There is, I am aware, a disposition to believe that a person who sees in moral obligation a transcendental fact, an objective reality belonging to the province of “Things in themselves,” is likely to be more obedient to it than one who believes it to be entirely subjective, having its seat in human consciousness only. But whatever a person’s opinion may be on this point of Ontology, the force he is really urged by is his own subjective feeling, and is exactly measured by its strength. [Utilitarianism, Chapter 3]
Kant also required the presence of a certain rarified feeling for an act to qualify as moral: the feeling of respect for the moral law. No act, no matter how much in accord with the letter of the moral law, could qualify as moral without this essential motivation. The feeling is so rarified, however, that it is easily the victim of a duping self-deception. It may be easily subverted by fear, guilt, pride, habit, sympathy, etc. all of which are not, in Kant’s view, moral motives. There is only one moral motive: this feeling of awe in the presence of an abstraction.