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To annihilate the subject of morality in one's own person is to root out the existence of morality itself from the world, as far as one can. Immanuel Kant writing on suicide, Mataphysics of Morals, 6:423.1
To some Kantians it may seem obvious that Kant was a moral anti-realist since he appears to have admitted his anti-realism repeatedly by invoking transcendental idealism in ethics. But to other Kantians it appears just as obvious that Kant was a moral realist given his claims that we are obligated to morality categorically, that we must believe that God exists to buttress the moral order of the world, and that when we think about the world as it is in itself as a noumenal world, we must employ reason and reason's child, morality. These different claims about Kant's moral theory stem from two sources: disagreements about the proper definition of moral realism and disagreements about Kant's own moral theory. This paper will first briefly survey different claims about Kant's realism or anti-realism and provide a definition of moral realism; then the bulk of the paper will show that the metaphysics in Kant's moral theory, when properly understood, is anti-realist.
I. CURRENT INTERPRETATIONS OF MORAL REALISM IN KANT
There is no firm agreement about whether Kant was a moral realist or moral antirealist.2 I will review three positions that exemplify different general approaches to Kant's metaethical theory: John Rawls's anti-realist constructivism, Allen Wood's realist focus on the national will, and Karl Ameriks's strong moral realist metaphysics.
Rawls takes Kant to offer a constructivist theory in which the categorical imperative is, roughly speaking, understood as a procedure for testing maxims. The result of the procedure will be a set of permissible maxims that form the content of morality; these are said to be constructed because they do not reflect any prior moral order. The categorical imperative procedure itself is not the result of construction but rather "laid out" on the "basis [of] the conception of free and equal persons as reasonable and rational, a conception that is mirrored in the procedure" and "elicited from our moral experience. "3 Thus, practical activity by agents who view themselves with a resulting collective self-conception provides the basis for a procedure that in turn provides...