Ethics Vindicated: Kant's Transcendental Legitimation of Moral Discourse

Can we regard ourselves as having free will? What is the place of values in a world of facts? What grounds the authority of moral injunctions, and why should we care about them? Unless we provide satisfactory answers to these questions, ethics has no credible status and is likely to be subsumed by psychology, history, or rational decision theory. According to Ermanno Bencivenga, this outcome is both common and regrettable.

Bencivenga points to Immanuel Kant for the solution. Kant's philosophy is a sustained, bold, and successful effort aiming at offering us the answers we need. Ethics Vindicated is a clear and thorough account of this effort that builds on Bencivenga's previous interpretation of transcendental philosophy (as articulated in his Kant's Copernican Revolution) and draws on the entire Kantian corpus.

Can we regard ourselves as having free will? What is the place of values in a world of facts? What grounds the authority of moral injunctions, and why should we care about them? Unless we provide satisfactory answers to these questions, ethics has no credible status and is likely to be subsumed by psychology, history, or rational decision theory. According to Ermanno Bencivenga, this outcome is both common and regrettable.

Bencivenga points to Immanuel Kant for the solution. Kant's philosophy is a sustained, bold, and successful effort aiming at offering us the answers we need. Ethics Vindicated is a clear and thorough account of this effort that builds on Bencivenga's previous interpretation of transcendental philosophy (as articulated in his Kant's Copernican Revolution) and draws on the entire Kantian corpus.

Ermanno Bencivenga is Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Irvine. He is the author of thirty books in three languages and of over seventy research articles. A world authority in free logic, he has also contributed extensively to the philosophy of language, to moral and political philosophy, and to the history of philosophy. He is the founding editor of the international philosophy journal Topoi and of the Topoi Library.