Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.

...some of those to-day who are loudest in their protestations of international pacifism are loudest in their protestations that nothing but a class war can save society. No truer word was ever said by a philosopher than was said by Kant, a century ago or more, that we are civilised to the point of wearisomeness, but before we can be moralised we have a long way to go. It is to moralise the world that we all desire. ... We have to remember one more thing besides that, that since the War we must not make the mistake of thinking that what may be war weariness is necessarily an excess of innate good will, and we cannot help noting that there has arisen in Europe, in the few years since the peace, a strong local feeling in different places of an extreme nationalism which, unless corrected, may bear in what is not of itself an evil thing the seeds of much future peril for the peace and harmony of Europe.

I note that a common but faulty view is that, like a satellite navigator, conscience gives us directions from outside our own moral reasoning. The classical Christian conception of conscience is of the natural perception of basic moral principles, their application in particular circumstances, and the final judgment about what is to be (or has been) done. Without shared objective principles, "conscientious" belief becomes window-dressing for the raw expression of preference or power. But conscience must be both well-informed and well-formed if it is to be a reliable guide to action.

Truth is that from which conscience can be at peace.

Freedom is inseparable from conscience. And even if it is true that all the ideas developed by the social conciousness are the product of evolution, conscience at least has nothing to do with the historic process. Conscience, both as a sense and as a concept, is a priori immanent in man, and shakes the very foundations of the society that has emerged from our ill-conceived civilisation.

If we do not keep alive the flame of freedom that flame will go out, and every noble ideal will die with it. It is not by force of weapons but by force of ideas that we seek to spread liberty to the world' s oppressed. It is not only ideals, but conscience that impels us to do so. Is there conscience in the Kremlin? Do they ever ask themselves what is the purpose of life? What is it all for? Does the way they handled the Korean airliner atrocity suggest that they ever considered such questions? No. Their creed is barren of conscience, immune to the promptings of good and evil. To them it is the system that counts, and all men must conform.

It may seem as if Kant was content with such a radically dualistic view of human action, but ultimately he was not. … What Kant is assuming here is that morality is not just a matter of making rightful or virtuous choices, but also requires us to put those choices into practice by attempting to realize the goals or ends that they entail in the arena of action, that is, nothing less than the realm of spatial, temporal, and causal nature in which we live and act.

Those of us who are sympathetic to Kantian ethics usually are so because we regard it as an ethics of autonomy, based on respect for the human capacity to govern our own lives according to rational principles. Kantian ethical theory is grounded on the idea that the moral law is binding on me only because it is regarded as proceeding from my own will.

Good will is obviously present also in the case where the innocently goodhearted person acts beneficently because she enjoys it. As already mentioned, certain moral psychologies even encourage us to think that this innocent good-heartedness is the only thing we could possibly mean by a “good will.” Kant’s claim is that it is not, and that the true value of good will “shines forth more brightly” when it is found in the contrasting case, where it must struggle to overcome adversity. This claim certainly has an air of paradox about it, because it means that what is most essentially deserving of moral esteem is found only in cases where the moral agent is faced with conflicting motivations, or at least with an absence of any natural, spontaneous motivation to do the right thing.

There are two main reasons that Kant refuses to allow that sympathy or any other empirical sentiment or desire could constitute the foundation of morality. One is that no sentiment of this kind can yield the kinds of objective and universal principles that morality requires. They can approximate to this only by claiming a greater empirical uniformity in human nature than experience shows to be there. […] Kant’s other main reason for rejecting sympathy or love as the basis of morality involves his view of the empirical psychology of these feelings as they arise in us in our social condition, and especially in the “civilized” condition of modern European society.

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.

It was in this attitude of faith as pure fealty to the moral ideal, that Kant left the human spirit at the close of his great labours. It was the only solution left him, after his thesis of the absolute limitation of knowledge to objects of sense. But surely that thesis has a strange sound, coming from the same lips that utter with equal emphasis the lesson of our really having cognitions that are independent of all experience. This is neither the place nor the time to expose the oversight and confusion by which Kant fell into this self-contradiction; I must content myself with saying that the contradiction exists, and that I think the oversight is exactly designable, and entirely avoidable. There is a truth concealed in Kant's thesis of the immutable conjunction of thought and sense, but there is a greater falsehood conveyed by it.

In the field of philosophy Kant was the first to take the next decisive step towards the point of view that not only the qualities revealed by the senses, but also space and spatial characteristics have no objective significance in the absolute sense; in other words, that space, too, is only a form of our perception.

Does anyone believe that there is an international conscience?