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Wir dürfen aber den Untergang eines Weltgebäudes nicht als einen wahren Verlust der Natur bedauren. Sie beweiset ihren Reichthum in einer Art von Verschwendung … Der Mensch, der das Meisterstück der Schöpfung zu sein scheint, ist selbst von diesem Gesetze nicht ausgenommen.Immanuel Kant was an early and influential theorist on race. What place a theory of race could have within his system is, however, far from clear. Empirical knowledge about human diversity seems not to be the kind of thing that may find its way into morally acceptable maxims. Kant's understanding of the a priori nature of the moral seems to prevent any account or theory of human difference from leading to prejudice or discrimination. On the other hand, Kant defends race it-self as an a priori concept, and the specific content of his anthropology seems to justify the exclusion of non-whites from moral concern in a new and dangerous way.

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Christian Wolff 's 1721 Discourse on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese is generally read as championing the autonomy of ethics from religion. This is too simple: Wolff 's ethics was an antivoluntarist religious ethics. The example of the Chinese confirmed for Wolff that revelation is not necessary for knowledge or practice of genuine virtue, though he held that the Chinese achieve only the first of three "degrees of virtue." (Most Christians, including the Pietists who drove Wolff from Halle shortly after he delivered the Discourse, did not, in his judgment, achieve even that.) China's being perceived as outside of Western (and sacred) history made it a congenial example for the ethics and moral anthropology that, in Wolff 's time, were struggling against the voluntarism of a Christian ethics premised on original sin.