Sometimes I wonder ...

Recently, I have been reading a lot of Christine Korsgaard's works in ethics. For those unfamiliar, she is a "contemporary Kantian" ethicist. In her case, this means that she has a constructivist interpretation of Kant's text. The basic idea is that we are bound to ethics, because the rules of ethics are also the rules of action. I think there are good reasons to argue this is not Kant's view, and that it does not succeed in producing the sort of ethics Kant would want.

The key to this sort of interpretation is assuming that Kant is an anti-realist in metaphysics and ethics. This would put him in line with much of contemporary philosophy, but I think the truth of the matter is more complicated for Kant. Kant is a skeptic about claims of metaphysical knowledge, but I think he assumes there is a real fact of the matter which is inaccessible to limited humans. Instead, we have access only to the re-rendered objects of our concepts and to sensed phenomenon.

What makes me unwilling to qualify Kant as an anti-realist is that his entire account is predicated on belief that he is accurately reaching the nature of cognition (through a transcendental argument) and that he thinks reason is common between the theoretical and practical dimensions. In a sense, this makes him like many contemporary philosophers -- committed to the idea of reasonability.