The Authority of Humanity

Abstract

In “The Value of Rational Nature,” Donald Regan challenges a central argument of much recent Kantian moral philosophy. For such contemporary Kantians as Christine Korsgaard and Allen Wood, the heart of Kant’s 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 nature’s 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. 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. He challenges only the claim that rational nature or rational choice is the sole original value from which the significance of all other concerns is derived. Regan’s central objection is that this position is wildly implausible, if not downright incoherent. He argues that the exercise of rational