Some Kantians --call them 'Kantian ethical rationalists' --seek to justify the basic norms of morality by means of an ambitious theory of rational agency. The theory is ambitious because: (a) it specifies conditions of motivation that necessarily apply to all rational agents; (b) it does not presuppose the correctness of any type of substantive moral consideration (e.g., shared moral judgments, a conception of agency that is partly defined in moral terms, etc.). Since the theory includes both (a) and (b), it can maintain that the norms of morality are a source of reasons to act for any agent regardless of whether that agent already acknowledges the authority of moral considerations.
Have Kantian ethical rationalists been successful in trying to defend such a theory? Most contemporary moral philosophers would probably question their efforts on at least two points. First, some of them would object that the theory can provide reasons to act for any agent only because it rests on a highly implausible conception of agency --i.e., a conception that ignores the fact that the perspective of an agent is a personal and not, as the Kantian thinks, an impersonal perspective. 1 Second, other contemporary moral philosophers would argue that, even if the perspective of agency is impersonal, it is still too weak to provide us with reasons to be morally concerned about one another's interests. 2
These two objections are familiar and important. I mention them, however, only in order to distinguish them from a third objection which seems to me also to deserve our attention and which I intend to defend in this paper. Whereas the first two objections are concerned with whether there is reason to conform to the norms of morality, this third one is concerned with whether the reason giving-norms that Kantian ethical rationalists defend are also moral norms. More precisely, the