As in the first volume, my attention here will be devoted mainly, though hardly entirely, to ethical philosophers’ attempts to come to grips with deontic morality understood in the terms of Anscombe’s critique. Sometimes, these will be defenses and theoretical accounts, as with, for example, the nineteenth-century utilitarians – whether empiricist, like Bentham and Mill, or “philosophical intuitionist,” like Henry Sidgwick – or the moral theories of British idealists like T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley. But unlike mainstream seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral philosophy – for instance, the modern natural lawyers, Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, Locke, and Cumberland, the British rationalists, and Kant – the ethical philosophy of the nineteenth century is more often concerned to criticize deontic morality or to put it in its place. Examples here are Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and, of course, Nietzsche.

What Fichte found most inspiring in Kant’s critical philosophy was its Copernican focus on the transcendental conditions of conscious thought, its doctrine of the autonomy of reason, and, most especially, its fundamental commitment to freedom of the will. Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophies of right are especially close in form and content. Both works treat the philosophy of right as a separate subject that is independent of ethical philosophy, and both ground their theories in a fundamental right of freedom from interference. We see, right at the outset, the importance of freedom in modern moral philosophy in Anscombe’s sense. We begin, however, with Fichte’s ethics. Fichte’s ethics of autonomy or, as he usually prefers to say, “self-sufficiency” or “independence,” departs from Kant’s in several important ways. The most important structurally is that whereas autonomy is at the heart of grounding what Kant takes to be the fundamentally formal character of the moral law. Fichte holds, against “all of the authors who have treated ethics merely formally,” that self-sufficiency or independence is a “material” kind of freedom. Fichte’s ethics sets autonomous self-determination as a fundamental moral end, and is ultimately consequentialist.