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Alright. Your next step is to justify the bolded assertion, to say why it is true and/or why anyone should believe you. You have two options for this.
You can hold it up as true, doing your own little bit of metaphysics. But that looks an awful lot like a priori knowledge.
You can be a good empiricist and leave it up to observation. But then you'll have to say what individual observation or observations can justify the universal assertion.
Before you answer, keep in mind that -- if you read the preface to the First Critique -- this dilemma, between dogmatic rationalism and skeptical empiricism, is exactly what motivated Kant to write the Critiques. The transcendental philosophy was meant to be a way to salvage scientific knowledge and human freedom given that we can't just speculate about the nature of being, the way the ancient Greeks and the medieval Christians were wont to do.
The basic problem is that if you have concepts without any basis in sensation, you're just chattering to yourself. If you look at the senses alone, then you give up on lots of things you need -- universal generalizations, logical inference, numbers, mathematical reasoning. (Hume saw this and bit the bullet, but most people today don't want to think that causality is just a fabrication of the mind, given what we know about physics.)
As far as the question of a prioricity and objectivity, it looks like you've confused objectivity with realism. A priori doesn't mean subjective, it just means prior to experience. An a priori claim would be something as trivial as "2 + 2 = 4". The expression is universally true, and true regardless of what anyone believes, which is all that objectivity entails.
If you want to talk about whether numbers and mathematical equations are "real" in the way a coffee cup or a star is real, well, that's a different issue.
Nothing about this is right.
Let's take a step back because we're missing some key background. The books are called *critiques* for a reason. He's investigating what is necessary for different kinds of thought, where the limits lie.
The First Critique is concerned with the limits and possibilites of theoretical knowledge. Physical objects, properties, cause and effect, that kind of thing. The world available to the senses and to the theoretical intellect is a world of cause and effect.
One of the surprising conclusions is that practical thinking, which concerns action, freedom and morality, deals with thing that fall outside the scope of theoretical reasoning.
Morality falls on the practical sides, concerning freedom and rational necessity, not physical objects and causality.
Turning specifically to the moral theory, a duty cannot be non-objective because as far as Kant is concerned, a moral obligation is a universal command which holds come what may. If one ought not tell a lie, then one is obliged not to lie no matter what time it is, where you are, or whether there's an axe murderer ready to kill your best friend if you don't lie to him.
In the Preface to the Groundwork we have this rather unwieldy sentence:
"Thus, among practical cognitions, not only do moral laws, along with their principles, differ essentially from all the rest, in which there is something empirical, but all moral philosophy is based entirely on its pure part; and when it is applied to the human being it does not borrow the least thing from acquaintance with him (from anthropology) but gives to him, as a rational being, laws a priori, which no doubt still require a judgment sharpened by experience...for the human being is affected by so many inclinations that, though capable of the idea of a practical pure reason, he is not so easily able to make it effective in concreto in the conduct of his life."
Nobody said he was a great writer. For those not comfy with stilted German, the point of this passage is that moral laws are not empirical but pure -- which means, formal or logical, purely rational rather than having anything to do with the specific person or circumstances. The moral law is a matter of pure rationality, which has nothing to do with feelings, emotions, desires, or sensations.
I'm not sure why you'd think this is somehow non-objective, or in any way connected to the laws of society. He's distanced himself about as far as you can distance yourself from subjective or social justifications. This morality is more like math or logic than feelings or social norms. (Which is ironically one of the complaints to make about Kantian moral theory.)
From another angle, consider the opening sentence from Section I of the Groundwork:
"It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will."
Kant goes on to write that moral goodness concerns who you are, in so far as what you desire and wish is the true test of a person's character. But he also realizes that human beings are really pretty messed up (the "crooked timber" quote) and saddled with so many competing motives that we need reason to even speak of moral behavior. Reason has to be separated to the maximal extent possible from the "animal" motivations.
Needless to say, reason is *not* a matter of social laws. In fact this is one of the most famous things about Kant's moral theory (Groundwork Section I again):
"But what kind of law can that be, the representation of which must determine the will, even without regard for the effect expected from it, in order for the will to be called good absolutely and without limitation? Since I have deprived the will of every impluse that could arise for it from obeying some law, nothing is left but the conformity of actions as such with universal law, which alone is to serve the will as its principle, that is, I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law."
The moral law transcends my impulses, your impulses, the rules and norms and laws of society. The moral law is universal.
Kant did say that an action couldn't be moral if you did it for a reward or because it made you feel good, or for any reason other than the motive of moral duty. To be fair, his stubbornness on this point gets him into trouble.
That said, to put it this way confuses moral duty and moral blame. Kant wouldn't say that an entrepreneur who works hard to build a business is therefore bad because not acting out of a moral motive. He's surprisingly restrained as far as what counts as moral actions, and most of the things we do fall outside that circle.
Unless you're expressly acting against moral duty, the action has no moral significance, good or bad. Entrepreneurship wouldn't be a moral issue at all unless somebody was acting like a dirtbag.
I'm curious...have you actually read Kant or are you recycling complaints you've picked up from second and third hand Youtubers? Virtually nothing you've said is accurate. It's like you're talking about an entirely different writer.
I can understand seeing crappy people holding up a writer's work and having an emotional reaction to it. If that's your worry, then the problem is crappy people and their sloppy thinking.
I'm not sure that countering that with more sloppy thinking and screaming-teenager name calling is really the antidote.
If anything it should be a good reminder that we need to be skeptical about anything unless you've spent time studying the texts yourself. Which means really spending time with them, not the sloppy way that so many public figures are sloppy with ideas.
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