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             A morally good person is a person that does moral things. This deceptively simple statement highlights the important questions of morality: is morality relative to the person or the act? Kant argued that the question of what is moral is derived from a priori knowledge, it is a categorical imperative and "neither its authority, nor its power to motivate us, is derived from anything but itself."1 This universal imperative holds true for all rational beings and it is our duty as rational beings to act in accordance with it. .

             This argument, though interesting in its historical context is invalid. When Kant was working on his Critique of Pure Reason there were two dominating schools of thought: the empiricists and the rationalists. Empiricism held that all knowledge is gained through experience; a prior knowledge was a nice concept but it did not exist.2 Conversely, rationalism espoused the view that the most important knowledge was a priori knowledge and it was from this innate information that we formed our understanding of the world around us. These two views were often at the mercy of the religious or scientific motivations of the individual philosopher. But Kant bravely sought to unify these religious and scientific inspirations behind these theories by, as he said, unifying the universe around him with the moral law within him. .

             To do so, Kant took parts of each theory to make a whole new theory: humans do not have innate knowledge, but we have an understanding of forms and concepts. This understanding allows us to categorize what we perceive in the world. Thus, he allowed for some sort of a priori knowledge and some sort of a posteriori knowledge. Unfortunately, when this argument is extended to moral principles it fails. Kant's framework for a priori knowledge was based on the concept of time and space. As rational beings we are aware of them, though we do not necessarily sense them in the empirical sense.