 Kant has several reasons for thinking that freedom is essential to morality. First, freedom is necessary for moral responsibility. When we hold a person responsible for blameworthy conduct, for example, we “impute” the ability to have refrained from such conduct and blame the person for her failure to exercise this ability properly. The judgment of “blame is grounded on the law of reason, which regards reason as a cause that… could have and ought to have determined the conduct of the person to be other than it is” (A555/B583). Second, Kant holds that “what is essential to any moral worth of actions is that the moral law determine the will immediately” (CPrR 5:71). If a person’s will were necessitated by her circumstances and empirical character, as Hume maintains, it would be impossible to respond properly to the moral law, which demands a kind of purity of thought and motive that Hume would not countenance. Third, freedom is essential to morality in that freedom is the ground of a special status or “dignity” that morality commands us to respect in ourselves and others. One important but unorthodox line of interpretation suggests a fourth reason for thinking that freedom is essential to morality. According to this view, Kant holds (in at least some places) that freedom is our most fundamental value, the source from which all other moral value derives. This is “the real bedrock of Kant’s moral thought” (Guyer 2000: 203). On this view, in fact, we are commanded to obey the moral law because it “is the necessary means for the realization of human freedom” (Guyer 2016: 38).