Dugald Owen, Fort Lewis College
I defend the Kantian project of deriving moral constraints on action from norms of rationality holding for every agent. Though the spirit is Kantian, the details borrow much from Nagel. The paper is intended in part as a reply to recent sympathetic commentators on Kant, including Allen Wood and Paul Guyer, who insist that he needs a primitive commitment to the value of reason in order to secure the Categorical Imperative as a constraint on rational action. Barbara Herman, too, has argued that Kant must be seen as simply positing the value of rationality – rather than deriving it from explanatorily prior norms of reason – in order to make his position fully comprehensible. I aim to show that no such brute posit is needed to derive, and so to justify, the value of reason or the Categorical Imperative. I am not so much concerned with historical interpretation as with the possibility of a successful argument from reason to morality.