It is commonly held that Kant ventured to derive morality from freedom in Groundwork III. It is also believed that he reversed this strategy in the second Critique, attempting to derive freedom from morality instead. In this paper, I set out to challenge these familiar assumptions: Kant’s argument in Groundwork III rests on a moral conception of the intelligible world, one that plays a similar role as the ‘fact of reason’ in the second Critique. Accordingly, I argue, there is no reversal in the proof-structure of Kant’s two works.

The focus of my argument is whether, and in what sense, freedom is ‘revealed’ by the fact of reason in Kant’s second Critique. I examine the passages in which Kant refers to the fact of reason and conclude that he uses the term to refer to our taking morality as authoritative, and to our apprehending the content of the moral law. I then point out how various commentators have claimed each to be the fact of reason. Next I address how each is claimed by Kant to reveal ‘freedom’ to us and argue that our taking morality as authoritative is best understood as referring to our conception of ourselves as autonomous beings, and that our apprehending the moral law’s content reveals only the idea of freedom as a coherent one. Neither would demonstrate that we actually are autonomous, nor would their conjunction, despite what some commentators have claimed. In closing I defend the deflationary position that the fact of reason entitles us to postulate our freedom, but only from the practical point of view, and that it demonstrates that freedom is a coherent idea.

In the second Critique, Kant claims that the moral law is given as a fact of reason. In this paper, contra the standard view, I argue that there is a non-dogmatic way of defending this claim. And Kant’s principle of morality is widely taken to be a formal principle. How then can such a formal principle be reconciled with our substantial moral end? In this paper, I also argue that Kant’s principle of morality can be construed as a formal principle in the sense that it provides correctness conditions for moral laws, rather than providing specific moral laws.

In this article I offer a critical commentary on Jeanine Grenberg’s claim that, by the time of the second Critique, Kant was committed to the view that we only access the moral law’s validity through the feeling of respect. The issue turns on how we understand Kant’s assertion that our consciousness of the moral law is a ‘fact of reason’. Grenberg argues that all facts must be forced, and anything forced must be felt. I defend an alternative interpretation, according to which the fact of reason refers to the actuality of our moral consciousness.

In Kant’s Defense of Common Moral Experience: A Phenomenological Account, Jeanine Grenberg argues for the centrality to Kant’s ethics of the experience of the feeling of moral constraint, especially as that feeling is described in Kant’s fact of reason argument. She criticizes interpretations of the fact of reason that interpret it as primarily a certain kind of act. I defend my version of an act-based interpretation against Grenberg’s criticisms, flesh out the Fichtean background of that interpretation and raise some further questions about Grenberg’s account.