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Kant the Bogey Man: "I would simply claim, in a comparable way, that I’m drawing upon parts of Kant’s teaching that explain better than anything else the properties of our moral judgments."
Mr. Arkes uses Kant to explain moral judgments about racial discrimination and racial preferences.

When we make laws, we sweep away the private preferences of people, and impose a public rule made binding on everyone. Hence the connection between the logic of morals and the logic of law: when we legislate for other people, we need to say something more than, “most of us here think this is desirable,” or “most of us have strong ‘feelings’ that this is the just thing to do.” We would need rather to establish that we are acting on the basis of propositions that would hold their validity for everyone, even if not everyone recognizes why they happen to be true. And that is what we do when we seek to trace our judgments back to anchoring “first principles” as Thomas Reid understood them: propositions that were true of necessity. John Marshall and Alexander Hamilton referred in this way to the “axioms” of our judgment, meaning essentially the same thing. And yet O’Brien writes as though it were odd or eccentric—or on the face of things implausible—to say that our judgments find their firmest ground when they are anchored in propositions of that kind, which cannot be denied without falling into contradiction.

Comments: Arkes is trying to using Kantian (or liberal) reasons to justify a position on racial discrmination/racial preferences? I had forgotten if he is considered a proponent of the NNLT. Is he a liberal in his presuppositions, like John Finnis?

From an Aristotelian pov - moral science is helpful for lawmakers in understanding how human laws are derived from first principles. It is the task of the philosopher (or theologian) to supply the argumentation. (See William Wallace's The Role of Demonstration in Moral Theology.) The acquisition of moral science is a perfection for those who are to rule, since it is better than relying upon opinions about customs and laws. (This suffices for those who only need to obey in order to act rightly.) Moral science provides the answer to those seeking the ratio for particular precepts or laws.

The NNL theorists attempt to reason out rationale for moral precepts, but from different starting points. I don't know if anyone has ever examined the logic of their arguments to determine if they are valid. I suspect that the arguments are valid, just not sound.