Treating a being as an end in itself means respecting the value of what makes it such an end. After we see that this value resides in rational nature… - Allen W. Wood

Free will is as philosophical a question, in that sense, as there is. Kantian ethics should not represent itself as having a solution to it. If the problem of freedom is a philosophical open wound, then the right way to think about Kant’s utterly unacceptable theory of noumenal freedom is that it is the salt that philosophers have a professional obligation to rub in the wound so that they can’t forget about it.

The standard model of ethical theory may seem like merely a necessary consequence of applying to normative ethics the high standards of clarity and rigor prized by all of us who like to think of ourselves as philosophers in the analytic tradition. This way of doing ethics obviously parallels the way analytical philosophers treat many other subjects – by formulating generalizations about this or that and testing them against intuitive counterexamples. But I think the Sidgwickian method of intuitional ethics, or the Rawlsian method of reflective equilibrium, is not the only way to think clearly about ethical theory.

Here is a conceptual truth about reasons: If it is impossible for us to do otherwise, that can never be because there is a reason to act as we do.