It is a cause of shame to any member of the human race to be a member of the same species some of whose members could vote for any candidate for president that has been offered by the Republican party. Such people seem to be motivated only by short-sighted greed, ignorance, fear and hatred.

There is no author or legislator of the moral law. It is simply valid in itself in the nature or essence of things. We become autonomous only when we obey it, because then our will aligns itself with the objectively valid law, and our choice follows the same law as that we give ourselves. We can think of rational faculty (or the idea - the pure rational concept, not exhibitable in experience) as the legislator or author of the law because reason recognizes an objective standard, and to that extent is already aligned with objective moral truth.

Since the Enlightenment, popular religion has rejected the Enlightenment path and transformed itself into a bastion of resistance against reason.

Kant's system of duties constitutes a Doctrine of Virtue because the duties also indicate what kinds of attitudes, dispositions and feelings are morally virtuous or vicious.

What is central to morality is rational self-constraint (acting from duty), in cease where there is no other incentive to do your duty except that the moral law commands it.

What Smith and Marx have in common is that they were both philosophers of great vision and perceptiveness, deep humanity, and a sense of social reality that has been lost in the abstractly formalistic economic theories that have dominated the field since the last third of the nineteenth century.

Capitalism has not proven to be a transitional form, a gateway to a higher human future.