 As Henry Allison and others have pointed out, it is not clear that there is any content to the question of whether an appearance is numerically identical to a thing in itself, outside of moral  contexts.[58]  It is relatively clear that in the context of his moral philosophy, Kant wants to assert that one and the same object, a rational agent, can be considered as an appearance and as a thing in itself. Considered as an appearance, a rational agent is subject to conditions of experience (space, time, and the categories). Considered as a thing in itself, a rational agent can at least consistently be thought of as free (because independent of the deterministic causal order of space and time), while practical reason gives us warrant for positively asserting that the agent is free. Kant typically expresses this solution to the problem of freedom and determinism in terms of the numerical identity of the appearance of the agent and the agent as thing in itself (e.g., Ak. 5: 105, 114). Practical reason gives both content and warrant to the assertion of numerical identity: content, because the assertion of numerical identity means that one and the same noumenal agent is the cause of and therefore responsible for the actions of an empirical rational agent over time, and warrant, because this assumption of the unity of a noumenal agent over time is a presupposition of our ordinary moral cognition of blame and praise. But neither of these seem to hold in the theoretical use of reason. It is not clear that within the theoretical use of reason we can give any content to the claim of the numerical identity (or distinctness) of appearances and things in themselves, nor any warrant for asserting or denying  it.[59]