Are our actions morally good because we approve of them or are they good independently of our approval? Are we projecting moral values onto the world or do we detect values that are already there? For many these questions don’t state a real alternative but a secular variant of the Euthyphro dilemma: If our actions are good because we approve of them moral goodness appears to be arbitrary. If they are good independently of our approval, it is unclear how we come to know their moral quality and how moral knowledge can be motivating. None of these options seems attractive; the source of moral goodness unclear. Despite the growing literature on Kant’s moral ontology and moral epistemology the question remains open what Kant’s answer to this apparent dilemma is. According to the moral realist interpretation of Kant he endorses the second horn of the dilemma. The objectivity of our moral judgments, the moral realist argues, can only be preserved if moral values are independent of our approval. Objectivity requires that there are mind-independent moral facts, and the truth of our moral judgments depends on whether we get these facts right. Constructivists like John Rawls and Christine Korsgaard, by contrast, believe that we should endorse the first horn; the procedure itself is the source of moral value. Korsgaard does not deny that moral judgments have truth-values, but she denies that they are mind independent. Instead she claims that “values for Kant are constructed by a procedure of making laws for ourselves […] [and are then] projected onto the world” (Korsgaard, SN 112). In this paper I want to argue that the alternative between constructivism and moral realism is not exhaustive for Kantians. I want to join constructivists in endorsing the first horn, but, in contrast to Rawls and Korsgaard, I want to argue that moral goodness itself is not known by applying a rational construction procedure to our desires. Instead, it resides in the self-knowledge of practical cognizers. I call this alternative view “moral idealism”.
