that morality is dependent upon the concept of a rational will (and the related concept of a categorical imperative: an imperative which any rational being must necessarily will for itself). It is not based on contingent features of any being's will, nor upon human wills in particular, so there is no sense in which Kant makes ethics "dependent" upon anything which has not always existed. Furthermore, the sense in which our wills are subject to the law is precisely that if our wills are rational, we must will in a lawlike fashion; that is, we must will according to moral judgments we apply to all rational beings, including ourselves. This is more easily understood by parsing the term "autonomy" into its Greek roots: auto (self) + nomos (rule or law). That is, an autonomous will, according to Kant, is not merely one which follows its own will, but whose will is lawful-that is, conforming to the principle of universalizability, which Kant also identifies with reason. Ironically, in another passage, willing according to immutable reason is precisely the kind of capacity Elshtain ascribes to God as the basis of his moral authority, and she commands this over an inferior voluntarist version of divine command theory, which would make both morality and God's will contingent. As O'Neill argues, Kant's theory is a version of the first rather than the second view of autonomy, so neither God nor any human authority, including contingent human institutions, play any unique authoritative role in his moral theory. Kant and Elshtain, that is, both agree God has no choice but to conform his will to the immutable facts of reason, including moral truths; humans do have such a choice, but otherwise their relationship to morality is the same as that of God's: they can recognize moral facts, but do not determine their content through contingent acts of will. Applications Medical ethics Kant believed that the shared ability of humans to reason should be the basis of morality, and that it is the ability to reason that makes humans morally significant. He, therefore, believed that all humans should have the right to common dignity and respect. Margaret L. Eaton argues that, according to Kant's ethics, a medical professional must be happy for their own practices to be used by and on anyone, even if they were the patient themselves. For example, a researcher who wished to perform tests