Kant Handout

Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
A Beginner’s Guide to Kant’s Moral Philosophy


Part 1: Kant’s Background & Philosophical Powers

Name: Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Group Alliances: "Terrible" Transcendental Idealists, "Destructive" Deontologists”

AKA: Hometown Manny; The Punctual Prussian; The Virgin; The Categorical Imperator, I've Fallen and I Kant Get Up, The Greatest Modern Philosopher

Powers: follows rules well, can leap as high as hundreds of times his own height

Weaknesses: sometimes seen as overly critical

Part 2: The Very Short Version

✫ Philosophy may be divided into three fields: physics (the study of the physical world), ethics (the study of morals), and logic (the study of logical principles). These fields may involve either "empirical" study of our experiences, or "pure" analysis of concepts. "Metaphysics" is the study of pure concepts as they relate to moral or physical experience.

✫ People generally presume that moral principles must apply to all rational beings at all places and all times. Moral principles must therefore be based on concepts of reason, as opposed to particularities of culture or personality. The goal of the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals is to develop a clearer understanding of moral principles, so that people may better avert distractions.

✫ Several general principles about moral duties may be advanced. First, actions are moral if and only if they are undertaken for the sake of morality alone (without any ulterior motive). Second, the moral quality of an action is judged not according to the action's consequences, but according to the motive that produced it. Third, actions are moral if and only if they are undertaken out of respect for the moral law (as opposed to some other motivation such as a need or desire).

✫ Since specific interests, circumstances, and consequences cannot be considered, the moral "law" must be a general formula that is applicable in all situations. Rather than commanding specific actions, it must express the principle that actions should be undertaken with pure motives, without consideration of consequences, and out of pure reverence for the law. The formula that meets these criteria is the following: we should act in such a way that we could want the maxim (the motivating principle) of our action to become a universal law. People have a decent intuitive sense for this law. Still, it is helpful for philosophy to state the law clearly so that people can keep it in mind.

✫ It is nearly impossible to find examples of pure moral actions. Nearly every action we observe can be attributed to some interest or motivation other than pure morality. Yet this should not discourage us, for moral principles come from reason, not from experience. Indeed, moral principles could not come from experience, for all experiences depend on particular circumstances, whereas moral principles must have absolute validity, independent of all circumstances.

✫ Because it applies in all circumstances, reason's fundamental moral principle may be called the "categorical imperative." The categorical imperative may be expressed according to the same formula as the moral law: act only in such a way that you could want the maxim (the motivating principle) of your action to become a universal law. When people violate the categorical imperative, they apply a different standard to their own behavior than they would want applied to everyone else in the form of a universal law. This is a contradiction that violates principles of reason.

✫ The categorical imperative may also be formulated as a requirement that we must not treat other rational beings as mere means to our own purposes. Rational beings have the capacity to pursue predetermined objectives ("ends") by means of their will, yet in pursuing their goals they never think of themselves as mere means to another purpose; they are themselves the purpose of their actions – they are "ends in themselves. If we treat other rational beings as mere means, we contradict the fact that all rational beings are ends in themselves. In this case, our principles could not be universal laws, and we would violate the categorical imperative.

✫ Another way of stating the point that rational beings are ends in themselves is to say that rational beings are simultaneously the authors and the subjects of the principles they execute through their will. The categorical imperative may also be formulated as a requirement that we act only according to principles that could be laws in a "kingdom of ends" – that is, a legal community in which all rational beings are at once the makers and subjects of all laws.

✫ The argument so far has established what the moral law is, but has not demonstrated why we feel we should be moral. The basis for morality is the concept of freedom. Freedom is the ability to give your own law to your will. When we follow the demands of some need, desire, or circumstance, we are in a state of "heteronomy"; our will is determined by something outside of ourselves. When we follow the categorical imperative and chose maxims that could be universal laws, we are in a state of "autonomy"; we use reason to determine our own law for ourselves. In other words, we are free.

✫ Freedom of the will can never be demonstrated by experience. It is a principle of reason that everything we understand may be explained on the basis of prior conditions. In other words, the world we observe and understand is a world governed by the principle that every event was caused by another event. Yet this world is nothing more than the picture that reason develops in making sense of "appearances." The world of "things in themselves"--the objects underlying appearances--may have different qualities, including freedom of the will. We can have no knowledge of things in themselves. Thus freedom of the will may be neither proven nor disproved. All that we may know is that we have a concept of freedom of the will, and that morality may be based on this concept.

Part 3: The (Slightly) Longer (But Far More Detailed/Helpful) Version [Adapted from Prof. M. O’Neill]

Kant’s Philosophical Project: In both parts of his philosophy (moral and theoretical), Kant saw himself as conducting a revolution in philosophy as fundamental as the ‘Copernican Revolution’ in natural science, which had placed the Sun, instead of the Earth, at the centre of the Solar System. Kant saw his own ‘Copernican Revolution’ as going in roughly the opposite direction – he wanted to place humanity itself at the centre of his philosophy, rather than any ‘external’ rational order.

Kant wanted to argue that this rational order is neither something that we discover through experience (as Empiricists like Locke and Hume believed), nor something which we can know through reason alone (as Rationalists like Descartes believed). Rather, for Kant, this rational order is something that human beings themselves impose on the world – both in the construction of our knowledge (a position he called ‘Transcendental Idealism’) and through our actions (as we see in his moral philosophy).

Some of the central themes of the Groundwork, which have become familiar parts of our modern moral outlook, include the following:

✫ We are all, as human beings, ends in ourselves, and not to be used as mere means by others;
✫ Respect for one’s own humanity involves respect for others;
✫ Morality is itself identical with freedom, and acting immorally involves being enslaved.

It is also well worth keeping in mind that the Groundwork is essentially one long argument, which runs from the beginning to the end of the book.

Two Important Kantian Distinctions:
The first piece of technical language which you’ll come across in the Groundwork is Kant’s use of two kinds of distinctions which apply to our judgements. These are:

1. The Analytic/Synthetic distinction. This concerns what makes a judgement true or false.
a. Analytic statements: true by virtue of the meanings of the words involved (e.g. ‘All dwarves are short of stature’).
b. Synthetic judgements: true in a more substantive sense; judgements which add something new to our knowledge of the subject in hand. Kant thought that, because they had to tell us something substantive, moral judgements had to be synthetic (or else they would tell us only about the meanings of the words which we were using).

2. The A Priori / A Posteriori distinction. This concerns how we come to know of a judgment’s truth. A judgement is known a priori if it is known independently of any particular experience, but is known a posteriori if it is known only through our experience of the world. All analytical truths, it is claimed, are known a priori – e.g. we know that ‘All dwarves are short’ even before we have any experience of dwarves in the world. Most synthetic truths – e.g. ‘Lenny the Giant is the most successful dwarf in his profession’ – are known a posteriori: that is, those judgements come to be synthesized through experience.

Kant thought – and this is a very central aspect of his conception of morality – that all moral judgements must be a priori. That is, he thought that all judgements of morality have to be completely independent of any contingent facts about how the world happens to be, and thus have to be derivable in abstraction from any particular experience, and can instead be derived from pure reason alone. This means that, for Kant, moral judgements have to be of a very particular kind: they have to be synthetic a priori judgements. Kant’s claim was that such judgements were possible, and that the judgements of morality, philosophy, mathematics, and geometry were all of this special kind.

The Preface to the Groundwork:

We here see Kant’s argument as running something like this:

Given that moral judgements deal with how the world ought to be, and not with how it is, it must be the case that they cannot be derived from experience, which can only tell us how things are. Thus, moral judgements must be a priori, as they are independent of how the world happens to be. By the ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, Kant means that collection of knowledge of pure, a priori judgements about morality.

This book is a Groundwork for that ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, in the sense that it sets itself the task of establishing the foundations on which that ‘metaphysics’ will come to rest – that is, Kant is setting himself the task of showing that there is a domain of laws which apply to our behaviour as rational beings, and that (what, for him, follows from this) there is such a thing as morality.
As Kant tells us, the purpose of the book is that of “seeking out and establishing of the supreme principle of morality” (392).

Kant thinks that the principle which tells us that we ought to behave according to moral laws must itself be a synthetic a priori principle, for ethics to exist at all. The Groundwork is thus designed to prove that such a principle – which Kant calls the Categorical Imperative – does exist. For Kant, this is identical to showing that morality, as such, exists.

The Categorical Imperative is, at base, simply the principle that our actions should have the form of moral conduct; which is to say (for Kant) that our actions should be derivable from universal principles.

Section 1: Transition from the ordinary rational knowledge of Morality to the Philosophical:

The purpose of Section 1 is to “proceed analytically from ordinary knowledge to a determination of the supreme principle” (392). Which is to say that Kant intends here to move from our ordinary ways of thinking about morality, analyzing them to discover the principles which lie behind them.

Here, Kant is trying to prove something prior to the fact that we have moral obligations – he is trying to show what it is that he has to establish in order to show that morality is possible.

Kant’s starting point in his argument (he assumes that everyone would agree with this belief) is that a “good will” is the only thing to which we attribute unconditional moral value. What he means is that the ‘good will’ is the only thing which has value completely independently of anything external to it, and which it therefore has in all circumstances, independent of contingent empirical facts.

Kant thinks that we cannot detract from the value of an action done from a good will, even if that actions turns out to be unsuccessful. The value of such an action is independent of “what it effects or accomplishes” (394). Thus, Kant’s project becomes that of “elucidating” the concept of a good will (397): Kant is going to find out what principle the person of good will acts on, in order to establish what the moral law tells us to do.

Kant focuses on actions done from duty. Duty is the good will operating “though with certain subjective restrictions and hindrances, which … far from hiding a good will and making it unrecognizable, rather bring it out by contrast and make it shin forth more brightly.” (397). By these ‘subjective hindrances’, Kant has in mind the person who has other motives which would mean that, in the absence of a sense of duty, that person would not be motivated at all to perform the morally right action.

Kant identifies three kinds of motivation for action:
1. Duty – you perform the action because you think that it’s the right thing to do
2. Immediate Inclination – you simply enjoy doing actions of a particular sort
3. Instrumental Inclination – you perform the action because of some independent end which it serves

Kant thinks that right actions performed from duty have a special value which right actions performed from one of the other kinds of motivation lack.
e.g. the ‘prudent merchant’, who acts fairly towards his customers because this will secure his
reputation, but not for its own sake. (The merchant has type-3 motivation).

More controversially, Kant thinks that the actions of the naturally beneficent or sympathetic person, who does not act from duty, but does good because he is naturally inclined towards doing the right thing, and enjoys doing so, also has no moral worth, insofar as it is not action from duty, and hence does not evince a good will. (i.e. type-2 motivation) “I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however dutiful and amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth.” (398).

Kant thinks that, for an action to be morally worthy, it has to be performed for the reason that you think that it is required of you (Duty) – if it is simply the case that it pleases you to do the morally right thing, then that is not enough for moral worth, as your action is not independent of the contingent fact that you happen to have certain preferences which incline you towards performing it.

So, Kant now has an account of what makes morally worthy actions have their special worth. They get their moral worth from the fact that the person who performs them acts from respect for moral law, and not through any reason independent of that moral law.

Section 2: Transition from Popular Moral Philosophy to a Metaphysics of Morals:

Kant’s project in Section 2 is to “present the practical faculty of reason from its universal rules of determination to the point where the concept of duty springs from it.” (412). In other words, Kant wants to lay out a theory of practical reasoning, which shows how the moral law is part of the principles of practical reason.

Kant sees the laws of practical reason as a series of imperatives, telling us what we ought to do. He distinguishes two kinds of imperatives:

✫ Hypothetical Imperatives – tells you what you ought to do, given that you will some end.
✫ Categorical Imperatives – tells you unconditionally what to do.

As we’ve already seen, as Kant thinks that morality must tell us what to do independently of our contingent wills or preferences, it must be governed by a categorical imperative.

The Categorical Imperative tells us to act on principles which are themselves laws. It gets its first formulation at (421), in what is called the Formula of Universal Law formulation of the Categorical Imperative:

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”.

This is immediately followed by what is called the Formula of the Law of Nature formulation:

“Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.”

Kant thinks that there is a test, derivable from the Categorical Imperative, which will allow us to identify which duties we have, and which actions are morally permissible. In each case, one has to perform a kind of though experiment, to see whether you could will your maxim to be a law of nature in a world in which you yourself were going to be a part.

Taking the example of the person who falsely promises to pay back some borrowed money, we can work through the test like so:

(1) We have to formulate the maxim of the action. A maxim combines an action, with a purpose for which that action is performed, and so has the general form ‘I will do Action-A in order to achieve Purpose-P’. Thus, the maxim in this case might be “I will make a false promise in order to get some ready cash”
(2) We then formulate the corresponding ‘law of nature’, which would be: “Everyone who needs some ready cash makes false promises.”
(3) We then imagine a world in which everyone obeyed this ‘law’.
(4) We then imagine ourselves in that world, attempting to secure some ready cash by way of a false promise.
(5) Finally, we have then to ask whether one could will the state of affairs in (3) at the same time as one tried to will the action in (4). We have then to see whether this would lead to any contradiction.

In this case, Kant thinks, a contradiction directly ensues. As he puts it, “For the universality of a law which says that anyone believing himself to be in difficulty could promise whatever he pleases with the intention of not keeping it would make promising itself and the end to be attained thereby quite impossible, inasmuch as no one would believe what was promised him but would merely laugh at all such utterances as being vain pretences.” (421). Thus, given this contradiction, Kant has taken himself to have shown that giving a false promise is morally impermissible.

Kant thinks that similar thought-experiments work for his examples of (1) suicide, (3) cultivating talents and (4) giving to the poor. (The false promise is example no. 2).

Kant thinks that there are two ways in which such contradictions can arise.
✫ In cases (1) and (2), Kant thinks that there is a contradiction in the very conception of the universalized maxim being a law. In such cases, Kant thinks that this shows that such maxims are in violation of strict or perfect duties.
✫ In cases (3) and (4), Kant thinks that the contradiction comes later, in willing that the given maxim be a universal law. In such cases, Kant thinks that this shows that the maxim is in violation of wide or imperfect duties.

Generally, if a maxim passes the Categorical Imperative test, then that action is morally permissible. If it fails the test, then that action is morally forbidden, and, therefore, the opposite action is morally required.

Another Formulation of the Categorical Imperative:

NB: Kant’s claim is that all of the different formulations of the Categorical Imperative are, in fact, equivalent with one another, and would permit and forbid exactly the same actions.

The Kingdom of Ends Formulation (434)

“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another,
always at the same time as an end and never as a means”.

Which is to say that, as human beings are of absolute value, they should not sacrifice themselves or one another for merely relatively valuable ends. This formula enjoins us to respect each other as rational beings.

This is intimately connected with Kant’s notion of autonomy. If we think of ourselves as legislating universal law through our maxims, then Kant would suggest that we should think of moral motivation as autonomous. Kant’s belief was that moral obligation arises from, and can only be traced to, the human capacity for autonomous self-direction.

• Kant now thinks that what it remains for him to show is that we are autonomous beings who are capable of being motivated by a conception of ourselves as legislative citizens in a Kingdom of Ends. He thinks that, if he can show that we are autonomous, then he will have shown that we are bound by the moral law as given by the Categorical Imperative.

Freedom, or autonomy, for Kant is obeying a law which you give to yourself. Thus, if he can show (in section III), that human beings can be genuinely autonomous, then he will have satisfied himself that the demands of morality as mapped out in sections I and II, do apply to rational human agents.

Section 3: Transition from a Metaphysics of Morals to a Critique of Pure Practical Reason:

The Story so Far:

By analyzing our ordinary conception of moral value, and our conception of rational action, we have
arrived at an idea of:

a. what the moral law says (act on a maxim one can will as a universal law)
b. the characteristic in virtue of which a person is governed by the moral law (autonomy of the will).

To complete the argument, Kant has to show that we and all rational beings really have the kind of autonomous wills for which the moral law is authoritative.

Kant starts Section III with a good summary of his view of freedom (446), “The will is a kind of causality belonging to living beings as far as they are rational; freedom would be the property of this causality that makes it effective independent of any determination of alien causes. [That is, independent of any factors extraneous to the will itself, including the merely empirical desires and inclinations of the agent in question.]”.
Insofar as human action meets this condition, it is autonomous. Insofar as it fails to meet this condition, and does find itself under the influence of ‘alien causes’, then it is heteronymous.

Kant thinks that freedom from such ‘alien causes’ is possible only when we act out of duty towards the moral law, as given by the Categorical Imperative. Thus, for Kant, “a free will and a will subject to moral laws are one and the same.” (447). Thus, for Kant, there is an analytical connection between freedom and morality. So, the big question for Kant has to be that of whether we really are free: if we are, then he thinks that he has done enough to show that we must be subject to the moral law of the categorical imperative.

Kant starts his defence of our freedom from what it’s like to be a rational being. When we choose between different options, we think that our choice is free, and that we are not compelled to go for any particular option. Thus, Kant thinks that, insofar as we are rational, we have to act under an idea of freedom. “Now I claim that we must necessarily attribute to every rational being who has a will also the idea of freedom, under which only such a being can act.” “Reason must regard itself as the author of its principles independent of foreign influences.” (448).

Now, Kant acknowledges that there might be a problem with this assumption of freedom, in that our freedom to freely choose between different options might seem to contradict the natural necessity of the laws of science. Kant’s solution here is to say that, whilst this is true of human agents insofar as they are part of the empirical world, it is not true of them when they are considered as rational beings choosing between alternatives in the ‘realm of freedom’.

[This corresponds with Kant’s distinction between the phenomenal realm of things as they appear, and the noumenal realm, of things as they are in themselves. Kant thinks that we can have knowledge only of the phenomenal realm, but that we can think of ourselves as rationally choosing courses of action within the realm of the noumenal (the ‘world of understanding’).]

Kant thinks that there are ‘two standpoints’, corresponding to the two parts of this distinction, from which we can think about ourselves, and that the nature of these two standpoints is such that they are unable to contradict each other. “Therefore a rational being must regard himself qua intelligence (and hence not from the side of his lower powers) as belonging not to the world of sense but to the world of understanding. Therefore he has two standpoints from which he can regard himself and know the laws of the use of his powers and hence of all his actions: first, insofar as he belongs to the world of sense subject to laws of nature (heteronomy); secondly, insofar as he belongs to the intelligible world subject to laws which, independent of nature, are not empirical but are founded only on reason.” (452).

So, just as there are two ways of viewing this representation of a cube – as either going “into”
or ‘out of’ the page – even though there is only one cube; and just as there is no real ‘contradiction’ between thinking of the cube in these two ways, so too does Kant think that we have two ways to think about human beings, which are essentially in disagreement, but which somehow manage not to contradict one another.

Thus, Kant thinks that, because we inevitably think of ourselves as members of the world of understanding, we must think of ourselves, at the same time, as free and autonomous. And he thinks that this does not come into any conflict with our beliefs that human beings are part of the natural world, and hence subject to the same natural laws as all other matter.

It is important to realize that Kant does not think it is possible to explain how this freedom is possible, as he thinks that we can have no knowledge of the noumenal realm in which we are free. Kant thinks only that (a) we are free and autonomous in the relevant sense and (b) that it is necessarily the case that we will be unable to give an account of quite how this is possible.

If one accepts this Kant’s account of our freedom and autonomy, then, if we have accepted the rest of his argument about morality, we ought to accept that we are governed by the moral law as given by the Categorical Imperative. On the other hand, one might want to argue that, in the end, Kant’s account of human freedom is simply incoherent.

Part 4: A Very Rudimentary Glossary

analytic: A judgement is analytic if the subject concept already contains the predicate.

autonomy: The property of a faculty which is both free and gives the law of its operation to itself.

idea: A concept formed by pure reason which purports to permit cognition of ‘objects’ beyond the limits of possible experience.

intuition: [Anshauung] An immediate presentation of a object in space and time. Pure, a priori intuition is the presentation of the form of space or time itself.

noumenon: thing-in-itself, intelligible, supersensible [Übersinnliche]: That realm of ‘objects’, unexperiencable in principle, which is purported to be the ground of all objects of experience.

Phenomenon/Phenomena: Roughly, ‘phenomenon’ is equivalent to ‘appearance’; ‘phenomena’ to ‘appearances’.

Practical philosophy: That philosophy that deals with human action in general, and with human free (and thus potentially moral) action specifically. For Kant, it is opposed to 'theoretical' or 'speculative' philosophy.
freedom: [Freiheit] The ability of the rational human will to act autonomously.

Synthetic/ synthesis: A ‘synthetic’ judgement is one in which the concept of the object does not already contain the predicate. ‘Synthesis’ is any act of combining or relating together presentations.

Theoretical Philosophy: That branch of philosophy that deals with objects of possible experience, and deals with them as objects of possible knowledge. See 'practical philosophy'.