RU is a variation on the same theme. A society's moral code is itself an instrument, and an act is wrong if it is proscribed by this instrument. A. Utilitarianism's holding morality to be instrumental in these ways means that moral value is instrumental and derivative from nonmoral value. What is morally valuable depends entirely on what will promote nonmoral value. B. A related feature of utilitarianism is that it makes the moral value of the character and action of the moral agent dependent on features that are external to moral agency.
Moral agency is itself instrumental.
The way a moral agent should be, the kind of character she should have, depends on nothing intrinsic to moral agency. III It central to Kant's view that he disagrees with utilitarians on both of these points. According to Kant, morality is autonomous. Hume's skeptical treatment of the ideas of necessity and causation convinced him that he couldn't simply assume that these ideas had metaphysical reality. The thread running through Kant's critical works is the desire to understand what basis we can have for ideas, like those of necessity and law, that seem so important, but also beyond anything we can experience.