The ground of obligation

Autonomy of the will as the ground of moral obligation is arguably Kant's most original ethical discovery (or invention). But it is also easy to regard Kant's conception of autonomy as either incoherent or fraudulent. To make my own will the author of my obligations seems to leave both their content and their bindingness at my discretion, which contradicts the idea that I am obligatedhy them. If we reply to this objection by emphasizing the rationality of these laws as what binds me, then we seem to be transferring the source of obligation from my will to the canons of rationality. The notion of self-legislation becomes a deception or at best a euphemism.

One way of responding to this dilemma would be to trace the prehistory of autonomy in early modern ethical thinking, as has been done in two excellent recent studies by Stephen Darwall and Jerome B. Schneewind. They describe the process involved in the transformation of “self-government” from a political metaphor applied to individual conduct into a fundamental conception relating to individual persons, which is then capable of making revolutionary demands on political institutions themselves. Once we understand this movement of thought in historical context, we see that the paradoxes about obligation based on self-legislation arise only insofar as we fail to recognize (or try to resist) the change in moral conceptions underlying the best thinking modern moral philosophy has to offer us.