Empiricist philosophy always tends to be anti-philosophy (and is often proud of it).

If being "iron headed" is to be lacking such feelings, then Kant's position is that an ironheaded person could not be a moral agent because such a person would not be rational.

It is rational to choose the right means to your ends to develop very elegant abstract formal theories of rational choice, and then turn these into what look like moral theories. Philosophers tend to be ravished by the formal beauty of such theories, and they don't pay much attention to the fact that our human limitations make them pretty useless in practice, while the simple point about instrumental reasoning is too shallow to be of much real moral interest.

There is a lot in Adam Smith that reflects the insights of Rousseau and anticipates those of Marx.

Kant certainly was sympathetic with the metaphysical tradition of rational theology that he criticized.

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

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."