Response to My Commentators

Abstract The commentators have focused on my interpretations of responses to Kant’s moral philosophy by K. L. Reinhold, Friedrich Nietzsche, and several of the British Idealists, including R. G. Collingwood and John Rawls. I argue that, contrary to Reinhold, Kant’s conception of freedom does include the source of moral normativity in its distinction between Wille and Willkühr ; that, in contrast to Nietzsche’s ‘exceptionalist perfectionism’, Kant’s insistence upon the equal right to freedom of all remains a defensible ideal; that Collingwood underestimated the subtlety of Kant’s moral philosophy on a number of crucial issues and, in particular, failed to recognise the importance of Kant’s version of the traditional distinction between perfect and imperfect duties; and that in her critique of both Kant and Rawls, Catherine Wilson demands from their political philosophy what, on their accounts, should be expected only from the other half of moral philosophy, namely ethics – again, primarily the domain of imperfect duty.