Etica come guida per l'azione ed etica come conoscenza

In this paper, two neo-Kantian conceptions of moral philosophy will be compared. The first is the ‘Kantian constructivism’ developed by John Rawls and Christine M. Korsgaard; the second is Hermann Cohen’s ‘ethics of pure will’. These conceptions will be characterized and contrasted in relation to two distinctions. The first is the distinction between first-order moral questions and second-order non-moral questions about morality; the second is the Kantian distinction between the practical and the theoretical uses of reason. The aim of this comparison is to argue: 1) that Cohen’s conception of moral philosophy is more faithful to some of the fundamental tenets of Kant’s critical project than the Kantian constructivists here analized; and 2) that the Kantian constructivism of Rawls and Korsgaard offers an unstable conception of moral philosophy precisely because it deliberately disregards these tenets.