Abstract

Critics deny that Kant's moral theory has the resources it needs to guide our actual actions. They reject the power of reason to establish moral rules and they propose alternative notions of person and project. This paper first develops aspects of Kant's moral theory, setting out briefly his notions of personality and the primacy of moral reason. Second it considers an alternative account that has been influential in recent Anglo-American philosophy to show that its understanding of persons and projects fails to blunt the need for moral reasoning identified by Kant.