, we make a claim to objectivity, taking those projects to merit our responses in a way independent of our actually so responding. On a weak reading, this move is unobjectionable. If the value of my project is to justify or rationalize my choice of it, there must be some possibility of my being mistaken about its worth. If my project has value simply as a logical consequence of the fact that I have chosen it, such value can hardly serve to justify this very choice. However, Regan sees premise 1 as involving a claim to objectivity that goes beyond providing for the possibility of mistake. That possibility only requires that I take my ends to be valuable independently of my now nding them to be so. In addition to such weak objectivity, Regan also thinks I must presuppose my ends to be valuable regardless of whether they are or would ever be valued by anyone at all. Such value
10. Ibid., p. 268. 11. See my discussion in Sec. VI below. 12. Regan, p. 268.

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could only be found in ends that are intrinsically good, or valuable just because of what they are.13 Regan concludes that from its very rst premise, the Kantians argument supports only a regress to a kind of Moorean realism about the good. The Kantians own characterization of our practical experience supposedly rules out any hope that the origin of value could be found in the attitudes of rational subjects simply as such. Regan worries that this reply is too easy (he nds it embarrassingly brief),14 and he is right to be anxious. In assuming that the objectivity we are after in premise 1 can only be sustained by Moorean intrinsic values, Regan begs the question at hand. In the regress argument, the Kantian started from the thought that rational choice presupposes some kind of objectivity in value, independent of the particular choice in question, to which that choice is to be held accountable. Regan then introduces a false dichotomy: that value is either (a) thoroughly independent of the nature of valuing agents or (b) completely derived from the actual attitudes of individual agents. Regan thinks that since we cannot sustain any interesting sense of objectivity with b, we must adopt a. With a, we conclude that objective value must have a basis that does not depend on anything about the character of valuing agents. Yet the Kantian is trying to show that there are signicant normative standards to which the very idea of rational agency commits us. If so, then there would be norms of choice that, while prior to any particular agents attitudes, would nevertheless be bound up with the metaphysics of agency itself. Ultimately, the Kantian may or may not be able to make her case for such standards. However, in assuming that only Moorean realism can sustain the minimal objectivity presupposed by premise 1, Regan has already concluded that this project has failed. Yet it is just the viability of this project that is here at issue. II Regans further criticism of the regress argument misses its mark because it confuses what he calls intrinsic value with the Kantian endin-itself. For Regan, something is of intrinsic value to the extent that its nonrelational properties make some proattitude appropriate to hold toward it. In Groundwork II, the central text for the regress argument, Kant focuses on the concept of an end-in-itself and argues that our own rational nature is the only t candidate for such an end. This concept of an end-in-itself is importantly different from Regans understanding of intrinsic value. Kant begins the argument by asking, But suppose there were something the existence of which in itself has an absolute worth,
13. Ibid., p. 272. 14. Ibid., p. 274.

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something which as an end in itself could be a ground of determinate laws.15 As Kant suggests, the value of a true end-in-itself would not merely make some proattitude appropriate to it. Rather, such a value would be the basis of objective practical laws, which any rational agent must obey regardless of her other attitudes or concerns. For Kant, something would be an end-in-itself only if it is rationally necessary for all agents to be committed to it. He argues that if there are indeed any valid moral laws, there must be some such ends, because any categorically binding laws would effectively dene a commitment that any agent must have insofar as she is rational. Regans understanding of intrinsic value leaves out the element of practical necessity that is of central importance to Kant. After all, something could be of intrinsic value in Regans sense without being the basis of any practical necessity at all. Let us grant that scientic knowledge is intrinsically valuablethat it is worthy of pursuit, simply because of what it is. This fact does not in itself show that it is rationally incumbent upon me or anyone else actually to pursue such knowledge. There may well be other intrinsic goods, such as beauty or pleasure, that I can only effectively pursue by neglecting science. It does not even follow from the fact that something is an appropriate object of concern that I am under rational obligation to care about it. I may sometimes, without error, neglect what I know to be of value even without having anything better (or equal) to put in its place. Many people are perfectly appropriate objects of love or devotion, even though I am under no rational obligation to love any of them. Many works of art are especially appropriate objects of our attention, but it need not be a mistake to fail to be interested in any of them. There are good things that we may, without rational fault, decline to care about when full appreciation of their value still leaves us cold. Whether and how we should care about some things often depends, in part, on whether we desire to do so. Such desire is best thought of as a kind of immediate affective engagement by the merits of something, more akin to love or fascination than a brute impulse or urge.16 Such engagement is not itself a reason-giving consideration, but a way of being related to such considerations that bears on how those reasons properly address the subject. As Regan observes, my reasons to care about Caravaggios St. Jerome depend on facts about the painting, not facts about me. What does depend on me, and my affective state, is whether the
15. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4:428. (Page references to Kants works are to volume and page of the Prussian Academy edition.) 16. I take this to be the most hopeful way of reading Kants distinction between an incentive and a mere inclination.

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objective merits of St. Jerome present me with mere practical possibility, a compelling suggestion, or a kind of volitional necessity that I cannot ignore without violence to myself.17 In all these cases, the basic reasons, reecting the independent merits of the painting, remain the same regardless of my attitudes. What shifts is the response that those reasons call for from me in particular.18 Admittedly, Kant himself does not clearly distinguish the objectively good from the rationally necessary. In Groundwork II, he invites confusion by claiming that humanity, as the sole end-in-itself, is the only fully objective end and the only thing that is of absolute worth. These remarks suggest that all other goods are of merely subjective or relative value, having only the importance that we take them to have. But we should keep in mind here that Kant considers something to be good only insofar as actions for its sake are practically necessary.19 Kants entire discussion of value is conned to the domain of the rationally obligatory. Regans more generic sense of value or goodness never comes into play, despite an unfortunate similarity in terminology. Kant can thus consider humanity to be the only objective good, in his restricted sense, without having to deny that there are other things that we have reason to pursue simply in virtue of their intrinsic qualities. Humanity can be the sole end-in-itself, without having to be the only underived or intrinsic value in Regans more capacious sense. Nothing in Kants conclusion, then, need conict with the commonsense value pluralism that Regan advocates.
17. See Harry Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About, in his The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 8095, and On Caring, in his Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 15580. 18. Here I depart from an otherwise similar line of argument in Korsgaards Two Distinctions in Goodness, in which Korsgaard argues against Moorean realism on the grounds that it cannot do justice to the way our reasons for action depend on our natural interest. (She rightly rejects the appeal to organic wholes as a piece of unilluminating ad hoccery.) I agree that our reasons at least partially depend on our desires and interest in something. Yet here desire and interest must be understood as already making reference to the independent worth of their objects, rather than as rationally inscrutable impulses. As Warren Quinn argues, a completely unrationalized impulse to turn on radios hardly gives an agent any reason to do so (Putting Rationality in Its Place, in his Morality and Action [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], pp. 21028). This impulse does not give her a reason even if there is in fact something good about its object (say, if the radio already happens to be tuned to an excellent music station). Only when our desire takes the form of cognitively freighted appreciation or engagement does it make an immediate difference to what the agent has good reason to do. Natural interest does not give us reasons that are prior to the merits of their objects, even if the full signicance of these reasons may depend on the possibility of such interest. 19. Kant, Groundwork, 4:412.

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Kant never develops a fully satisfactory account of nonmoral value and motivation. While he recognizes that some interests quite properly depend on the attitudes of the subject, Kant tends to assimilate all such attitudes to a generic notion of inclination. Kant takes such inclinations to have no interesting internal rational structure, individuating them only with respect to their objects and motivational strength.20 In the second Critique, Kant even seems to suggest that pleasure and the avoidance of pain are the only possible objects of immediate nonmoral concern.21 When discussing prudence, Kant presents happiness to be just the satisfaction of all our inclinations, rationally systematized in a way that he never species. Kant does not develop the notion of a generic nonnecessitating reason for action, of something good to do that need not be something we are rationally required to do.22 I have no wish to defend Kants general account of nonmoral interest. Fortunately, the main thrust of the regress argument can be extricated from this part of his philosophy. Kant frames the regress argument purely in terms of ends that are practically necessary, rather than those that are objectively good in the broader sense. He aims rst to show that humanity is the only plausible candidate for such a necessary end. Kant then tries to show why any rational agent must presuppose that there is something that is an end-in-itself: that is, why we must consider ourselves bound by any substantive, necessitating concerns at all. The load-bearing features of this argument are separable from Kants more worrisome claims about inclination, self-love, and the nature of happiness. The regress argument can avoid Regans worries, although its ultimate success will turn on questions about the wills freedom that go beyond the scope of this reply. To reconstruct the argument, we again start with the premise that in choice, we consider our ends to be objectively valuable. We take the
20. Kant did in his later works move toward a richer account of inclination by distinguishing passions and mere affects (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary J. Gregor [The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974], Ak. 26576). Unlike affects, passions do have substantial internal rational structure, although Kant still considers them all to be forms of illusion and perverted reasoning. 21. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5:2325. 22. Kant does approach something like this distinction when he distinguishes between practical counsels and practical commands in the second Critique, but he does not develop the suggestion (ibid., 5:36). Kant also comes near this distinction in his understanding of the imperfect duties, which are concerns that we are morally and rationally obliged to care about, but to a degree and in a way that is largely indeterminate. Hampered by the poverty of his general understanding of nonmoral interest, Kant does not develop any corresponding category of the nonmoral good.

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intrinsic qualities of our ends to make our choice of them appropriate. Yet in successful choosing, we do more than just express some appropriate proattitude toward our ends. We rationally commit ourselves to these ends. Even though nothing may have been rationally incumbent upon us before we chose, we are now rationally obliged to take whatever means are necessary to these new ends of ours, so long as they remain our ends. Before I decide to go see St. Jerome, I have only a weak reason to get on the one bus that goes to the art museum (theres something to be said in favor of getting on the bus, in that theres something to be said for seeing the exhibit). But once I decide to see St. Jerome, it is now rationally incumbent upon me to take that bus, insofar as it is the only way to get to the exhibit. Perhaps at the bus stop my old bus phobia ares up. Without reconsidering or changing my mind, I fail to get on the bus. Here I have acted irrationally, knowingly going against a binding imperative of reason. Of course, in light of my fear of buses I might have reevaluated my plan and decided not to go the art museum at all. In this case no rational imperatives would attach, and I would manifest no rational failing. However, some story like this need not apply simply because I voluntarily avoided the bus. It is possible that I remain fully and sincerely committed to seeing St. Jerome despite my failure of nerve at the bus stop. If such failure counts as irrational, then it seems that rational choice has the power to impose practical necessities on me where there were none before. Such necessity goes beyond the sort of consistency conditions we impose upon ourselves when we come to a belief. When I intend to E, I bring myself under rational obligation to seek out and perform whatever is a requisite means to E. I also bring myself under obligation to seek out and perform some acts that, while not necessary to E, are potentially sufcient to bring E about. In intending E, I must do whatever is necessary and at least something sufcient to attain that end. There is no analogous necessity in the theoretical case. Some proposition p may entail or provide strong evidence for all sorts of other claims. But I am not under any rational obligation, simply in virtue of believing p, to gure out and believe anything else that p entails or supports. Belief is of course subject to rational constraints, such as those that require us to believe whatever is obviously entailed by our current beliefs or that prohibit believing anything manifestly inconsistent.23 Nevertheless, coming to a belief does not, absent any further cognitive goals, necessarily commit us to any further theoretical projects. In contrast, forming an intention does rationally commit us to some ongoing prac23. The Paradox of the Preface, however, may make us wonder about even this.

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tical tasks. Rational choice is thus a ground of imperatives in a way that rational belief is not. So far, the regress argument shows that in our most basic practical experience, we recognize our rational nature to be an authority that can make something that is good to do into something we must do.24 Such recognition is not at all adventitious: we could hardly make sense of our own agency without assuming this minimal authority to impose rational imperatives on ourselves. Rational nature thus emerges as an end-in-itself. Yet the Kantian needs to show not just that rational nature is one such end but that it is the only end-in-itself. How can we rule out, a priori, that there may be some substantive concerns that, at least once they reach a certain degree, are as rationally necessitating as our own acts of commitment? Perhaps if St. Jerome were beautiful enough, we would be just as obliged to go see it as we are to take the bus once we have decided to go the museum. Kant rules out such possibilities by invoking the general claim that the material content of all nonmoral concerns is determined purely by psychological causation. Kant here retains the Humean view that the appeal of any substantive concern is just a matter of the thought of it evoking a certain inclination in us. Since the object of such an inclination is rationally accidental, it could hardly ever qualify as an end-in-itself simply by being such an object of a desire. Kants ofcial reply here turns on some of the more implausible features of his treatment of nonmoral interest and would be question begging against the Moorean. But we can make Kants point without the troublesome excess baggage. To do so, we can exploit a plausible connection between rationality and intelligibility. If some concern is rationally binding, we might well expect a creature that is completely indifferent to that concern to be unintelligible to us in some important respect. There should be some important dimension of its being that we cannot make any sense of. This is not to say that there need be anything particularly unintelligible about any particular episode of such irrationality. Nothing makes more sense to me than the weakness of will provoked by a nice slice of cheesecake or the prospect of a few more hours sleep. While I may often violate instrumental or prudential imperatives, I need not be utterly indifferent to them, or unintelligible in my weakness. What is unintelligible is the wanton, who simply does not
24. This authority is not merely epistemic, as it would be if our rational faculties were just particularly reliable guides to what it is good to do. They are that, of course. In addition, the exercise of rational choice can create practical imperatives even when all the objective merits of the competing options fail to determine any choice as necessary. Such authority is not just a form of expertise but a fundamental normative power that we can exercise toward ourselves, as a kind of self-legislation.

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care about sticking to his putative commitments in the face of any competing temptation. The Moorean may suggest that, along with our rational nature, there are some other concerns that are rationally incumbent upon us: perhaps beauty, knowledge, or physical pleasure. To test these suggestions, we might consider a creature who is and has always been thoroughly indifferent to some such concern. Would such a person seem, not just weird, but alien to the point of incomprehensibility?25 Would we lose any sense of how to go on with him as a fellow agent and interlocutor? We would suffer such estrangement in the case of the wanton, who does not at all recognize the authority of his own rational nature. However, for other values it seems that we could acknowledge the agents strange blind spot but still understand him perfectly well in practical contexts in which that value was not at stake. It may be a sad thing to have no sense of humor or appreciation of sports, but such failings do not completely alienate us from those aficted with them. Kant himself might conclude that such agents are not even making evaluative mistakes but simply failing to have a desire that tends to be produced in the rest of us.26 We neednt follow Kant this far. Having distinguished the good from the practically necessary, we can say that the agent who is utterly unconcerned with sports may indeed be failing to appreciate a real value that should inform his deliberations. Nevertheless, his failure does not undermine our ability to make sense of him as an agent in general or to imaginatively enter into his deliberative perspective. He is at worst obtuse or benighted, not insane or hopelessly alien. We would then have grounds to conclude that the value he disdains, while truly important, still falls short of being an end-in-itself. Our ordinary experience of choice reveals that we implicitly recognize our capacities for rational commitment to have a kind of unique authority over our reasons for action. However, attributing such authority to rational choice does not make it uncriticizable. Such choice has authority only insofar as it is rational. Choice must be at least minimally informed by and responsive to the independent merits of its possible objects. Animals and insane people may make choices in some sense. Yet insofar as these subjects are unable to consider or act in light of the real merits of their options, their capacities for choice command no such authority. Nor need we say that rational choice is so authoritative that it can create real practical necessities out of any material whatsoever.
25. For a similar suggestion, see Korsgaard, The Normativity of Instrumental Reason, in Ethics and Practical Reason, ed. Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), p. 240, and Two Distinctions in Goodness, pp. 27073. 26. Except, perhaps, insofar as such concerns can be shown to have a prudential or moral dimension.

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I have argued that rational choice alone can convert something that would otherwise be only reasonable to do into something we must do. This does not entail that such choice could make a law out of something that is otherwise thoroughly bad to do. Tony Soprano may have rationally chosen his practical identity as a maoso, but this does not entail that he has any real reason to engage in the requisite whacking and clipping.27 IV This version of the regress argument shows that we implicitly recognize the authority of rational nature as the source not of goodness, but of law.28 However, the argument does not yet show us how to interpret this claim to authority. The authority of humanity as an end-in-itself might still be read in a purely agent-relative way. On such an interpretation, an agent would have to recognize the authority of her own rational nature over only her own choices. Yet the regress argument equally admits of a broader, agent-neutral reading of the authority of humanity.
27. Cf. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, pp. 18384, 25658. 28. In The Normativity of Instrumental Reason, Korsgaard develops a line of thought similar to what I have been arguing here. However, she takes her approach to be continuous with her earlier works, where she concluded that humanity is the only original source of value (p. 246, n. 61). Yet in The Normativity of Instrumental Reason it is hard to see how Korsgaard moves past the claim that humanity is the source of law to this stronger claim that humanity is the source of all goodness. The transition seems to involve an equivocation: For the instrumental principle to provide you with a reason, you must think that the fact that you will an end is a reason for the end. Its not exactly that there has to be a further reason; its just that you must take the act of your own will to be normative for you. And of course this cannot mean merely that you are going to pursue the end. It means that your willing the end gives it a normative status for you, that your willing the end in a sense makes it good (ibid., pp. 24546; my emphasis). How might willing an end make it good? As I have argued, in willing an end, an agent acquires a stronger reason to do whatever is needed to realize that end than she had before, a reason that takes the form of a rational imperative. This claim does not by itself establish that humanity is the source of all objective or intrinsic value. To reach her stronger conclusion, Korsgaard would have to invoke a more ambitious understanding of how willing an end makes it good. Willing an end would have to engender a new reason to will that end in the rst place. If so, then every minimally rational choice, even the most whimsical or arbitrary, would turn out to be self-justifying. But as Korsgaard emphasizes, a reason must be able in principle to guide and constrain our deliberation: it must be something that an agent could in principle violate. Korsgaard may not intend this stronger, more problematic reading. She does caution that whatever reason we gain by our commitment, it is not exactly . . . a further reason. This qualication may rule out precisely the conclusion that minimally rational choice is inherently self-justifying. But if this is the point of the qualication, then talk of willing making its end good seems misleading. In willing an end we do subject ourselves to rationally binding constraints, but we do not confer value in the way suggested by Korsgaards Creating the Kingdom of Ends and The Sources of Normativity. In arbitrarily willing an end I make my choice no less arbitrary, even though I may be rationally obliged to do what will promote that end.

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On this interpretation, we would recognize the active exercise of rational agency to be binding on any rational agent whatsoever. This latter reading is clearly Kants intended conclusion, but nothing in the argument so far privileges one reading of humanitys authority over the other. So far, the regress argument has only revealed only a very indeterminate commitment to us, and both interpretations are equally adequate ways of further specifying that concern.29 To decide between these competing interpretations of the authority of humanity, we must augment the initial premises of the regress argument. Considering the unconditional value of our rational nature, Kant claims that every other rational being represents his existence in this way consequent on just the same rational ground that also holds for me; thus it is at the same time an objective principle from which, as a supreme practical ground, it must be possible to derive all laws of the will.30 Kant realizes that this conclusion is not fully supported by the argument that has preceded it. He immediately adds: Here I put forward this proposition as a postulate. The grounds for it will be found in the last section.31 These further grounds that become available in Groundwork III involve the claim that the will is free. Supposedly, such freedom is an essential aspect of our experience of deliberation and, hence, something we may also assume from a practical point of view.
29. In Kants Ethical Thought, Wood rules out the agent-relative interpretation, saying that for Kant merely agent-relative reasons (simply as such) are never justifying reasons, hence not reasons at all in the sense that is relevant here. Agent-relative reasons might count as genuine justifying reasons, but only when they can be brought under a universal principle of value that gives them an interpretation in agent-neutral terms (p. 128). Wood here seems to conate agent-neutral reasons with ones that are expressible in purely general terms. If consideration C justies my doing A, then there must indeed be some general description of me and my situation such that anyone who falls under it would be justied by C in doing A. Any justifying reason has to be formulable in a way that avoids direct reference to any particular person for whom it is such a reason. In contrast, an agent-relative reason is a justifying reason that, in its appropriately general formulation, nevertheless still contains a free agent variable in the expression of C that refers back to the agent to whom the reason is addressed. The rational egoist believes that each persons ends give that person justifying reason to do what promotes them. Such reasons are grounded in a perfectly general principle, even though the reasons so grounded turn out to be completely agent-relative. Of course, this reading must admit that even if I am fully justied in doing something, someone else may be fully justied in trying to stop me. The agent-relative reading has to admit the possibility of rationally irresolvable conict. However, it seems that we cannot appeal to this fact to disqualify the agent-relative reading without tacitly assuming that justifying reasons must be something like potential legislation of a harmonious Kingdom of Ends. This latter criterion is not a feature of justifying reasons per se, but a substantive moral commitment. In rejecting the agent-relative interpretation on these grounds, we would be begging the question of the egoist (cf. Korsgaard, Kants Formula of Humanity, p. 122). 30. Kant, Groundwork, 4:429. 31. Ibid., 4:429n.

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Presupposing such freedom, we can now choose between the two competing interpretations of humanitys authority as an end-in-itself. On the agent-relative reading, where every individual recognizes only the authority of his own humanity over himself, we would have to give up any interesting conception of the wills freedom. On this approach, once an individual has made some choice, determinate practical necessities do apply to him. However, his initial choice would still involve an irreducible element of arbitrariness. The agent confronts an array of minimally appropriate projects whose merits fail to determine any particular choice to be rationally necessary. Given the rational indeterminacy of such a choice, the agents ultimate decision must be in part arbitrary. If his choice is made determinate simply as a result of the causal inuence of desire, then he will not have chosen freely at all. Yet if he has made up his mind in a way independent of both the inuence of desire and the (underdetermined) merits of the options, then his choice manifests only the empty spontaneity that cannot really be called choice at all. We might understand the value of rational nature in an agent-relative way, but in so doing we sacrice any interesting sense of our own free agency. Our freedom would begin only where our ways of making sense of action run out. On the other hand, if we interpret the value of rational nature in the agent-neutral way, we can sustain a meaningful sense of the wills freedom. The value of rational nature would then be independent of the actual choices of any particular individuals. As such, this value could provide the further normative guidance needed to make such choices fully determinate. The normative slack left by the competing merits of our options could be taken up by whatever further demands our general humanity makes on each of us as individuals. Such constraint would still be consistent with the wills fundamental freedom. While the value of humanity, read broadly, could make our choices determinate, this value would not be an end alien to the will itself. The rst stage of the regress argument showed that any rational will must recognize some such authority, even if the argument did not fully specify the sense in which the will must do so. In recognizing the general value of humanity, we would not be submitting to some external demand. Instead, we would only be accepting a particular interpretation of our own vague but ineluctable commitments. Our freedom would begin not just where our reasons run out, but at the point where we start to have a substantial understanding of ourselves as free beings. V In avoiding Regans worries, this version of the regress argument exposes itself to new doubts. For the argument to work, it must rst be the case that we do necessarily deliberate and act under the idea of freedom

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in the requisite sense. Even in the Groundwork, Kant worries that the needed kind of practical freedom is not actually presupposed by practical deliberation simpliciter. When confronting the circle, Kant suggests that the requisite freedom is to be found only in deliberation that is already informed by substantive moral commitments.32 This is a real problem, and it may have forced Kant to signicantly revise his understanding of the grounds of the moral law in the second Critique. It is also not obvious that the conclusion of this regress argument has any determinate content. Recognition of humanity as an end-initself will be an empty commitment unless there is a way of understanding the authority of rational nature that is distinct from the more limited authority that particular agents possess over themselves. Kant represents the value of humanity in terms of a hypothetical corporate rational agent choosing the basic legislation that will govern the actions of its constituent members. This ideal of a Kingdom of Ends is meant to allow us to conceive of the rational choice of a subject who is equally every rational agent in general and yet no rational agent in particular. Such an ideal is hardly self-explanatory, but it is what we would need to make sense of respecting rational nature simply as such. Insofar as this ideal turns out to have content, recognition of humanity as an end-in-itself could plausibly be rendered as a commitment to abide by whatever legislation is necessary for such a well-ordered Kingdom of Ends. Proponents of the regress argument sometimes suggest that there is a reason to promote whatever anyone rationally chooses because such choice directly confers value upon its objects. Like Regan, I nd this view implausible, but I do not think the Kantian is committed to it. The Kantian can well admit that choosing something worthless does not make it any less worthless or the choice any less misguided or foolish. The argument shows that there is always a presumptive reason to help others in the pursuit of their rationally chosen ends, but not because intrinsic value has been bestowed upon those ends. Rather, we have such reasons only to the extent that some principle of benecence, indifferent to the actual worth of the projects in question, turns out to be part of the constitution of any Kingdom of Ends. I would then have some reason to help the grass counter, but not out of respect for the value that grass counting has taken on through her choice of it. Rather, I would have a reason to help the grass counter out of respect for her as a rational chooser, even when there is nothing in her particular choices to recommend them. Her importance as an agent goes beyond her role as a detector or producer of the good. Her choices have a value that is irreducible to the value of what she has chosen. Of course, it is hard to see how we could have any reason to help someone were it the
32. Ibid., 4:44950.

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case that all of her choices turned out to be utterly worthless. But then it would be equally difcult to see such a bizarre character as a rational agent in the rst place. A full defense of Kant would have to say much more about how the legislation of a Kingdom of Ends adequately reects the authority of rational choice as such, and how this legislation manages to have determinate content. Such a defense would also have to confront the worries about the idea of freedom that Kant struggled with throughout his works. Both issues are beyond the scope of this reply. Regans objections concern only the coherence and plausibility of taking rational nature itself as the grounds of all evaluative truths. My approach to Kants account of the value of rational nature sidesteps Regans worries, because it accepts that various things may be, simply in virtue of their intrinsic properties, especially appropriate or inappropriate objects of concern and choice. The Kantian need not be committed to any particular view of the source of intrinsic value, at least in the broad sense in which Regan understands it. To show humanity to be the sole endin-itself, the Kantian need only show that rational nature alone is t to make practical demands on us. This position allows that there may still be a great many positions from which credible suggestions might nevertheless be entertained. VI Could Kants practical philosophy make a place for intrinsic values that are not wholly derivative of the value of rational nature? Despite the poverty of his explicit account of nonmoral value, Kant does seem to have the resources to accommodate this possibility. The issue turns on just how Kant understands those incentives of the will through which we entertain nonmoral interests. Regan avoids this topic, remarking only that this is not the place for a full discussion of the role of incentives in a Kantian theory of action, but the claim that we can act only on need or inclination threatens the very possibility of a nonsensuously affected rational nature, whereas Kant wants such natures to be possible, for both good and evil.33 This dismissal is puzzling. Kant never denies that our wills are sensuously affected: he only insists that our wills are not sensuously determined. Sensuously determined wills, like those of animals, would indeed be incapable of rational self-determination and, with that, any possibility of good or evil. Yet something can be sensuously affected without being thereby determined. My beliefs are certainly sensuously affected through my perceptions, but it is hardly obvious that my beliefs are causally determined by these perceptions. Kant introduces incentives in part to show how our sensible nature could inform our
33. Regan, p. 279, n. 37.

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rational choice enough to make determinate choice possible, without undermining the freedom we must possess as morally responsible agents. If such incentives are mere inclinations, it will be hard to explain why they have even the rst word in the wills deliberations, being nothing more than facts about our motivational psychology. On a more promising reading, incentives could be something more like perceptual modes of presentation by which we might recognize somethings intrinsic value. By admitting such distinct values, Kant could show why such incentives should have any deliberative signicance in the rst place. Contemporary Kantians can thus accommodate and benet from a modest realism about value, so long as they take care not to trespass upon the legislative prerogatives of our own rational nature.34

34. How should the Kantian understand the basis of such intrinsic goods that are nevertheless not rationally obligatory? In The Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard appeals to the more particular but still normatively freighted conceptions of ones practical identity, a move that does have precedent in what Kant calls our ineliminable predispositions to good (Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], vol. 6, pp. 2628). The suggestion here is that we understand value simply in terms of those normatively constituted self-conceptions that show our lives to be worthwhile. Such self-conceptions, and the values they reveal, will be more or less normative just to the degree that they make our lives better able to survive general reection while sustaining particular forms of devotion. Of course, these criteria are themselves irreducibly normative, and we should not hope to give any nontendentious or uncontroversial construal of them. While such an understanding of value locates it rmly within human attitudes and practices, it offers little encouragement to those who hope for naturalistic analyses and reductions.

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