Abstract

The apriority of moral feeling is an indispensable part of Kant's insistence on moral certainty as a foundation for ethics. Even though the moral feeling of respect cannot be the source of our knowledge of the authority of the moral law, moral feeling is a catalyst to self-criticism and moral self-confidence. It is argued that moral feeling reveals a nonempirical object, one's moral character. In fact, moral feeling plays a representational role that parallels sense experience, but does not derive from sense experience. His general remarks on sensibility and representations and his specific discussion of moral sensibility make it hard to take feeling as central to his ethics, but this paper explains how they in no way preclude a representational function for moral sense.