The Scope of Autonomy, Katerina Deligiorgi's excellent new study, has a number of noteworthy strengths. First, unlike most contemporary approaches to the topic of autonomy in Kant, it does not ignore the law-like or constraining features of autonomy in a genuinely Kantian sense. Second, it makes an unusually cogent and powerful case for the theoretical and practical superiority of Kantian autonomy, so understood, to ‘personal autonomy’ as it has come to be known both in the technical literature and more generally. Third, she is particularly attentive to the ways in which the drift of recent meta-ethical discussion has distorted the reception of Kant's moral thought in the English-speaking world, which tends to read Kant through the lens of Bernard Williams's distinction between externalism and internalism (and similar concessions to an ethics that is fundamentally Humean in inspiration). What such readings especially miss is Kant's peculiar success in sailing between the Scylla of moral subjectivism and the Charybdis of moral naturalism. Her criticisms of much recent scholarship, on this and related points, are both deeply instructive and unusually and enviably incisive.

Deligiorgi takes her fundamental bearings (wisely, in my view) from the moral life itself, and, in particular, that dimension rooted in our sense that moral action is, as she puts it, ‘up to us’. Autonomy, she says, ‘gives expression to the idea that we lead our lives rather than suffer them’ (1). Her stated goal is ‘to identify the morality of autonomy’ (5), i.e. to formulate a theory of autonomy that captures both our capacity for ‘self-determination’ (or sense of ‘authorship’) and our ‘responsiveness to [moral] reasons’ (2). Autonomy, as she understands it, is not a ‘birthright of the natural individual’, nor does it flow from some more conceptually austere notion of ‘personhood’, but is, as she states, ‘a practical ideal, nothing more and nothing less’ (5). (To what extent this practical ideal can be fully divorced from ‘nature’ or some other underlying objective reality is an issue I will return to).

Kant's starting point, on her account, is the question ‘what ought I to do?’ as posed from within the moral point of view, i.e. as ‘an ordinary expression of moral perplexity’ (12). And it is one of the great virtues of her approach that she takes this starting point as both necessary and irreducible if Kant's notion of autonomy is to have any grip on us. As she sees, Kant does not aim to refute the thorough-going moral sceptic, if there are any such, nor to derive moral claims from non-moral premises. The main goal of Kant's moral philosophy, as represented here, is to vindicate our ‘ordinary sense that we have a power to do or refrain from doing’, that is to say, ‘to show how things must be’ if the self-conception of human agents necessary for moral conduct ‘is to be sustained’ (15).

Autonomous agents, on the author's account, are self-legislating only to the extent that they are co-legislating. In stressing the other-regarding aspects of autonomy, she means to counter certain prevalent strains in contemporary Kant scholarship, which heroize an idealized personal agent or otherwise lose sight of Kant's specific emphasis on human finitude. At the same time, Kantian autonomy, as she presents it, is multi-faceted, with cognitive, motivational and ‘nomic’ elements that constitute a systematic whole in ways she proceeds to elaborate.

Her related exploration of the distinction between the cognitive and motivational aspects of autonomy is especially valuable, and might have gained additional support from a consideration of the doctrine's genesis. (Kant restricted reason's function to cognition, as distinguished from motivation, until fairly late.) The primary role of the categorical imperative, according to the author, is to provide a test of what is and is not morally allowed – assuming that the core of moral action lies in doing only as one would be done by – rather than to yield comprehensive knowledge of specific duties. ‘Consciousness of the law is a cognition but not cognition of a pre-existing object’ (58). Nor does such cognition presuppose prior knowledge of some ‘fact’ about the good, be it that of ‘humanity’, ‘freedom’ or ‘personality’, to name three such alleged moral facts. Deligiorgi struggles a bit with the Kant's famous ‘factum of reason’, though further consideration of the meaning of the term ‘factum’ (which in Latin literally means ‘done deed’) might lend her overall case further support. The cognitive import of the categorical imperative is better understood, according to the author, as a refinement of the golden rule, or the injunction to treat others as one would be treated (not make an exception for oneself), here presented as an irreducible moral starting point.

Chapter 3 turns from moral cognition (or knowing what is right) to moral motivation (or doing it). Deligiorgi aims to resolve, on non-Humean grounds, the famous (Augustinian) puzzle about how we can know what is right without doing it. Her solution is ‘externalist’; that is, it tries to give due weight to the binding or obligatory character of moral norms. At the same time it means not to slight the requirements of moral authorship, or our sense that at times morality involves inner strength and struggle. To do so, she is forced further into the realm of ‘metaphysics’ than most contemporary Kantians have been willing to venture, though perhaps not quite far enough (107).

Chapter 4, on ‘freedom as constraint’, provides her most telling arguments against the ‘internalism’ of scholars like Bernard Williams without succumbing to the equally unsatisfactory ‘expressivism’ of scholars like Paul Guyer or Christine Korsgaard. As she duly notes, what Williams cannot explain is how we can properly blame someone (as we do) whose ‘motivational set’ happens not to contain the moral law – our sense, in other words, that doing what's right is different from doing what one happens to desire. She does so by detaching our notion of the moral law's ‘a priority’ with its ‘necessity’ (which she denies) and instead giving it the function of ensuring ‘the conceivability of the existence of … a single principle for morality’ (135). This permits her to ground ‘objectivity’ in something other than some alleged moral ‘fact’ (e.g. in Guyer's case, that freedom just is objectively good or choiceworthy). Autonomous ‘co-legislation’, on her account, ‘is an attempt to capture the idea that we think of ourselves as sitting among other legislators who have a legitimate claim to passing judgment on the law we propose to pass’ (138). I think that the author could carry this line of argument further if she more fully attended to the moral law's role in establishing the objective ‘reality’ of an intelligible world, informed by what Kant calls the ‘laws of freedom’, whose membership consists in every morally accountable agent.

Instead, Deligiorgi adopts the less metaphysically demanding strategy of linking objectivity with universality. As a result, who these co-legislating others are remains ‘indeterminate’, as she puts it. Not only is it ‘not clear who the others we should include in our deliberation are’; it is also not clear what it is to think of them, or of ourselves, as belonging to the class of ‘rational beings’ (138–9). This has the virtue, she says, of ‘forc[ing] us to test the boundaries of inclusion we are prepared to uphold’, and thereby ‘helps stretch our moral imagination’. But a critique might with equal justice respond that it allows, and perhaps even encourages, an all-too human tribalism. So long as my imagination extends only as far as my own village or tribe, what's the worry? (The other approach is arguably more likely to compel us to the co-legislating noumenal membership and common humanity of anyone whom we hold morally accountable.)

A further weakness in her approach, and clue to a possible alternative, appears in Deligiorgi's claim that ‘the law that is valid for all rational creatures is a law that is without sanction’ (139). This is true in the sense that the conception of duty that it formulates contains no reference to external rewards if we obey or external punishments if we do not (though at the time of the A edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, even this is not so clear: A811 = B839). But what it fails to capture is the sanction of one's own conscience, i.e. one's sense that in doing wrong one would make oneself unworthy of the happiness that one is naturally compelled to seek. It fails to capture, in other words, the ‘self-contempt’ to which action that we recognize as contrary to the moral law immediately exposes us (Groundwork, 4: 426). Accordingly, Deligiorgi has little to say about such key Kantian concepts as ‘respect’ and ‘dignity’ along with their antonyms.

On the alternative view I am proposing, Kant's characterization of the moral law for us finite rational beings as ‘necessitating’ (rather than ‘necessary’) is his way of capturing the inevitability – not, to be sure, of our acting out of duty – but of the self-condemnation, and accompanying feelings of self-contempt, to which our failure to do so, on Kant's account, delivers us. To be sure, this approach would require placing more weight on issues of desert than Deligiorgi, here following the lead of most contemporary Kant scholarship, is inclined to give them. At the same time, one wonders if her justifiable suspicion of theoretically ungrounded and/or incoherent appeals to an ‘ideal self’ has not led her to ignore core elements of a moral phenomenology on which she elsewhere properly leans: a phenomenology consisting not only of a consciousness that our action is ‘up to us’, but also that this mainly matters because otherwise moral ‘blame’ (and moral credit) along with accompanying feelings of self-contempt (and self-respect) would make no sense.

Instead, she argues for the ‘comparative advantage’ of her ‘co-legislative’ explication of Kantian autonomy over the alternatives offered by some of Kant's most famous and influential critics, namely Schiller (in chapter 5) and Hegel (in chapter 6). Against Schiller, she shows, successfully in my view, that Kant can give due weight to the role of feeling without throwing out the nomic baby with the ascetic bathwater. Her discussion of Hegel (and Harry Frankfurt) lays similar stress on the obliging, as distinguished from the socially dependent, in an effort to lend reality (as Hegelian ‘actuality’) to moral norms (188). The result, as she observes, tends to collapse the distinction between moral norms and those of mere social etiquette (190) and so falls prey to some of the same weaknesses that bedevil Schiller: i.e. a failure to do justice to the peculiar hold that obligations we regard as moral have on us.

Deligiorgi's more positive argument appears only in the book's final pages: an intriguing, partly ‘reconstructive’ foray suggested by what Kant calls ‘the causality of reason’. The causality of reason, she claims, is ‘neither about causality nor (directly) about reason’. Instead, it is a ‘power of origination’ or to will ‘something in itself’ that the will, in the sense of ‘choice’, can opt to actualize or not (194).

What Deligiorgi means to do is to go some way towards accounting for the possibility of ‘moral freedom’ (197). She means, that is to say, ‘to show something about the ground of choice that lets us opt either for a causality of nature or a causality of reason. The ground of choice is not itself the causality of reason anymore than it is the causality of nature. And it is best captured in the thought, when we deliberate morally, that how we decide is ‘up to us’.

One way of filling out this thought might be by appealing directly to a robust notion of ‘desert’: without the notion that actions are up to us we could not hold ourselves morally worthy or unworthy, and the very idea of a good will as the sole thing ‘good without limitation’ would be unavailable to us. Instead, Deligiorgi appeals to the fact that things in themselves ‘are not in causal relations with one another’. At the same time, she is equally insistent that we not regard the ‘causality of reason’ as sort of ‘a rival necessity to natural necessity’ (199). But why must the latter be avoided? First, she says, because it inclines us towards a so-called ‘two-world’ account that it itself problematic. Second, because it leaves unexplained how we swing from one sort of causality to another. Third, because it seems to imply that we are free only when we act rationally (199–200). Her alternative is to give up ‘causa sui conceptions of control’ and related attempts to pinpoint some place of origin. ‘Power of origination’, according to the author, ‘does not describe a causal power (control does not have to do with causes … [but] with submission to rational laws)’ (201). Deligiorgi's is an ingenious attempt to explain, to the extent that it can be, how moral freedom is possible without succumbing to the usual conceptual difficulties to which such attempts are generally prone. And yet she continues to insist that a moral agent must be ‘in a position to be able to assert’ that he or she is the ‘source’ of a moral action. The distinction between a ‘source’ (which is unconnected to causality) and ‘causa sui’ is difficult, however, to parse. Her argument might be aided by Kant's definition of a cause elsewhere as a ground leading to a determinate consequence according to some necessary rule or law. By this definition, a moral actor's decision to submit to the laws of reason (or not) is not itself a cause in the strict sense, but a choice to become one sort of causal ground (as per ‘the causality of reason’) rather than another.

It may be misleading, then, to insist, as does the author, that the ‘causality’ of reason is ‘not about causality’ (192). For this not only deprives the metaphor of co-legislation of its necessitating bite; it also denies us needed moral assurance that pure reason can be practical, i.e. bring about real changes in the world.

The paradox – one that is arguably irresolvable – lies in attempting to hold in a single thought both the law's necessitating grip (and potential worldly efficacy) and our own freedom to submit to it or not. I would suggest that an exploration of our sense of duty, and related feelings of respect, might be a more promising way to explore this paradox than an appeal to ‘deliberation about our choice of ends’ as here proposed (201). If, as the author concludes, it is only our desire to uphold ‘a robust concept of agency as such’ that gives Kant's arguments their purchase on us, it is only (I would add) our own moral awareness and related capacity for self-condemnation and approbation that lead us to place such value in this concept in the first place.

But such a suggestion raises complicated questions, ones that I cannot begin to address in a brief review. It is a tribute to the penetration and clarity of Deligiorgi's book that in this, as in many other dimensions, it carries one to the heart of things, both with respect to Kant studies and to the moral life more generally. I know of no better brief introduction to contemporary debates within the scholarship, and few more comprehensive treatments of the practical orientation that Kant's moral teaching takes for granted.