¹ Wood, Allen, Kant's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 321–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Riley, Patrick, Kant's Political Philosophy (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983), 17Google Scholar.

³ Williams, Howard, Kant's Political Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983)Google Scholar, 265, 268.

⁴ References to Kant will consist of (i) abbreviations for the works from which they were drawn (unless they are obvious in context) and (ii) the relevant volume and page references to the standard critical edition of Kant (Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences [Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1900]). The only exception will be for references to the Critique of Pure Reason (ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998]), where the supplemental references will be to pages in the first (1781 or “A”) and second (1787 or “B”) editions of the work. What follows is a complete list of the abbreviations I will use, in alphabetical order by abbreviation, including the English translation used for each text: CF = Contest of the Faculties (Kant, , Political Writings, ed. Reiss, Hans, trans. Nisbet, H. B. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970], 176–90Google Scholar); CJ = Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); CPrR = Critique of Practical Reason (Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 133–272); ET = “The End of All Things” (Kant, , Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Wood, Allen and di Giovanni, George [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 193–205Google Scholar); GMM = Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant, Practical Philosophy, 37–108); IUH = “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (Kant, Political Writings, 41–53); MM = Metaphysics of Morals (consisting of the Rechtslehre [Doctrine of Right] and the Tugendlehre [Doctrine of Virtue]) (Kant, Practical Philosophy, 353-604); PP = “Toward Perpetual Peace” (Kant, Practical Philosophy, 311–52); Rel = Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Kant, Religion, 31–192); and T&P = “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice” (Kant, Practical Philosophy, 273–310).

⁵ Also see Wood, Allen, Kant's Moral Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 95–96Google Scholar, and Yovel, Yirmiahu, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 88–90Google Scholar. Some authors have argued that the highest good is superfluous to or even inconsistent with Kant's moral theory; see, for example, Beck, Lewis White, Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 242–45Google Scholar, and Auxter, Thomas, “The Unimportance of Kant's Highest Good,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 17 (1979): 121–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Others have defended its role, including Silber, John, “Kant's Conception of the Highest Good as Immanent and Transcendent,” Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 469–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Engstrom, Stephen, “The Concept of the Highest Good in Kant's Moral Theory,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 747–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ An antinomy is “a contradiction … between two equally binding laws” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2^nd ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989]); also see Flikschuh, Katrin, Kant and Modern Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 50–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Beck, Commentary, 247–48. More specifically, I am using Beck's second reconstruction, which is itself a modified version of an earlier reconstruction by Messer, August, Kants Ethik (Leipzig: Veit, 1904), 88Google Scholar. Yovel concurs in Beck's second reconstruction (Kant and the Philosophy of History, 87 n). Among the numerous other scholars who have criticized and reconstructed the antinomy is Wood, Kant's Moral Religion, 25–34, 116.

⁸ Also see Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History, 82–83, who notes that ability (können) is a necessary condition of obligation (sollen).

⁹ Also, see Wood, Kant's Moral Religion, 21–23, and his Kant's Rational Theology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 21–22.

¹⁰ Also, see Wood, Kant's Moral Religion, 155–60. Yovel notes that a belief in the impotence of moral effort “would produce an attitude of passivity and retreat, undermining the psychological possibility of intending to promote the highest good” (Kant and the Philosophy of History, 102).

¹¹ Also, see Wood, Kant's Moral Religion, 120.

¹² Also, see ibid., 21–23, and Wood, Kant's Rational Theology, 21.

¹³ Wood, Kant's Moral Religion, 21.

¹⁴ Ibid., 21–23.

¹⁵ This last condition is designed to rule out certain odd cases where an incomplete approach to a desirable object is worse than no approach at all. For example, an absence of guns may be ideal, but an initial, merely partial approach to this ideal may make things worse by disarming victims more often than criminals. What must be “held equal” to maintain the truth of the monotonicity claim here is something like the maintenance of the gun-ownership ratio between victims and criminals. See Taylor, Robert S., “A Game-Theoretic Model of Gun Control,” International Review of Law and Economics 15 (1995): 269–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Kant's own religious beliefs, which are a contested matter, may be relevant in this context. Some scholars, such as John Hare, hold that he “personally continued to believe in the central doctrines he was brought up with,” viz. those of Lutheranism, Pietist (The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God's Assistance [New York: Oxford University Press, 1996], 38)Google Scholar. Others, such as Cassirer, Ernst (Kant's Life and Thought, trans. Haden, James [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981], 17–18, 377–97)Google Scholar and Manfred Kuehn, deny this and (in the case of Kuehn) even maintain that Kant was a lifelong religious skeptic. In his biography of Kant, Kuehn has Johann Georg Scheffner, Kant's oldest surviving friend, reflect on Kant's religious skepticism at his funeral: “Scheffner was only too much aware of Kant's belief that there was nothing to be expected after death. Though in his philosophy he had held out hope for eternal life and a future state, in his personal life he had been cold to such ideas. Scheffner had often heard Kant scoff at prayer and other religious practices. Organized religion filled him with ire. It was clear to anyone who knew Kant personally that he had no faith in a personal God. Having postulated God and immortality, he himself did not believe in either. His considered opinion was that such beliefs were just a matter of ‘individual needs.’ Kant himself felt no such need” (Kuehn, Kant: A Biography [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 2–3). We cannot rule out the possibility, then, that in the Rechtslehre Kant intended to subvert his earlier religious claims. However, I will proceed on the (defeasible) coherentist assumption that all of his works are meant to be consistent with one another and even mutually supporting. See Yovel (Kant and the Philosophy of History, 215–16) for an unsurprisingly brief discussion of Kant's infrequent practice of self-protective esotericism.

¹⁷ In “Perpetual Peace,” Kant does insist upon a naturalized deity—he uses the terms “nature” and “providence” rather than God—but the difference seems semantic rather than substantive: he speaks of nature as a “great artist,” calls its “purposiveness … the profound wisdom of a higher cause,” and says that we can make it “comprehensible to ourselves only if we ascribe it to the end of a creator of the world” (PP 8:360–62).

¹⁸ Unfortunately, dating Kant's “final word” on unachievable ends raises some exegetical issues. The Rechtslehre and Tugendlehre (which together constitute the Metaphysics of Morals) were published separately in 1797, nearly two years after “Perpetual Peace.” Scholars differ in their assessment of this work. Kuehn, for example, sees it as a “compilation of old lecture notes” and states that because of his advanced age, Kant “simply did not have the energy to satisfactorily pull together all the different strands of his arguments, let alone polish the work” (Kant, 396). If so, then “Perpetual Peace” might have a plausible claim to be the “final word.” Wood, on the other hand, considers it “the definitive form of Kant's practical philosophy” (Kant's Ethical Thought, 13). My own evaluation of it is closest to Wood's.

¹⁹ On the economic theory of dikes, see Hirshleifer, Jack, “From Weakest-Link to Best-Shot: The Voluntary Provision of Public Goods,” Public Choice 41 (1983): 371–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ This paragraph and later ones may raise the question of how my paper's argument relates to Kant's philosophy of history. Scholars commonly divide over whether his historical philosophy is strictly about external progress (i.e., the pursuit of domestic and international right) or whether it is also strongly related to internal progress (i.e., the pursuit of a good moral disposition). Louden, Robert B. (Kant's Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000], 144–52)Google Scholar provides an excellent overview of this debate. As will become evident, I (like Louden himself) draw lessons from both sides: although history is necessarily based upon observable things, especially political actions, from which we draw motivational inferences at our own peril, Kant also believes that political and especially religious progress are the preconditions for ethical progress—by promoting and at times enforcing good behavior, states and churches help members develop the capacities and attitudes needed for morality.

²¹ Also see Anderson-Gold, Sharon, “God and Community: An Inquiry into the Religious Implications of the Highest Good,” in Kant's Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered, ed. Rossi, Philip J. and Wreen, Michael (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 124Google Scholar.

²² See, e.g., Velkley, Richard, Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundation of Kant's Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Velkley, Richard, “The Crisis of the End of Reason in Kant's Philosophy and the Remarks of 1764–1765,” in Kant and Political Philosophy: The Contemporary Legacy, ed. Beiner, Ronald and Booth, William James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Cassirer, Ernst, Rousseau, Kant, and Goethe, trans. Gutman, James et al. (New York: Harper and Row, 1963)Google Scholar.

²³ Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Gourevitch, Victor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 187Google Scholar.

²⁴ Wood correctly distinguishes between two things: achieving virtue for others, which is impossible, and creating the conditions for that achievement, which is undoubtedly possible and may even be obligatory, as in the case of the moral education of children (Kant's Moral Religion, 74–78).

²⁵ For more on the relationship between self-knowledge and virtue in Kant's ethics, see Grenberg, Jeanine, Kant and the Ethics of Humility: A Story of Dependence, Corruption, and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 8.

²⁶ Kant also says that “if after this life another awaits him, he will persevere in it (in all appearances under different circumstances, yet according to the very same principle) and come ever closer to his goal of perfection” (Rel 6:68). If opacity is, as I have argued, a hindrance to moral progress, then these “different circumstances” would plausibly include motivational transparency. To be clear, Kant never claims this himself—I am extrapolating here—but if my overall argument is sound, this extension would appear necessary to preserve moral motivation and prevent despair.

²⁷ 1 Corinthians 13:12 (King James Version). Kant would find it entirely appropriate that moral philosophy guide us in the interpretation of Scripture: he argues in Religion that “since the moral improvement of human beings constitutes the true end of all religion of reason, it will also contain the supreme principle of all scriptural exegesis” (Rel 6:112). For a critique of Kant's hermeneutics, see Yovel, Yirmiahu, “Bible Interpretation as Philosophical Praxis: A Study of Spinoza and Kant,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 11 (1973): 189–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Shell, Susan Meld, The Rights of Reason: A Study of Kant's Philosophy and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 170–73Google Scholar. Insightful interpretations are also provided by Ellis, Lisa, Kant's Politics: Provisional Theory for an Uncertain World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 104–11Google Scholar; Laursen, John Christian, “The Subversive Kant: The Vocabulary of ‘Public’ and ‘Publicity,’” in What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. Schmidt, James (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 263–66Google Scholar; and Rosen, Allen, Kant's Theory of Justice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 181–86Google Scholar.

²⁹ Riley, Kant's Political Philosophy, 17. I say “may,” because even though a completely virtuous people would no longer have to be forced to conform to right, they might still need a public authority to establish and validate rights for purposes of voluntary coordination. Also note that such superfluity would hinge on virtue (and hence right) being fully attained, not simply approached.

³⁰ In his lectures on Kant, Rawls substitutes what he calls the “secular ideal” of a kingdom of ends for the highest good, which he considers a Leibnizian corruption of Kant's thought (Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000], 317). Similarly, Onora O'Neill asks the following question in a Tanner Lecture: “[M]ight we not construe the task of moral progress as a this-worldly, shared and historical, perhaps incompletable task, rather than as one that will provide each of us an occupation for an eternal afterlife?” (“Kant on Reason and Religion,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Grethe B. Peterson [Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997], 286). Also see Kaufman, Alexander, Welfare in the Kantian State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason, 153.

³¹ For a discussion of the various forms of millennialism, see Baumgartner, Frederic, Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

³² Habermas, Jürgen, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on Philosophical Justification,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Lenhart, Christian and Nicholson, Shierry Weber (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1980), 86Google Scholar. Habermas warns against the temptation to “improperly hypostatize the system of validity claims on which speech is based”; he avers that ideal communication communities are not political models but rather “thought experiments” (Habermas, Jürgen, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. Rehg, William [Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996], 322–23Google Scholar). Nevertheless, his own language frequently belies this claim, as when he states that “the theory of communicative action detranscendentalizes the noumenal realm only to have the idealizing force of context-transcending anticipations settle in the unavoidable pragmatic presuppositions of speech, and hence in the heart of ordinary, everyday communicative practice” (19). This statement is properly understood not as a rejection of guiding ideals but rather as an affirmation of their immanent (rather than transcendent) quality.

³³ Ibid., 10.

³⁴ Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 50Google Scholar.

³⁵ Rawls, John, Collected Papers, ed. Freeman, Samuel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 264Google Scholar.

³⁶ Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, 115, cf. 221.

³⁷ I do not intend to imply by these comments that Habermas and Rawls are antireligious or even that their theories lack a kind of religious ethos—far from it. For the former's views on religion and its relationship to philosophy (and critical theory more specifically), see Habermas, Jürgen, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity, ed. Mendieta, Eduardo (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002)Google Scholar. Rawls became more deeply religious during his last two years as a Princeton undergraduate, but infantry service in the Pacific during World War II permanently changed this, after which he was “no longer orthodox,” as he put it, though he appears to have retained some belief in a nonvoluntarist, non-Christian moral theism (“On My Religion,” in John Rawls, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, ed. Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009], 259–70).

³⁸ Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 115; Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Burger, Thomas (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989), 208–9Google Scholar, and Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 171, 183.