The Will and the Good

Abstract Recent decades have witnessed sharp disagreement about the character of Kant’s metaethical position. Constructivists have read him as thinking of moral value, against the example of his rationalist predecessors, as constructed by acts of the human mind. Realists have read him as thinking of such value, in the company of these predecessors, as constituted prior to human nature altogether. I argue that both camps have mischaracterized Kant’s position, in particular as it contrasts with that of the rationalists, and that the correct characterization depends on an underappreciated distinction between two forms of constitutivism. While the rationalists follow a medieval precedent in thinking that the human will is by nature the power to love and pursue a good constituted prior to it, so that they are aptly described as endorsing a heteronomist constitutivist conception of the relation of the will to the good, Kant defines the good in terms of the will as the object to which its internal standard directs it, thereby embracing an autonomist constitutivism.