Abstract

My dissertation examines the relationship between Kant's account of moral experience and his means of justifying morality. More specifically, I examine the justificatory role attributed to the consciousness of being bound by the moral law in the Critique of Practical Reason and subsequent texts. ;Rather than supplying a proof of the veracity of this consciousness, Kant claims that it alone establishes the moral law's objective validity. In my attempt to determine how this consciousness achieves its purported justificatory function, I focus on an interpretation of the "practical point of view" that claims that our being bound by the moral law is validated by the way in which our consciousness of being bound undermines moral skepticism. I argue that this interpretation is still susceptible to skeptical attack and suggest an alternative account of how the practical point of view may be related to the problem of justification. ;The justification of the moral law's supreme normative authority is drawn from its satisfying what theoretical reason could not achieve: viz., an unconditioned condition. Through an attack upon Kant's claim that the moral law is constitutive of our practical point of view, I contend that the moral law cannot reach this unconditional status, leaving practical reason with the same problematic structure as theoretical reason and, thus, compromising Kant's means of justifying the moral law. ;Kant is correct to look to the practical point of view in his attempt to justify the moral law. However, the problem of justification, or more generally, moral theory, should be characterized as a practical project rather than only a theoretical concern. Although this revision will not give to the moral law the supreme authority attributed to it, recasting the relationship between the practical and theoretical in this manner will reveal why norms cannot, in principle, be fully justified