In this challenging book, Katerina Deligiorgi develops and defends an account of autonomy as a practical ideal. Her account is inspired by themes present in the work of Immanuel Kant, but she prioritizes texts and debates from contemporary metaethics. While this combination sometimes makes the argumentative structure of her account demanding, the problems she addresses are interesting and important, and the solutions she offers are novel and provocative. Scholars working at the intersection of Kantian ethics and contemporary metaethics will find Deligiorgi’s book stimulating and rewarding.

Deligiorgi begins by noting the commonsense appeal of the value of autonomy, which ‘gives expression to the idea that we can lead our lives rather than suffer them’ (1). Following Terrence Irwin, she argues that autonomy is important and worth having because we value freedom, and autonomy is a kind of freedom worth valuing (9).

However, the Kantian claim that autonomy has an essentially moral value has faced many critics. Deligiorgi presents two fundamental criticisms of autonomy as a moral ideal. The first criticism, put forth by scholars such as Iris Murdoch and Charles Larmore, challenges the plausibility of autonomy as a moral ideal because it is essentially egoistic and hence amoral. On this view, Kant’s valuing of autonomy amounts to nothing more than an unlimited and ungrounded exultation of the self with no regard for others (1). Deligiorgi observes that this objection has led Kantians to appeal to rational principles and reflection in order to bring order to the chaos of self-assertion. This move gives rise to the second criticism, where scholars such as Bernard Williams object that Kant’s view is overly reliant on abstract, universalistic rational reflection. Universalism in ethics is alienating and distorts and undermines common moral experience (2).

Deligiorgi’s strategy for addressing these criticisms is to develop an account of autonomy that is intersubjective and faithful to moral experience rather than egoistic and alienating. She points to Kant’s definition of autonomy as ‘the idea of the will of every rational being as a universally legislating will’ in order to show that Kantian autonomy ‘centrally involves our relation to others’ (vii). As she sees it, the common moral question of ‘what ought I to do?’ shows that, far from being alienating, the desire for knowledge and reflection is present in common sense morality from the beginning (12). She continues to develop a complex and novel response to these objections throughout the rest of the book.

Chapter 2 is concerned with the possibility of objective moral knowledge. It situates Kant’s view within the semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical taxonomies that have been developed within contemporary analytic metaethics. Deligiorgi argues that addressing epistemic issues is essential to her theory of autonomy, since ‘autonomy states that we are able to judge right and wrong correctly and to know what morality demands of us’ (37). This concern with moral knowledge is firmly grounded in the common moral experience of posing the question ‘what ought I to do?’ Deligiorgi takes seriously the common moral intuition expressed by this question: that it is possible to attain knowledge of the correct answer to it (35). Common moral experience is thus cognitivist, in that it is committed to the view that moral utterances express judgments that are capable of being true or false, rather than expressing non-truth evaluable pro-attitudes.

But what is it that makes a moral judgment true or false? Deligiorgi gives two reasons for resisting the view that the existence of true moral judgments necessitates the positing of a realm of sui generis moral facts and properties. The first is John Mackie’s familiar criticism that such entities are metaphysically and epistemically mysterious, in that they are nothing like any other facts and properties that we know. The second is that the existence of moral facts that are prior to the will is incompatible with the will’s autonomy. Such facts would furnish a law for the will lying outside the will itself, thus violating autonomy (43).

Deligiorgi’s solution to the problem of what makes moral judgments true begins with the claim that Kant does not adopt a correspondence theory of truth, where moral judgments are true to the extent that they conform to some independently given moral reality. Rather, moral truth consists in agreement with the moral law. Specifically, it consists in agreement with the moral law’s requirement that our maxims be universalizable. Deligiorgi glosses the demand for universalizability as a requirement for consistency in moral experience and moral concepts (53). This purely formal account of moral truth allows Kant to have a notion of moral truth without introducing a mysterious realm of moral facts. Deligiorgi claims that the universalizability test also ‘directs our moral reflection and enables us to identify what is right’ (53-4), and thereby has a positive function. However, it is unclear how the test could go beyond the merely formal, negative function of eliminating inconsistencies in moral thinking and generate positive, substantive content any more than standard universalizability tests can.

On Deligiorgi’s view, the demand for universalizability is not foisted upon common moral experience by ethical theory, but rather emerges from thoughtful engagement with common moral experience itself. Thus Kant’s universalist ethics is not an alienating intellectualist abstraction from common ethics, but merely a ‘philosophical affirmation of our moral cognitive competence’ (52). Nor is it cognitively egoistic, since this competence is fully realized in an ideal moral order that is patterned after the universalizability test and valid for every rational being (59).

In Chapter 3, Deligiorgi takes up the issue of the practicality of moral knowledge, i.e., the question of the performance of moral action once universalizability tests have determined what ought to be done in order to realize reason’s idea of a consistent moral order. The most important and interesting portion of this chapter is the author’s sustained critique of the psychologistic interpretations of Kant’s moral philosophy that dominate the literature. Deligiorgi claims that such psychologistic interpretations rely on a Humean belief-desire model of moral psychology that does not capture all of the aspects of Kant’s view (67).

Deligiorgi persuasively argues that the fundamental problem with the psychologistic interpretations of Kant’s view is that they get the relationship between reason and motivation backwards. On the psychologistic interpretation, Kant argues from the practicality or motivational force of certain reasons for action to the validity of the moral law. However, in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues in the opposite direction: he first formulates the moral law, and then claims that the practicality of pure reason is a corollary of the moral law (69). From this passage, Deligiorgi draws her most fundamental and wide-ranging conclusion about Kant’s metaphysics of agency.

On her interpretation, the core of Kant’s metaphysics of agency is the claim that there are a priori principles of practical reason that determine the wills of rational agents as such, independently of empirical conditions (87). This metaphysics of agency in turn grounds Kant’s moral psychology, which is much richer and more open to various motives than is often thought (88). She argues that this understanding of the metaphysics of agency is capable of grounding both the obligatory character of moral propositions and the relevance of judgments in explaining action in a way that purely psychologistic interpretations cannot (84).

Deligiorgi’s claim that Kant’s metaphysics of autonomy is prior to his moral psychology is a vitally important corrective to psychologistic readings of his view that dominate the literature. However, her discussion of this claim would have benefitted from a closer engagement with Kant’s account. For example, Kant’s discussion of the moral incentive of respect for law in the third chapter of the second Critique provides a prime example of metaphysics grounding psychology without degrading into psychologism.

In Chapter 4 Deligiorgi explores the implications of her metaphysical reading of Kant’s theory of agency and autonomy. She begins by claiming that a commitment to naturalism drives the anti-metaphysical psychologism in the work of contemporary Kantians such as Korsgaard and Guyer. She then argues that interpretations that embrace psychologism, internalism, and the reduction of justificatory reasons to motivational ones cannot escape the charges of egoism directed at Kant’s view (117). Instead of reducing normative to motivating reasons, Deligiorgi adopts a strategy showing that the agent, ‘properly reflecting on her commitments and cares, is already proleptically, let us say, moral.’ (117). She does this by investigating the apriority of the universalizability test in a way that shows its normative content.

Deligiorgi’s argument for the apriority of Kant’s ethics links universalizability to apriority by means of the principle of contradiction as a criterion for a priori conceivability. The universalizability test, she argues, ‘is just a version of the principle of contradiction’ (136). As Deligiorgi herself admits, she uses non-Kantian arguments to come to a Kantian conclusion about the apriority of moral judgments. She argues that the link between apriority and universalizability allows Kant to generate moral content for autonomy (137). A test for universalizability should not be regarded as a procedure for deducing particular duties, but rather as a way for us to expand our practical thinking from our own perspective to that of other rational co-legislators by means of a ‘perspectival ascent’ (139).

In Chapter 5, Deligiorgi resumes the discussion of moral motivation from Chapter 3, but this time with an eye to addressing an objection raised against Kant’s view by critics from Schiller to Bernard Williams. This is the complaint that Kant’s ethics of autonomy, which requires us to do the right thing because it is right, is austere and alienating. While Chapter 3 shows that practical reason determines the will independently of empirical conditions or desires, this does not entail, on Deligiorgi’s view, that a broader range of emotional states cannot accompany the necessary cognitive and motivational features of her theory of autonomy that she outlines in chapters 2 and 3. She appeals to a range of Kant’s writings in order to show that he acknowledges a broader palette of motivational resources than the textbook reading of Kant’s view in the Groundwork would have it. Moral emotions do not play a cognitive role in determining what should be done (171), as Schiller claims they do, but they play an important motivational role in moving us to do what reason tells us ought to be done (166). In addition, this reference to an objective account of what ought to be done that is valid for all autonomous co-legislators provides a way for Kant to avoid egoism that is not available to a Schillerian ethics of authenticity (172).

In the concluding chapter, Deligiorgi develops the moral content and metaphysical structure of her Kantian interpretation of autonomy in dialogue with historical and contemporary accounts of autonomy. She begins by examining Harry Frankfurt’s and Gerald Dworkin’s contemporary psychological theories of autonomy in light of the previous discussions of Schiller and Kant. Deligiorgi argues that the central role played by authenticity and independence in these views give rise to irresolvable problems regarding agent involvement, responsibility, and solipsism. She looks to Hegel’s socialized account of autonomy in order to lend intersubjective substance to autonomy, but then rejects it for two reasons. The first is that it precludes moral thinking that transcends the ascriptions and evaluations that are given in actual social contexts to include all rational agents. Morality, she writes, collapses into social etiquette on Hegel’s view (190). The second problem is that any attempt to transcend concrete social relations by appealing to the historical teleology of absolute spirit seems to be incompatible with freedom and agential control.

In the final pages of the book, Deligiorgi returns to Kant’s metaphysics of freedom in order to make sense of an idea of autonomy that can combine both intersubjectivity, and hence morality, and freedom, understood as agential control. An interpretation of Kant’s views on agential control faces the challenging task of making sense of the mysterious Kantian notion of the ‘causality of reason.’ Deligiorgi aims to remove the mystery by arguing that the causality of reason involved in Kantian agential control does not involve causality in any standard sense (192). On her view, the causality of reason refers to an agent’s ‘power of origination,’ which she understands as ‘the capacity to make certain ends our own on the basis of our deliberation’ (201). We exercise this capacity not when we cause certain things to happen, but when we submit our choice of ends to rational laws. This understanding of freedom as a capacity to adopt ends in accordance with rational laws provides the link between freedom, autonomy, and morality at the core of Deligiorgi’s view.

The most important and interesting feature of Deligiorgi’s ambitious book is her claim that contemporary interpretations of Kant’s ethics are overly psychologistic and anti-metaphysical, and therefore fail both philosophically and as interpretations of Kant’s view. Her claim that a metaphysically robust reading of Kant’s account is the solution to psychologism echoes Kant’s own claim at the beginning of the second part of the Groundwork that morals can be given a secure foundation only if we go beyond the inclination-based moral psychology of popular moral philosophy and undertake a ‘metaphysics of morals.’ One might hope that this would initiate a move toward more metaphysically serious readings of Kant’s practical philosophy in the literature.

However, Deligiorgi’s own metaphysical reading of Kant’s theory of autonomy is quite modest and makes limited use of the rich metaphysical resources available in Kant’s texts. Her discussion of Kant’s metaphysical views focuses on two passages from the Critique of Practical Reason, where Kant lays out the fundamental law of pure practical reason and its corollary (69), and on texts from the Metaphysics of Morals. However, Kant’s most important discussion of the metaphysical possibility of the absolute practical necessitation of the will begins in the second part of the Groundwork and develops throughout the whole of the second Critique. Even if Kant’s metaphysics turns out to be too extravagant for contemporary tastes, it would be helpful to have a more comprehensive account of what he actually had to say on the matter.

Nevertheless, Deligiorgi’s main aim is to contribute to contemporary debates on autonomy and not to give a rigorous exegesis of Kant’s texts, so the metaphysical parsimony of her interpretation should serve her well in this context. Her book is an original and wide-ranging effort to bring Kant into conversation with contemporary views of autonomy, and her call for a return to metaphysics in Kantian ethics should provoke much discussion.