In my acquaintance with John Rawls, I found him to be a simple and honest man, who just by chance also happened to be the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century. I would like to think that I could emulate at least his modesty - his refusal to exaggerate his perception of himself and his place in the larger scheme of things - even if my work never compares with his in its importance.

Not only in order to act morally, but even to formulate theoretical questions, devise experiments, choose which ones to perform and what conclusions to draw from then - we must presuppose that we are free. That's the sense in which it is true that for Kant "we must assume we are free."

Our procedures of deliberation are not ways of finding out independent moral truths but instead ways of "constructing" these truths, in the process of deciding what to do.

There is a very common, though also very silly, picture of Kant according to which as empirical beings we are not free at all, and we are free only as noumenal jellyfish floating about in an intelligible sea above the heavens, outside any context in which our supposedly "free" choices could have any conceivable human meaning or significance. Part of the problem here is that Kant faces up honestly to the fact that how freedom is possible is a deep philosophical problem to which there is no solution we can rationally comprehend.

We cannot predict the effects of our actions, especially our collective actions over generations or centuries, to use instrumental reasoning toward these big final ends to tell us what we ought to do.

Leaders of nations, and people whose wealth or fame gives them power over the lives of others quite often do more harm than good.

It would be nice, wouldn't it? if we could get comfortable about the problem of freedom. Kant thinks that we can't.