A Road Not Taken: Moral Beauty In The Early Kant

This essay offers an interpretation of the moral reflection at the end of Kant's Prize Essay by bringing it together with the writings of Frances Hutcheson. The interpretation suggests that it is a mistake to look in these pages, as many do, just for an inadequate anticipation of Kant's later views on morality. They look forward instead to the Critique of Judgment and thereby suggest a nexus between ethics and aesthetics, at this point in Kant's thought, that not only helps explain his attraction to moral sense theory, but has intriguing implications in its own right.