Objective Imperatives: An Exploration of Kant's Moral Philosophy

Abstract

Kant is hardly an unappreciated philosopher, but in Objective Imperatives, the eminent Kant scholar Ralph Walker argues persuasively that the strength of Kant's account of the objectivity of morality and his defence of free will have not been sufficiently recognised and that Kant's views about these topics may well be true, or close to it. If one asks why the force of what Kant says has not been fully realised, then Walker blames Kant himself. Though eager to put his opinions before a wide public, he had little sense of how to present his arguments in a way most people could grasp what is essential to them. ‘Kant was never very good at making his ideas clear to his readers, … The result is that the reader is almost bound to be left with a caricature of his real position’ (p. 3). In what follows, I shall endeavour to set forward Walker's analysis of these two issues, though there is much else of great value in the book, such as a painstaking analysis of the Categorical Imperative.