Kant’s Contribution to Moral Epistemology

This paper addresses a specific aspect of Kant’s legacy that has been largely disregarded in contemporary ethics, that is, his impact on moral epistemology. Kant’s contribution to ethics is typically discussed under the rubric of normative ethics. Indeed, Kant’s impact on this domain can be hardly exaggerated. If some may be reluctant to credit him with the “invention” of autonomy, nobody can dispute that Kant produced one of the most interesting ethical theories of the western tradition. My purpose in this essay is to suggest that the most innovative aspect of Kant’s ethical theory is not a first-order normative ethics, even though the importance and long-lasting mark of Kant’s ethics of autonomy cannot be questioned. My conviction is that Kant is far less interested in producing a normative ethics, or a system of duties, than he is in the investigation of the proper methodology for ethics and in the nature of moral cognition. In this regard, his main contribution should be registered at the epistemological level. I further argue that this contribution should be taken to consist in a constructivist account of moral cognitions. This claim may be perplexing in more than one way, since constructivism is often characterized both as a first-order account of moral judgments and as a retreat from epistemological and ontological committments. I think this characterization is misleading in general, and mistaken for Kant’s constructivism in particular. I take Kant’s constructivism to be a methodological claim about the authority and productive function of reason and an epistemological claim about the nature of moral cognitions. 2