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 is both theoretically mistaken and morally wrong to regard others as objects of investigation rather than partners in free rational communication.

Kant does not think that the silly commandment "universalize your maxims" is the be-all and end-all of ethics or that it provides us with some sort of general decision procedure that is supposed to tell us what to do under all circumstances.

Those who see Smith as a defender of capitalism - as it existed in Marx's day, or as it exists today - show above all that they are not living in the real world. They are behaving as though the undeveloped form of capitalism Smith studied is still with us.

It was an important part of Mendelssohn's philosophical and religious view that the traditional rationalist proofs for God's existence should be sound an convincing. Kant thought they were not. So Kant's critique was world-shaking for Mendelssohn.

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

As I understand it, Kantian constructivism is partly a position in normative ethics and partly a position in metaethics. In metaethics, it is the position that ethical claims have truth values, but their truth conditions consist not in a set of objective facts to which they correspond, but instead in the outcome of some procedure of deliberation resulting in decisions about what to do.