Kantian Autonomy and Divine Commands

Abstract

On a certain conception (often thought to be Kantian) of moral autonomy, it is difficult to see how morally autonomous persons could accept any morally significant concept of authority—i.e. , any concept of authority that goes beyond a mere description of a power relation in order to provide at least prima facie moral justifications for acts that would have been without justification in the absence of the authority. A few years ago Robert Paul Wolff used a supposed Kantian conception of moral autonomy to defend what he called philosophical anarchism—the claim that the concept of moral autonomy and the concept of legitimate political authority are inconsistent1; and, more recently, James Rachels has argued that a morally autonomous person could not accept divine commands as an authoritative source of moral obligation—and thus that the worship of God is impossible for an autonomous person.2