Kant was convinced that feelings of approval or disapproval of our or others’ actions must depend on something else, “a necessary internal law that makes us view and feel ourselves from an external point of view.”[19] Our mere feelings, be they of sympathy or anger, pleasure or pain, could never be the basis for knowing the right thing to do, because they were always contingent, always subject to the vicissitudes of a shifting world tossed around in space and time. For Kant, the changeability of the spatiotemporal world undermined the very idea of something being right or true, which required,
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