 It is, however, controversial whether Kant himself was a constructivist in this sense. One reason to question whether this is the right way to read Kant follows from the fact that Kant himself did not see morality as free from metaphysical commitments. For example, Kant thought that it would be impossible for someone who believed that mechanistic determinism was the literal truth about himself to believe that he was a moral agent, since morality requires an autonomy that is incompatible with determinism. To see myself as a creature who has the kind of value Kant calls “dignity” I must not see myself merely as a machine-like product of the physical environment. Hence Kant thought that it was crucial for morality that his Critical Philosophy had shown that the deterministic perspective on humans is simply part of the “phenomenal world” that is the object of scientific knowledge, not the “noumenal reality” that it would be if some kind of scientific realism were the true metaphysical view. When we do science we see ourselves as determined, but science tells us only how the world appears, not how it really is. Recognizing this fact suggests that when Kant posits that humans have this intrinsic value he calls dignity, he is not “constructing” the value humans have, but recognizing the value beings of a certain kind must have. Humans can only have this kind of value if they are a particular kind of creature. Whether Kant himself was a moral realist or not, there are certainly elements in his philosophy that push in a realist direction.