One rational standard of action is how well it promotes the end it seeks. Another standard is whether it aims at ends which are good. Both of these, but especially the former, depend on judgments of fact.

Some of Kant's particular moral opinions, either because he shared the prejudices of his time, or because of his own personal crotchets, can strike sensible people as ridiculous or offensive. But in my view, his own theory provides us with the resources (the best resources available, I believe) to correct his own personal errors or cultural prejudices.

It is absurd for anyone to think that Soviet "Marxism" is a correct application of the thought of Karl Marx. No doubt Soviet propaganda represented it this way. But who believes Soviet propaganda? It is remarkable (but maybe not so remarkable after all, when you consider their motives) that apologists for capitalism, who would not accept Soviet propaganda on any other point, are eager to agree with it on this point.

Fichte takes an I or free will to be not a thing or being but an act which is not undetermined but self-determined, in accordance with reasons or norms rationally self-given.

Fichte thinks that the mutual recognition of one another as free beings belongs among the transcendental conditions of self-consciousness itself.

Our decisions need not be seen as resting on procedures that are merely instrumental in making judgments that are reliably truth-tracking. The procedures might be more directly related than that to truths about what is right or good, or about what we ought to do, or to principles that tell us what is true about these matters. And I have no metaphysical theory about the truth-conditions of such truths, except to say that as objective truths, they must be independent of the attitudes, decisions or actions that they are supposed to justify or for which they are to offer reasons.

I think if there were to be a solution to the problem of free will, it would have to be a compatibilist one. Unfortunately, from that it does not follow that there is such a solution. Many philosophers find this an unwelcome message, and as often happens in philosophy, they punish the messenger by ascribing to him an entirely imaginary but untenable position.