Facundo Rodriguez

‘[Loneliness] comes from a vague core of the self’ wrote Sylvia Plath. I think Plath is right. To show why, I turn to Kant. For Kant, what lies at the ‘core of the self’ is our capacity for self-consciousness. But, self-consciousness, Kant warns, opens an ‘abyss’ between the active ‘I’ of which we are conscious and the passive phenomenal world we experience. Loneliness, I argue, is the painful experience of standing on the ‘brink of the abyss’, from the standpoint of the noumenal ‘I’. Like Kant, but unlike Plath, I think there is a way out of the ‘prison of the self’ – as Kant calls it. To escape the prison we need a fellow agent to come to this side of the abyss, with whom we can ‘unite our will’ in shared action and thought. We escape the loneliness of the self-conscious ‘I’ in a shared ‘we’.

The debate on final value has been so far understood as a debate over what sort of properties final value depends on. The debate’s reliance on mere dependence has, I argue, made it very difficult for conditionalists to put forward a coherent positive alternative to intrinsicalism. Talk of dependence is too coarse-grained and fails to distinguish between different ways in which value can metaphysically depend on other properties of the value bearer. To remedy this, I propose that we bring back a ‘forgotten’ distinction between two ways in which value can depend on other properties. We should distinguish those properties in virtue of which a value is had—the grounds of the value—from those on condition of which it is had—which following Dancy I call the enablers of the value. With this distinction in hand, I offer a clear re-statement of the two main conditionalist accounts of final value: non-instrumentalism and non-derivatism. When understood not as making claims about the properties on which final value depends but rather as making more specific ones about the properties that ground final value, these accounts are perfectly coherent.

It is common for constructivists to claim that Kant was the first philosopher to understand moral facts as ‘constructions of reason’. They think that Kant, just like the constructivist, proposes a procedure – the Categorical Imperative – from which the order of value can be ‘constructed’ and grounds the validity of this construction procedure not in some previous value but in its capacity to solve a practical problem, the problem of ‘free agency’. I here argue that this reading is misguided and propose that we read Kant as a teleological realist instead. Kant is a realist in that he takes the value of rational nature to be objective and so not ‘constructed’. Kant is a teleological realist insofar as his derivation of the moral law from the objective value of rational nature relies on a teleological understanding of rational nature.