You didn't really go into noumena.
Noumena is the shit as I understand it.
It's how the object of our perceptions actually exist. It's the way things really are outside the perceptions of our minds (phenomena).
So what did Kant say was the connection between the moral sense (things that "should" and "should not" be) and noumena?
Don't leave me hanging here.
Alanzo
Noumena are things in themselves, which we can never know. We can only know things we experience (phenomenon).
It doesn't have anything to do with morality.
Remember that Kant is answering the dilemma caused by Hume's questions.
Hume had differentiated between what is and what ought to be, and that statements of what ought to be are not statements of fact because they cannot be verified.
So Hume asked how can morality presume to know what we ought to do when all we can know is what is?
So Kant replied with his "Copernican" reversal.
That is, instead of moral knowledge conforming to the facts, let the facts (or actions) conform to our principles.
Morality can only be established a priori only if it is completely independent of what is.
Morality must not follow facts, as a descriptive science would. Instead it must precede facts, lying down the law for them as a prescriptive discipline.
For example, suppose that we agree that killing is wrong. Then, suppose that in our society the majority begin killing.
If our ethics were empirical (descriptive, based on facts), we would say that it is now acceptable to kill in this society.
If my ethics was based on empirical evidence, I would have to adjust my attitude toward killing and adjust to the new ways.
But if my ethics is prescriptive, I would say that although societies behavior has changed, that change has no effect on the essential rightness of what is right or wrongness of what is wrong.
We do not get right or wrong based on a show of hands.
What is right is right even if there is nobody who is right.
Wrong is wrong even if it is everybody that is wrong.
The post-modern view is that right and wrong is simply a product of culture, not reasoning, because some post-modernist (like Foucault) would argue that even reasoning is cultural.
Hubbard's view is that right and wrong are also relative.
Kant's view is that right and wrong are not relative and can be discerned through reason.
There is a lot more to Kant than this, but this is the basics.
The Anabaptist Jacques
