This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Learn more

Philosophy Notes Ethics Notes

Summary Kant's Groundwork Of The Metaphysics Of Morals Notes

Updated Summary Kant's Groundwork Of The Metaphysics Of Morals Notes

Ethics Notes

Ethics

Approximately 99 pages

Notes made for the Ethics paper at the University of Oxford.

Each set of notes brings together in detail all the major areas needed to write a first-class essay on the subject. Key arguments and positions from both primary and secondary sources are summarised clearly: perfect as a basis for an exam essay or as a primer on the subject.

Includes a detailed summary of the arguments from - and the interpretation of - Kant's 'Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals', as well as the most common o...

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Ethics Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant demonstrates the limitations of speculative metaphysics. But this paves the way for an extension in the power of practical reason. As Korsgaard puts it, “bringing reason into the world becomes the enterprise of morality rather than metaphysics, and the work as well as the hope of humanity”.

For Kant, the fundamental principle of morality – the categorical imperative – is the law of an autonomous will. Immorality involves a violation of the categorical imperative and is therefore irrational. So, as Robert Johnson points out, at the heart of Kantian moral philosophy is a strong conception of reason reaching into practical affairs.

Thomas Hill argues that Kant’s aims in the Groundwork are not primarily to illustrate how to apply his formulas to particular problems, but to the basic presuppositions of practical reason. In the Metaphysics, where Kant turns explicitly to working out intermediate principles for guiding ethical judgements in areas of human life, the humanity-as-ends formula is most often appealed to.

Structure of the Groundwork

Robert Johnsons summarises the fundamental – though not sole – aims of Kant’s moral philosophy as follows:

  1. To seek out the foundational principle of a metaphysics of morals – the aim of the first two sections of the Groundwork. There his process is, as Korsgaard puts it, “analytic”: he analyses our (apparently) common-sense notions of morality to come up with a precise statement of the principle underlying our moral judgements.

  2. In the third section Kant attempts to show this foundational principle is a demand of each person’s own rational will.

Moral goodness

Kant uses an account of the principles of ethics to determine what it is to have a good will. To be morally good, an action must be done for the sake of the law – and not just in conformity with it. It is not sufficient just to do as the law commands, but according to one’s own inclination. Instead, one must act as duty requires, because duty requires. An action has moral worth only so far as it is done for the sake of duty.

The only unqualified good is a Good Will. Talents of the mind, and gifts of character and fortune, can become bad if the will puts them to the wrong use. By contrast, the good will is good in itself, irrespective of whether or not it achieves its aims.

Robert Johnson points out this understanding of ‘good will’ is not meant to be taken as close to our modern usage of ‘good hearted’ or ‘meaning well’. Instead, Kant’s idea is closer to the idea of a ‘person of good will’. A good will is supposed to be one which takes moral considerations in themselves to be conclusive reasons for guiding behaviour.

According to Kant, we value a good will without limitation or qualification. Johnson takes this to mean primarily

  1. A good will is unconditionally good: there is no conceivable circumstance in which we regard our own moral goodness as worth forfeiting in order to gain some desirable object. A moral consideration is worthy of weight in all circumstances.

  2. Possessing and maintaining one’s moral goodness is the condition that makes everything else worth having or pursuing. Pleasure is only valuable if it does not force us to give up our fundamental moral convictions. Thus, a good will is good in itself, and not in virtue of its relationship to other things.

The person who acts according to duty because of an inbuilt disposition, and the person who acts for the sake of duty despite not wanting to, are both contrasted to the person who does the right thing for an ulterior purpose (fear, hope of reward, …).

Our wills are imperfect, and are not in complete harmony with rationality. We therefore face competing demands on us.

First Proposition: to have moral worth, an action must be done from duty.

Second Proposition: An action derives its moral worth from the maxim by which it is determined, not from the purpose which is attained by it. It depends merely on the motive for the action, without regard to any object of desire.

Third Proposition: (a consequence of the first two) duty is the necessity of acting from respect for the law.

If we do the right action from happiness alone, then had conditions been different we would not have done our duty. By contrast, if we had acted from duty we would have acted rightly in any possible world. Removing all material purposes from the will, all that is left is the formal principle of the will, of duty:

I am never to act otherwise than I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.

This is the principle which motivates a good will, the principle which Kant takes to be the fundamental principle of morality.

The common reason of men perfectly coincides with this.

Moral laws

Everything in nature works according to laws. To have moral force, a law must carry with it absolute necessity. So moral laws must be founded a priori in the conceptions of pure reason. They must hold for all rational creatures generally, with absolute necessity.

The moral law is a synthetic a priori principle; an ought statement cannot be derived from experience, and the moral ought cannot be established analytically. Once we have sought out the fundamental a priori moral principle, we can consult facts of experience to determine how best to apply this principle. Thus, the fundamental principles of morality are synthetic a priori: they are not analytic or conceptual, yet their justification does not rely on observation. However, as Robert Johnson points out, it is not always clear Kant sticks to this method: the Groundwork, for example, makes appeal to empirical facts such as that our wills are determined by practical principles.

Rational beings alone have the faculty of acting according to the conception of laws. Deduction of actions from principles requires reason, so the will is nothing but practical reason.

If the will is not in accord with reason, the actions objectively recognised...

Buy the full version of these notes or essay plans and more in our Ethics Notes.