The moral law is simply the way we think our own freedom as self-determination.

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.

We usually can't know how, and we probably should not even ask, how our lives contribute to a better world.

Fichte would identify all states of our minds with states of our body - perhaps not merely of our brain, but the whole body as an acting organism.

It is often difficult to know about one's own era which philosophers in it will be remembered as the most important ones, but I think it is already clear that John Rawls is the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century.

Both Kant and Fichte thought of traditions of revealed religion as ways of symbolically (that is, with aesthetic emotional power) thinking about our moral condition. Both thought that religion would become more and not less powerful, emotionally and morally, if the claims of scriptures and religious teachings were taken symbolically rather than literally (whatever 'literally' might mean in the case of claims that are either nonsensical or outdated or historically unsupportable if taken as metaphysical or historical assertions).

It seems to me self-evident that it is worthwhile to understand the best thoughts of the past, to appropriate them, to criticize them.