Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals/On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns

Groundbook of the Metaphysics of Morals

by Immanuel Kant, James W. Ellington (Translator)

This expanded edition of James Ellington’s preeminent translation includes Ellington’s new translation of Kant’s essay Of a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns in which Kant replies to one of the standard objections to his moral theory as presented in the main text: that it requires us to tell the truth even in the face of disastrous consequences.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Classics, German Literature, School, Metaphysics, 18th Century

82 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1785

About the author

Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century philosopher from Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He's regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe & of the late Enlightenment. His most important work is The Critique of Pure Reason, an investigation of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics & epistemology, & highlights his own contribution to these areas. Other main works of his maturity are The Critique of Practical Reason, which is about ethics, & The Critique of Judgment, about esthetics & teleology.

Pursuing metaphysics involves asking questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Kant suggested that metaphysics can be reformed thru epistemology. He suggested that by understanding the sources & limits of human knowledge we can ask fruitful metaphysical questions. He asked if an object can be known to have certain properties prior to the experience of that object. He concluded that all objects that the mind can think about must conform to its manner of thought. Therefore if the mind can think only in terms of causality–which he concluded that it does–then we can know prior to experiencing them that all objects we experience must either be a cause or an effect. However, it follows from this that it's possible that there are objects of such a nature that the mind cannot think of them, & so the principle of causality, for instance, cannot be applied outside experience: hence we cannot know, for example, whether the world always existed or if it had a cause. So the grand questions of speculative metaphysics are off limits, but the sciences are firmly grounded in laws of the mind. Kant believed himself to be creating a compromise between the empiricists & the rationalists. The empiricists believed that knowledge is acquired thru experience alone, but the rationalists maintained that such knowledge is open to Cartesian doubt and that reason alone provides us with knowledge. Kant argues, however, that using reason without applying it to experience will only lead to illusions, while experience will be purely subjective without first being subsumed under pure reason. Kant’s thought was very influential in Germany during his lifetime, moving philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists & empiricists. The philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer saw themselves as correcting and expanding Kant's system, thus bringing about various forms of German Idealism. Kant continues to be a major influence on philosophy to this day, influencing both Analytic and Continental philosophy.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was studying this book there were no copies available to buy for some reason - but then I found it in the local library in a hard back edition printed in the 1930s or something. I borrowed it and showed it to my lecturer and he said, "You ought to steal that - they only charge you what it cost the library to buy and that would have been cents back then." I said, "You want me to steal a book on morality?" Needless to say, he was much better at lecturing on Neitzsche.

This is a remarkably difficult book to read - not as hard as some of Kant's other works - the Critique of Pure Reason *which I've started many times - and will probably start many times more) should only be attempted with fear and trepidation - all the same, it repays the effort. The main problem is Kant's endless sentences - he is the Henry James of the philosophy world.

Some feel that his categorical imperative - act in a way that allows you to imagine the maxim that is guiding your action could be used as a universal law for anyone needing to act in similar circumstances (my longer than Kant take on it) is a fascinating basis for building a morality.

Some say that the categorical imperative is just the Christian golden rule written in a way that makes it hard to follow. The golden rule not being 'he who has the gold makes the rules', but rather 'treat others as you would be treated yourself'. There is something to that, but I think it is a little more interesting when Kant does it. The idea that other people should be treated like ends and not means seems to me to be as good a basis of a moral system as anyone has, as yet, come up with.

I'm terribly fond of Kant, almost protective of him, not because I think he is the greatest philosopher of all time, but because he was what we would today consider a boring little man who never left his home town, but thought remarkable thoughts. He even worked out why the solar system is a flat disk shape - pretty cool, if you ask me. He had world changing thoughts in some ways.

I would go so far as to say that understanding his idea that one cannot know the thing-in-itself is perhaps one of the core ideas in understanding virtually all philosophy after him.

If you were thinking of starting reading Kant and weren't sure where would be a good place to make such a start this wouldn't be too bad a book to buy. The other place to look, perhaps, is the Critique of the Judgement which is quite an easy read (for Kant) and fascinating stuff on taste - taste in art, that is.

[Roy Lotz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Confession of Stupidity:

Lately, I’ve been had long and agonizing conversation with my friend about the categorical imperative. I was insisting that it didn’t make sense; my friend insisted that it did, and that I merely misunderstood it. After much deliberation, I found to my embarrassment that he was right: I had misunderstood it. I had misunderstood it badly. Now, fortunately, I think I’ve got a hold on the concept, which indeed is not terribly complex (though, for my brain at least, a bit too much).

Having thought a lot about it, I wish to give a fairly pedantic examination of the theory (forgive me!). But first, I’d like to explain what it is not, and the various ways that I managed to misapprehend it.


My Mistakes:

I was under the impression that the categorical imperative was this: “Before you do an action, consider whether it would work as a universal law; if it would, it’s okay; if it wouldn't, then it’s forbidden.” But I thought to myself “I could will almost literally anything as a universal law. I could will universal suicide or a universal fight to the death, just so long as I was willing to commit suicide or fight to the death myself.” The thought experiment Kant instructed us to perform seemed completely arbitrary; he might as well say “before you do an action, imagine if it could be performed on a spaceship.”

Also, I thought “if I give enough qualifications, almost anything could work as a universal without anything catastrophic happening.” For example, I could say “if you are tired, going to work on a Tuesday morning, hate your job, are six foot three inches tall, and need to urinate, it’s okay to be push people on the street.” The conditions given for this action are so specific that nothing would really change. Similarly, I could say “if you’re really really desperate, it’s okay to steal,” and it could work. In fact, I bet that’s already the case.

The second formulation also confused me: “treat people as ends, not means.” For one, I couldn’t see any connection between this formulation and the previous one: what does treating people with respect have to do with willing universal laws? What’s more, the command seemed preposterous. I thought, “but I treat people as means all the time. When I order coffee I don’t do it for the sake of the person selling the coffee.” I also thought that there was a contradiction between doing an action for the sake of duty and doing it for the sake of another person; what’s the real ‘end’, the person or the duty?

All of my objections managed to completely and totally miss the point. My friend got frustrated because I was bringing up all these irrelevant objections, and I felt very confused.

Hope came when I took a long walk, and decided that I would attempt to start from Kant’s assumptions (which I knew roughly from his Critiques) and see if I could get to something that resembled the categorical imperative. Here is what I found.


My Attempt to Derive the Categorical Imperative:

When we look at nature, we often find determinism. Equations determine the movement of particles and the temperatures of stars; chemical structures determine the qualities of materials; instincts honed by natural selection determine animal behavior. Sometimes, we also see random chance. We run into an old friend in a distant country, or we accidentally drop our mug of beer. But freedom is incompatible with either determinism and chance: to be free, we cannot be said to be determined by anything else, nor can we attribute our actions to some random process. Nonetheless, we cannot help but suppose ourselves free; otherwise, we can never decide what to do—since all decision-making presupposes freedom.

We can relieve this tension in one of two ways. One way would be to declare freedom illusory. We presuppose freedom when we decide, but this is just a feeling of freedom; we are just as determined by natural laws as anything else in nature, and just as subject to random processes. And here we might ask ourselves, what is freedom, anyway? Well, maybe it's easier to answer: when are we not free?

When we are compelled to follow a law or directive foisted on us by somebody in power, we aren't free because we aren't determining our own actions. But, when a drug addict sells their property to get a fix, we also say they aren't free, even though they aren't following some external directive, because their desires are determining their actions. Last, we don't hold accountable a person whose house was destroyed by a hurricane, and is reduced to penury, because the hurricane might be said to have struck by chance.

So we say a person is free when they make coolly rational decisions, not forced by some outside party, not overwhelmed by some strong desire, and not affected by some random process. But is this justifiable? Is this really freedom? And do we have it? It seems that, even when we're making coolly rational decisions, we're still subject to the laws of nature, to random events, and are still guided by our wants and needs. So is freedom—at least in the fundamental sense of an action being undetermined by all previous events, nor at all random—is this freedom possible?

Kant thinks it is; but he has a job to do in proving that it is possible. We can attempt to resolve these conflicts by hypothesizing that there is a part of us that is neither determined nor subject to chance.

But what would this part of us be? I can find two possibilities, not mutually exclusive: consciousness and rationality. Humans are distinguished from other creatures by our self-consciousness and by our ability to reason. First, let us suppose it is consciousness only that makes us free. But what are we conscious of? Hunger, thirst, exhaustion, desire, and various other things in our surroundings.

If something external to our bodies forces us to do something, we are obviously not free, just as a dog is not free when being trained by its master. Consciousness seems to make no difference in that case. But we also seem not to be free when following some desire. For example, a dog is probably conscious of hunger, too, yet we do not usually think that dogs have free will when they pursue food. Perhaps you can say you are free because you can chose which desire to satisfy; but then what is the criterion by which one makes such a decision? Another desire?

Clearly, something extra is needed: rationality. Our ability to use reason is what sets our decision-making apart from that of dogs and cats. Using reason, we can establish criterion that are not themselves desires. We can reign in desire for fast food if we realize that it will have negative long-term effects; we can abstain from buying that expensive new luxury car by considering how it would affect our children’s futures. Ah, but that's not quite enough! Because, even when we refuse to eat fast food, all we're doing is balancing our desire for something salty against our desire for long life. In a sense, we're still in the position of a drug addict balancing his desire for a fix against his desire for a coat. So not only must reason be the criterion, but reason must be the motivation, for free decisions. We must both be determining our own actions and not pursuing some desire.

Now we are in a position to ask ourselves: what is morality? To be moral is to decide to do the right thing; it requires decision-making, and therefore can only apply to rational creatures. Not only can morality only apply to rational creatures, but morality can only apply to creatures insofar as they are rational.

Anything non-rational, therefore, cannot be moral. Animals and inanimate objects cannot reason, so morality cannot apply to them. We have previously determined that things like hunger, thirst, and other desires are non-rational; so such things are not the basis of morality. Neither is morality concerned with achieving any particular goal in the world, because all goals derive their value from desiring them. Phrased in a slightly different way, all goals are contingent: they are only operative when the desire for them is operative; and we know that our desires are ever-changing. Nor can morality even have anything to do with human nature, since all other rational creatures—human, alien, or angel—would be equally subject to it.

So morality, being derived from rationality and only applicable to creatures insofar as they are rational, must not have anything to do with empirical reality; it is, in other words, a priori.

Now, morality deals in oughts, commands, or imperatives—what we should do. Since morality cannot take into account states of fact, the commands of morality must apply under all conceivable conditions. Also, since every rational creature is equally subject to the commands of morality, all moral imperatives must apply equally to all rational creatures. In short, morality is equally operative no matter who you are or what you’re doing. It is not dependent on any circumstances: it is a categorical imperative.

From this alone we can draw the conclusion that any action which makes an exception of the actor cannot be moral. In other words, any action which could not be universalized is immoral (since the categorical imperative applies to everyone equally at all times). Also, since morality applies to all rational agents equally, any actions which treat a rational agent as not deserving of equal respect is immoral. This is to say, any action which treats a rational agent as a non-rational part of nature is forbidden; there is no valid reason for doing so.

This test is a negative test. The categorical imperative cannot tell you what to do; it can only tell you what you may not do. You may not make an exception of yourself; you may not treat another rational agent as a part of nature. In other words, act only on maxims that can be willed as universals; never treat other rational agents as means only, but as ends in themselves deserving of respect.


The Categorical Imperative in a Nutshell:

So Kant does a very clever thing here. Kant essentially makes morality and freedom synonymous. You are only free if you are motivated by reason; and when you are motivated by reason, you are abiding by the categorical imperative, and are thus moral.

Rationality is, for Kant, the basis of free will. So when rationality fully determines the will, it is the will giving a law unto itself. This removes the paradox of freedom. We are not free when we are following a law from outside ourselves, nor when we are following our own desires; we are only free when we are following the laws we created for ourselves (you can see the Rousseau influence here). And not only must we abide by these self-made laws, but we must abide them purely for the sake of abiding by them, because only then are we free and moral.


Some Implications:

Before examining whether Kant’s premise holds, let us take a moment to ponder out some of the implications of his conclusion. In Kant’s system, many things commonly regarded as immoral are forbidden: lying, stealing, raping, murdering. Stealing, for example, treats people as ends and not means; to steal makes an exception of yourself from a general rule; it cannot be willed as universal. This consonance with popular opinion is (at first sight, at least) an encouraging sign.

But consider further. Because Kant has divorced morality from all consequences, and founded it purely on consistency, all moral actions are equally moral, and all immoral actions are equally immoral. This is apparent at once, when one considers that one can either be consistent or inconsistent, not half consistent; one can either treat someone as an end or not, not half as an end. Therefore, lying and murder are equally immoral and equally forbidden. The white lie you told your wife puts you on a level with the murderer in prison. This is a chilling conclusion, as any punitive system which doles out punishments in proportion to the crime’s consequences (such as ours) is itself immoral, or at least ammoral.

Another odd implication of Kant’s conclusion is that non-rational creatures are completely exempted from the system, as they do not (according to Kant) have free will, and therefore cannot be bound by morality. This means that all bets are off regarding animal cruelty. Because animals are non-rational, there is no restrictions on how one must treat them. To pick a grim example, slowly torturing a squirrel to death can certainly be willed as a universal without contradiction; the act doesn’t treat a rational agent as a means; thus, it is permissible.

Kant says so much himself:

Beings whose existence depends not on our will but on nature’s, have nevertheless, if they are irrational beings, only a relative value as means, and are therefore called things; rational beings, on the contrary, are called persons, because their very nature points them out as ends in themselves, that is as something which must not be used merely as means, and so far therefore restricts freedom of action (and is an object of respect).

One wonders whether this exemption from the strictures of morality applies to young children and the insane, who are also not capable of reason. If so, infanticide is permissible, as is the mistreatment of the mentally ill. Another chilling conclusion.

But perhaps the most striking thing about this chain of reasoning is that, as a result of Kant's disdain for empirical facts, a moral person has no reason to expect happiness. In fact, a person acting in accordance with the categorical imperative may reasonably expect to be miserable; their unerring code of behavior would make them easy prey for anyone who wished to take advantage of them.

This is not a theoretical objection to Kant. But one may reasonably ask, "then why be moral?" The only thing Kant can say is, "to be free." And if you ask, "why be free?" Kant's famous response is "to be worthy of happiness." But I'm sure many would rather take happiness than worthiness.


But was Kant Right?

Kant’s argument rests on the premise that, when one acts rationally, one is not determined by anything else. Rationality, for Kant, is not part of the world of nature, and is therefore the basis of freedom.

I am extremely skeptical that this is the case. I do not see how anybody could make an absolutely free decision, independent of the normal laws of nature. We cannot, so to speak, take ourselves out of the stream of causation. It therefore seems more likely that freedom is an illusion, or a particular kind of ignorance. In Spinoza's words, "men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are conditioned. Their idea of freedom, therefore, is simply their ignorance of any cause for their actions."

Thus, acting in accordance with Kant’s principles would not make a person more or less free. Refraining from stealing based on the categorical imperative is just as "free" a decision as eating lunch because of hunger, or sleeping because of exhaustion. We are always both subject to random processes and to deterministic laws, and all our decisions are just as motivated by desires as the drug addict's. (Even the strict Kantian is motivated by his desire to abide by the categorical imperative.)

Kant makes the subtle and interesting argument that even if rationality doesn’t actually make us free, the categorical imperative is still operative because, in order to act, we must assume we’re free. In other words, Kant says that, even if freedom is an illusion, his conclusions still hold. But if freedom is an illusion, acting according to his principles might be literally impossible for sentient creatures (as I suspect is the case); so striving after some “ideal of reason” (as Kant calls it) hardly seems like the sensible thing to do.

Moreover, because we are not capable of completely free decisions, and because morality apparently does have its basis in empirical fact—if it can be said to exist at all—it behooves us to take into account things like human psychology, empirical conditions, cultural and historical forces, and consequences. A moral system that treats lies as equivalent to murder is impracticable; and a moral system that only binds rational agents may lead to inhumane acts. Finally, no person can be reasonably expected to abide by a moral system that will not lead to their own happiness.


Parting Thought

As I reread this book, a feeling suddenly took hold of me: admiration. I found myself almost in awe of Kant—both of his boldness and his genius. Even if I don’t believe his premises are correct, I can’t help but think it would be a beautiful thing if such a kingdom of ends were possible. It just so happens that the world isn’t as beautiful as Kant’s mind.

[Luís · Rating 3 out of 5]

If your reason commands you to help raise an old lady who has inadvertently fallen at your feet, you obey a categorical imperative, and your act is moral.
If you hope that by helping him, you will have a reward, you are obeying a hypothetical imperative (and in my opinion, it is not earning the tip).

[Nikos Tsentemeidis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Θα τολμούσα να πω (αν και αυθαίρετα ίσως), ότι ο Καντ είναι ο Αριστοτέλης της σύγχρονης δυτικής φιλοσοφίας. Πολύ απαιτητικό βιβλίο, αν και το πιο προσιτό του σε μη ειδικούς αναγνώστες.

[Joshua Nomen-Mutatio · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was the annoying guy in class who kept insisting that the categorical imperative was the Golden Rule with a thick, convoluted veneer of the most difficult writing in philosophical history slathered all over it. Of course it is slightly different than the Golden Rule, but I'd say only trivially so. I understand Kant's influence, importance, etc, I just can't stand his writing. And I do think that his ideas, as influential as they were, were often failures. And again, the writing is painfully bad, regardless of the intelligence within, every fan of Kant's philosophy admits this as far as I know: great philosopher, terrible writer.

Also, I find deontological ethics (moral precepts divorced from their consequences, "goodness for goodness sake", etc) to be a failure, especially in light of superior consequentialist positions like preference utilitarianism. One can be a moral realist without recourse to positing imaginary realms divorced from human happiness and suffering where ethics magically emerge from. I mean, how smart can a person be who really believes that lying is always unethical regardless of the circumstance? It takes about two seconds to conjure up a situation in which lying would absolutely be the right thing to do: Nazis looking for your Jewish friends that are hiding in your attic. According to the genius Kant it would be wrong to say that they're not upstairs.

For an antidote to reading a book like this look to work on ethics done by Peter Singer, Bernard Williams, Simon Blackburn, and Derek Parfit.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
― Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Picture:



Words & Phrases:

Freedom, Autonomy of the Will, Categorical Imperative, Intuitions of Sense, Morally Aught, Universal Laws, Pure Practical Reason, Pragmatic, Practical, Rational Beings, Universality, Moral Law, External Conditions, Happiness, Empirical Interests, Obligations, Reciprocal Conceptions, Heteronomy, Causality, Things In Themselves.

Meaning:

In some ways the Categorical Imperative appears like a philosophically formal and universally binding adaptation of the Golden Rule, **kind of**. When one sees how many different versions of the Golden Rule have appeared independently in space and time, perhaps Kant was onto something. Anyway, I enjoyed reading this if only because a lot of what I've studied in political philosophy and moral policy was either born out of Kant's thoughts or as a reaction to it. Rawls' Veil of ignorance seems to be a recent, direct descendent, as Kant's social contract was a child of Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke.

[Vicky "phenkos"]

Covid-19 is first and foremost a social disease. If we ever needed an example of Kant's categorical imperative, Covid-19 is the best we could find. Remember that Kant distinguishes between hypothetical and categoricaI imperatives. Examples of the former include: if I want to lose weight, I need to go on a diet. 'If I want to win the next general election, I need to...(complete as necessary)'. In other words, going on a diet is not good in itself, but is only good if one wants/needs to lose weight. The action is good given a certain aim. As Kant puts it, "The hypothetical imperative thus says only that the action is good for some possible or actual aim." But there are actions that are good in themselves, and this what morality is about.

Morality, says Kant, cannot be based on hypothetical imperatives. Morality is about what is good in and for itself. We are moral beings because (and insofar as) we do the right thing just because it is the right thing to do, not because we hope to gain something out of it. A very different kind of imperative comes in here, the categorical imperative.

"Finally, there is one imperative that, without being grounded on any other aim to be achieved through a certain course of conduct as its condition, commands this conduct immediately. This imperative is categorical. It has to do not with the matter of the action and what is to result from it, but with the form and the principle from which it results; and what is essentially good about it consists in the disposition, whatever the result may be. This imperative may be called that of morality."

In other words, when it is a question of morality, the law does not allow of equivocations. No ifs, no buts! But how do we know what's the moral thing to do in any given case? To help, Kant gives a series of formulations, of which the best known one is the so-called FUL or The Formula of Universal Law:

‘‘Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’’

When I make it my maxim to practice social distancing, i.e. when I practice social distancing consistently as a principle of my actions rather than incidentally, my maxim is consistent with a giving of a universal law (always and at all circumstances practice social distancing). I do it because it's the right thing to do and not because I hope to gain something out of it. By contrast, if I only practice social distancing when it suits me, my maxim is not consistent with the giving of a universal law because I act haphazardly. One time I practice social distancing and at another time not. To put it simply, I don't practice social distancing because it's the right thing to do, but because (and insofar as) I feel like it.

Let's see now how FUL applies to dealing with Covid-19. What we know so far is that the coronavirus is extremely contagious. It will get transmitted far more easily than flu viruses we are familiar with. In addition, infected people can infect others even if they do not present any symptoms. In fact, if I understand this correctly, coronavirus is very infectious at its early stage, i.e. before the carrier presents any (or serious) symptoms.

If people infected with Coronavirus practice social distancing haphazardly, that means that the transmission rate is going to be far higher than if people were to practice social distancing consistently (because it's the right thing to do). We know that of those infected a percentage will die. Given the exponential rate of the growth of infection see Manny's review here, the number of infected people will increase at a rate that will soon outstrip the capacity of the national health service system to cope.

If I understand correctly, there is currently only one way to deal with the coronavirus, which is to cause it to run out of carriers. However, there are two strategies to bring this about. The one followed by the Chinese involves aggressive testing and draconian enforcement of social distaning. The other strategy is the one favoured by the British government. In its purest form, this strategy is premised on the idea that the virus will run out of carriers when the vast majority of the population has been infected with the virus and has become immune whilst a smaller, high risk group waits it out by self-isolating. The former staregy appears to have worked in Wuhan but it has come at a cost that Western countries may not be willing to pay. It requires a disciplined population and it is easier to be enforced by an authoritarian government. The latter strategy is easier for the population to accept initially, but will lead to a considerably higher number of deaths in the long run.

Is there a categorical imperative here, and if so, what does it bid us do? It may seem obvious that if one values human life, practicing social distancing strictly is the right thing to do right now. But you see, I put in an 'if' there! Does this make my imperative hypothetical? An adept dialectician might push me on this; what does it mean to value human life? Are all lives equally valuable? When doctors have to make decisions on who is to live and who is to die, don't they flout this universal value? And won't they have to make such decisions whatever their personal code of ethics when hospitals run out of ventilators? It is being vigorously denied that an adviser to the PM allegedly argued against strict measures to contain the coronavirus because that would hurt the economy. But even assuming that such arguments were never voiced, the fact is that this strategy uses older people or people with underlying health problems as 'collateral'. Are we happy to see this happen? One has to ponder this possibility carefully.

[Miguel Cisneros Saucedo · Rating 5 out of 5]

La "Fundamentación..." de Kant es una obra magistral que ofrece una visión profunda y perspicaz sobre la ética y la moral. Kant nos guía a través de un riguroso análisis filosófico, estableciendo los fundamentos racionales de la moralidad y la libertad. Su enfoque en la razón práctica y el imperativo categórico proporciona un marco sólido para comprender nuestras obligaciones morales y nuestras acciones éticas. La claridad y la precisión de su argumentación hacen que este libro sea accesible incluso para aquellos no familiarizados con la filosofía. En definitiva, una lectura indispensable para cualquier persona interesada en las bases de la fenomenología y en comprender la influencia del movimiento del Racionalismo en la ética.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Preservation of life and happiness is a duty. Duty is conceived by moral grounds, often reflecting natural law or societal law. A maxim of action should be a universal law.

"For duty is to be a practical, unconditional necessity of action; it must therefore hold for all rational beings (to whom an imperative can apply at all), and for this reason only be also a law for all human wills." (71)

Why must a moral philosopher self-determinably try and rationally postulate the notion of suicide if life is a gift?

Law requires interest, either by way of attraction or constraint.

"In the kingdom of ends everything has either value or dignity. Whatever has a value can be replaced by something else which is equivalent; whatever, on the other hand, is above all value, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity." (92)

Autonomy of the will and rational beings belong to the world of understanding.

"Freedom must be presupposed as a Property of the Will of all Rational Beings." (117)

What legislations promote harmony in ur kingdom?

[Orhan Pelinkovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Happiness is not the central character or aim in Kant's ethics, as is the case with most ethical theories, nor is happiness the ideal state of the mind.

Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) is more focused on presenting the core principles of morality derived from a priori pure ideas.

Where only in freedom alone lies this pure idea and in that idea the awareness of one's free will.

Hence, this free will provides us with the choice to choose what's morally good or bad. So, in order to decide what's morally good, one is to utilize Kant's categorical imperative which is a simple logical process in determining what is right and wrong.

Namely, in order to assess if your actions are purely moral you are to believe that everyone else should act the same way in a given situation and that those actions should become the general law of nature.

Kant goes on to say that good will itself is the only thing that's unconditionally good. Therefore, one's pure intentions to want and wish good for others is the ultimate good despite the outcome of those intentions in the sensual world.

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a joke in German...the German philosophy student who learns English because Kant was too hard to understand in German(!) The hardest book I have ever read...99% went over my head...Kant was a genius - I am not. Just the right book to take you down a notch; but I will keep trying to understand him - as best I can.

[Turbulent_Architect · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a love-hate relationship with Kant, but there's no question that the Groundwork is a brilliant piece of philosophy. Kant argues that rightness or wrongness of an action can be derived from nowhere else than from the concepts internal to practical reason, and, more specifically, from the concept of lawfulness. Hence his famous categorical imperative: An action is right only if it is coherent to will that all rational beings perform it. Now there seem to me to be a number of conceptual blunders in Kant's thinking. And while I think there's something to the kind of universalizability requirement he proposes, I also don't think it can ground the rightness or wrongness of an action independently of considerations about that action's consequences. Be that as it may, this is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in moral philosophy.

[Théo d'Or]

Certainly, reading Kant goes beyond the act of reading, becoming an act of bravery, thinking of the necessary patience. If there is anyone who can prove that white is black, or green, or pink, when ( almost ) everyone sees only white, that one is Kant. In the matter of moral sentiment, we have a sum of variables and as many contradictions.
The philosopher admits the existence of a moral sentiment, a fact that can only surprise, because it appears as an inconsistency of his own theory.
The sentiment, regardless of its type, is related to sensitivity, so, inclinations, and these - according to Kant - can't be ( even when these are good ) - a motive of morals. On closer examination, the apparent inconsistency dissipates, but instead the strangeness of kantian conception
of moral sentiment stands out. Alors, we find that that moral sentiment does not precede or substantiate the moral law. But then, I wonder, how does this sentiment relate to the moral law ?
Kant also considers the instinct and inclination of sentiment a side incompatible with morality, placing it in the area of self-love.
Kantian apriorism and formalism only leave me with a lot of ambiguities and confusions.
Reading phrases like " Two things fill my soul with ever new and growing admiration and veneration : the starry sky above me, and the moral law in me " - I conclude that the spectacle of the universe can constitute for man a real narcissistic lesion, instead, the moral law has the gift to exalt the feeling of human dignity.
When expressed as such.

[Mashael Alamri · Rating 3 out of 5]

ترجمة الكتاب رائعة , شرحت بالتفصيل فلسفة كانط بطريقة ميسرة قد تكون مفاتيح للكثير من البحث أو القراءة , فكرت كثيرا كيف أكتب المراجعة للكتاب ووجدت أنني أكتب صفحات عدة لأن الكتاب بترجمته هو عبارة عن مراجعة هل سأنقله بأكمله ؟؟
أول كتاب اقرأه لكانط , بخلاف بعض المقالات والشروحات عن فلسفته لذلك أحتاج الكثير قبل أن أكتب عنه أقلها الإطلاع على مؤلف آخر له لأنها الآن تبدو لي صعبه.

[E. G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Translator's Preface
Commentary and Analysis of the Argument - The Approach to Moral Philosophy, Outline of a Metaphysic of Morals, Outline of a Critique of Practical Reason

--Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals

Notes
Index

[Ana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pensei que a leitura deste livro "ia ser dose" ou seja, que ia ser muito complexa e aborrecida, mas não foi assim uma leitura tão má quanto isso. É óbvio que a minha compreensão total deste livro beneficiaria em muito de um conhecimento mais aprofundado e contextualizado da obra completa deste filósofo, contudo não a achei difícil de entender e penso ser uma obra acessível a quem como eu tenha poucos conhecimentos sobre Filosofia.

O autor propõe-se neste livro chegar estabelecer os fundamentos da metafísica dos costumes para chegar a uma razão pura prática. Divide o texto em três partes para melhor expor as fases e o processo de construção desta sua teoria filosófica. O processo está bem descrito e interessante, pois o autor serve-se de várias abordagens: do particular para o geral e também o contrário, do método indutivo e também do dedutivo, num texto bem estruturado e claro para o leitor. Como os assuntos giram em torno da moralidade, dos costumes, da natureza, da acção humana, etc, também algumas passagens (quando ele se refere a exemplos) são muito interessantes, porque acabei por os ver como apontamentos da época e da sociedade onde o autor se movimentava.

Gostei particularmente do imperativo categórico (logo a sua primeira formulação, ainda sem mais desenvolvimento). Em minha opinião, tal como está formulada e mesmo retirada deste seu contexto original, é uma frase digna de reflexão, que se bem interpretada pode ainda ser "importada" para os nossos dias (enquanto orientadora geral da acção):
"Age apenas segundo uma máxima tal que possas ao mesmo tempo querer que ela se torne uma lei universal"
A forma como eu a entendo retirada do contexto não é contudo original bastando uma outra frase cuja origem é a da moralidade religiosa (da qual a teoria de Kant se tenta afastar) para orientar a acção humana de forma idêntica :"Faz aos outros aquilo que gostarias que te fizessem a ti" (penso que a frase original estará na negativa, "não faças aos outros...", mas vai dar ao mesmo :)

E depois tudo o que não gostei e que vou resumir:

a) a tentativa de chegar a leis universais para um pensamento puro que deveria ser a base da acção humana : quimérico, em minha opinião. Ainda que fosse possível, nunca poderia ser realizável por este meio. Se o autor parte da sua experiência individual, da sua sociedade, do seu tempo, enfim do seu mundo... como poderia ele criar leis universais para toda a humanidade, ainda mais quando estamos a falar da prática, da acção, do comportamento. Não deixa contudo de ser interessante a forma como ele o tentou.

b) a falta de definição dos construtos que ele utiliza para a sua teoria: algo muito próprio do seu tempo e da filosofia em geral, mas que a mim me fez alguma falta. O que entende o autor por moralidade? por acção? o querer? a vontade? o desejo? até a natureza?... se queremos falar de uma da construção de uma teoria, ainda que filosófica, seria importante para mim saber exactamente como é que o autor define estes conceitos. Talvez estejam descritos em outro lugar, mas julgo que seria importante estarem também definidos na obra.

b) as divisões cartesianas: a razão da emoção, o sensível do inteligível, o racional do irracional... Não me vou alongar aqui porque teria muito a dizer, mas em suma, não concordo e penso que qualquer teoria que tente isolar o pensamento do homem do seu sensível, da sua natureza, da sua emoção, e mesmo da sua condição enquanto animal, estará sem dúvida condenada a não ser válida.

c) "os homens e os outros seres racionais..." : pelo menos duas vezes Kant escreveu desta forma dividindo os homens dos outros seres racionais...(??)...seremos nós as mulheres? perguntei-me eu... pois parece que sim. Vá lá, ainda nos considera racionais, mas quando se refere a estes outros seres racionais, estão sempre ligados à natureza, à razão vulgar, às vontades e desejos, ao que ele (Kant) considera como inferior. Uma pequena procura na net revelou-me que para Kant nós mulheres somos vistas assim (atenção esta frase não é deste livro):
“a mulher não deve aprender nada de geometria; do princípio da razão suficiente ou das mônadas só saberá o indispensável para entender a graça das poesias humorísticas”

Ó meu amigo Kant...e ainda me dei eu ao trabalho de te ler... :D Eu sei que és fruto de uma época, que este teu trabalho é datado e que tens muito valor, mas apesar de continuar a dar-te o valor que bem mereces, pensar que o teu pensamento foi um dos mais influentes da era moderna....arrrepia-me...lol.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never trust what modern writers say about classic works of Philosophy. Kant is not only relevant because of the influence he had on latter day thinkers, but, as with this work, he has something to say which makes mince meat out of most of the present day writers. If this book had been published for the first time last year, most readers would have thought it was the greatest book they had read in the decade (or even in their lifetimes).

There is a little bit of getting used to the special language that Kant uses, but it's really not hard to follow if you are familiar with Kant (I am not a philosopher but I want to learn my purpose and how best to be 'good'). He'll use 'synthetic' and 'analytic', the trick I use is since 'synthetic' starts with 's' think 'senses', and analytic is another word for math so think 'math', for 'a posteriori' and 'a priori' (I put them in this order because 'a posteriori' relates to the senses (synthetic) and is after the fact or after experience, 'a priori' relates to 'analytic' before the fact or from first principles or deductively as in a mathematical system. Two other Kantian words are 'subjective' (think 'self' sense it starts with 's' and 'objective' is an 'object' (or thing) outside of yourself.

Kant is really not hard to follow and this work in particular was clearly written such that any one can really follow it because he obviously wants as wide an audience as possible for what he is going to tell the reader. (Now, I will admit that "Critique of Pure Reason' was hard at first but once I looked up those words in the above paragraph I ended up loving what he had to say and how he said it. With Kant you always get a unique way of looking at something and it's not always as important what he concludes as how he gets there. He even says something like that at the end of CPR, but with this book how he gets there and what he says are both well worth the effort).

The reason he wants such a wide audience is because what he's going to tell the reader is an answer to one of the two great universal truths we all seek: 1) knowledge (justified true beliefs) about the world (Aristotle starts his Metaphysics with this fact), and 2) knowledge of the good (or divine) (Plato's formulation). This book is all about the second truth we all want, and to know about the 'good' one must first understand what the good is. This is what he does within this book.

Kant builds a 'ground' based on reason to get at what our unconditional duties are in which we need to grasp the unconditional practical reason (morality) as maxims (universal laws) or as he says 'categorical imperatives'. Or in other words, he uses the infinite to get at our finite understanding of how we should approach life. His methodology is always a pleasure to behold and will teach anyone (including me) how to think better, and his conclusions are one of the best guides on how to live a moral life that I've encountered. I like the Golden Rule (and parts of the Sermon on the Mount), I like J.S. Mill's utilitarian philosophy, and I just love Kant's Categorical Imperatives. A combination of all three is how I choose to live.

In the end, we earthlings, need to understand what it means to be good. All moral philosophy at its root combines empathy with reciprocity of some kind and call for us to be 'good' in some fashion, but 'what is the good (or divine)' is not obvious except usually in some circular fashion, and this book gives an extraordinarily good account for it. Don't worry about the technical language, because overall it is written to be understood, and is an incredibly good self help book that could easily replace almost all the rest of the current best sellers especially the vile self help books which I walk past in the bookstore.

[Seyed Mohammad · Rating 5 out of 5]

متن بی‌شک یکی از مهمترین متون تاریخ فلسفه اخلاق است و احتمالا دشوارترین آنها. اهمیت متن تنها در تقابل با متونی اساسی دیگر در فلسفه اخلاق فهمیده می‌شود. خصوصا اخلاق نیکوماخوس و ایده‌های هیوم
در اینجا فقط به دو نکته مهم اشاره می‌کنم. درک کانت از اخلاق به غایت ضد طبیعتگرایانه است. این تقابل با اخلاق ارسطو، به ذهن من ریشه در گرایشات شبه مسیحی در اندیشه کانت دارد (می‌گویم شبه مسیحی چراکه در دینداری کانت تردیدهایی وجود دارد). این ایده که انسان فراتر از تمام ضرورتها می‌تواند و باید اخلاقی باشد. این ایده که می‌تواند از آنچه تاکنون بود به یکباره بگسلد و زندگی اخلاقی را پیش بگیرد. هر دو ایده مخالف نگرش ارسطو به اخلاق است که فهمی فضیلت محور از اخلاق دارد و فضیلت نیز نه یکباره و نه بدون فراهم شدن ضروریات آن در زندگی روزمره ممکن است. انسان برای کانت در پستترین محیط ها و با بدترین سوابق هم می‌تواند و باید اخلاقی باشد. برای ارسطو چنین انسان نهالی است در زمین بایر که بختی برای شکوفایی ندارد.
نکته دیگر تقابل کانت با هیوم در درک عقل عملی است. برای هیوم در نهایت اخلاق مشروط به وجود انگیزه‌های اخلاقی در شخص است. نفس دانستن احکام اخلاقی و تصدیق آنها لزوما دلیل و انگیزه‌ای برای عمل اخلاقی فراهم نمی‌کند. حال آنکه برای کانت احکام اخلاقی هیچ پیش شرط انگیزشی ندارند. آگاهی به آنچه اخلاقی است خود بالاترین انگیزه برای انجام عمل اخلاقی است

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's probably a product of having been in grad school for too long, but somehow I found myself really liking this piece. I don't even care that it's not applicable to real life, at least his methods are based on tying human action to univsersal principles that anyone can participate in instead of trying to create this really creepy classist/elitist system of morality which the ancient greeks oozed over. And unlike the clunky, inhuman ethical systems espoused by more anylitic thinkers, Kant is at least willing to acknowledge the connundrum of trying to act from a rational principle with no recourse to lived experience. And the way he tries to conceptually map out the different parts of the psyche, while it's probably wrong and kind of creepily mechanistic, is still a refreshing break from the messy, useless soup of abstractions that a lot of other thinkers would subsequently indulge in i.e. Hegel. If nothing else, it forced me to confront my own complacency about not even being willing to really listen to Kant's arguements.

[Ron Wroblewski · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am giving it 4 stars due to the brilliance of Kant's conclusions, not of his reasoning. I taught Philosophy for 12 years, yet I struggled to get through this book. Much of his thought I not only did not understand but think it unnecessary. Kant attempted to develop a moral theory based on reason alone, and not on any religious rule. Yet it comes very close to the Golden Rule contained in many religions. His 2 basic rules are:

Do not perform any act that you would not make into a universal law, which would permit anyone else to do what you are about to do.

Treat no human being as a means to an end but treat them as an end in itself.

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kant is the perfect embodiment of modern liberalism. Imagine one of your neighbors. He’s a nice guy, does all the right things. All he wants is for everyone to be nice. At worst, he might want the State to enforce niceness. This isn’t that different from late 20th century America. It’s completely useless, however, against nihilism and revolution.

This is a lucid treaty which introduces you to Kant’s famous maxim, “Don’t do something if you aren’t willing to make it a universal law.” That actually works quite well in a Christian, or at least moral society. There are problems in Kant’s ethics, to be sure, but he does cover all the requisite ground and deals with the same issues you would find in Aquinas on happiness.

All rational knowledge is either concerned with the object of knowledge or with the form of understanding itself. Kant’s goal is to construct a pure moral philosophy. Such a moral philosophy will not only conform to moral law, but will do so out of a sense of duty (and that is the main point for Kant).

Indeed, what makes a good action good? Kant’s answer is very simple: a good action is good simply by virtue of its volition (256).

Surprisingly enough, Kant argues that reason can’t be the guide. He correctly notes that reason can’t satisfy all of our wants and perhaps even multiplies them. Rather, our duty is to follow the law. If we must have emotions, then we should have respect for the law. What kind of law should determine my will? Kant gives us his famous secularized golden rule: “never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law” (260).

Persons and Things

A person is a rational being who is an end in himself. A thing is a being whose end is relative to another end (272).

Kingdom of Ends

A kingdom for Kant is a union of rational beings in a system by common laws (274). This definition, while inadequate, is not too far from Augustine’s “common objects of love.” Ends for Kant are determined by abstract, universal laws. For example, I must treat everyone as though he were an end in himself and not my means to another end.

Kant nicely summarizes his project this way. Morality has three modes: 1) a form, consisting in universality; 2) a matter, such as the end or goal; and 3) the ability to characterize all maxims in the previous two modes (275).

A Will that is Free

Kant has a standard account of free will. Such a will is independent of external, determining forces, etc. It has an internal causality. That brings Kant to a problem of which he is very much aware. It’s not really coherent to speak of my making laws to which I am subject. It’s a circle, as he notes: “we laid down the idea of freedom because of the moral law only that we might afterwards in turn infer the latter from freedom” (282). What is his solution? It’s not clear but I think he says such an intuition of freedom allows us to transcend ourselves. I’m not really sure what that means.

There is a bigger problem, though. If the world of nature is mechanistically determined, then how am I free? Kant says that for all practical purposes, we are free. If we don’t presuppose that, then we can’t make sense of human actions.

Problems

Kant is not unaware of problems with his system. For example, if I have a direct inclination to an action, say, caring for my wife, my passion and strong feelings towards my wife might actually cloud the nature of duty (258). In fact, in order to truly appreciate the duty of caring for my wife, I shouldn’t let my emotions or feelings come into play at all! (Only an unmarried bachelor like Kant could have imagined this). If I have conjugal relations with my wife and I enjoy it, that’s good and all but irrelevant. All that matters is we have performed our duties. Have fun with the therapy.

Perhaps more to the point. I have a duty to preserve my life. Most men in fact do this. Here is the problem: Are they doing this just out of natural habit or from the specific command, “You must act according to the duty to preserve your own life”? Almost everyone acts from the former and they are not wrong to do so. Kant, however, would say they failed to act ethically.

The same applies to helping the poor. Unless you do it from the perspective of “I have a duty to be beneficent,” the action has no moral worth. This doesn’t seem right.

Moreover, with Kant we see the modern commitment to ethical autonomy. Consider the following chilling passage: “Even the Holy One of the Gospels must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before we can recognize him as such” (263).

Kant’s system is beautiful and elegant, yet cold and austere.

[Juan Pablo · Rating 3 out of 5]

i avoided philosophy when i was in college because i was (and still am) not a thinking person lol, but now as an aspiring author, i am so glad that i have read this because i learned a lot when it comes to morals, what is considered good or bad, and the nuances of people's action and the factors that affect them. although the information here are helpful, i find this a little bit hard to read due to translation issues. if not for the footnotes that somehow simplify some passages, i would have much harder time studying. there are also a lot of technical terms that overwhelmed me, jargons that i think a tenured philosophy major would understand, but all in all, this is a good book if you wanna study about philosophy of morals.

i will definitely check more books to deepen my knowledge.

[مجید اسطیری · Rating 5 out of 5]

این ریویو تکمیل خواهدشد:

امانوئل کانت در این اثر کوتاه ولی مهم به دنبال یافتن پایه هایی برای کردار است که همه ذوات معقول آن را دریابند و بپذیرند. در این مسیر چند گام اساسی برمیدارد:

«نیت خوب» را تنها چیزی معرفی میکند که بی قید و شرط میتوان آن را نیک دانست.

در نقد #ارسطو روش اعتدال را برای راهنمایی کردار انسان ناکافی میداند و نشان میدهد که چگونه اعتدال میتواند در خدمت نیات ناپسند درآید.

مفهوم #وظیفه اخلاقی را در میان می آورد و توضیح میدهد که فقط در حضور قانون خدشه ناپذیر فراگیر معنا دارد.

"فلسفه ناب" یا فلسفه ای که مطلقا مستقل از تجربه باشد را تنها واضع قانون اخلاقی معرفی میکند و تاکید میکند علوم تجربی هیچگاه نمیتوانند به کمک مابعدالطبیعه بیایند.

مهم ترین محک انجام به وظیفه اخلاقی را مخالفت با میل می‌داند و می‌گوید کافی نیست که عملی مطابق با قانون باشد بلکه باید از برای قانون باشد.

به علاوه انسان شناسی و خداشناسی را از اینکه بنیاد مابعدالطبیعه اخلاق را بگذارند ناتوان معرفی میکند زیرا:

انسان شناسی تجربی و خد��شناسی اصل #خودآیین و مستقل بودن اخلاق را در نظر نمیگیرند.

چرا اخلاق باید خودآیین باشد؟ زیرا خردی که این قانون را وضع میکند نباید آن را به خاطر هدفی غیر از خودش وضع کند.

بنابراین مهمترین شرط برای قانون اخلاقی، آزادی قانونگذار است. چنین قانونی نه بر مبنای ترس یا جایزه که بر مبنای احترام پذیرفته و اجرا میشود.

مهمترین شرط قانونی که خرد در حضور آزادی برای خودش وضع میکند «عام بودن» آن است یعنی همین جمله ساده که هر #عقل_سلیم آن را در می یابد و میپذیرد:

چنان رفتار کن که میخواهی همگان چنان رفتار کنند.

با این حال در فصل آخر این فرض که آزادی کامل برای انسان میسر باشد را مطلقا ناممکن میداند

در آخرین صفحه یادآور میشود کاربرد نظری عقل به ضرورت علتی غایی از جهان ره میبرد اما ماعقل نمیتواند ضرورت مطلق این قانون عملی نامشروط را فهم کند.

خب خواندن این کتاب چندان ساده نیست و هر بند را چند بار خواندم تا مطمئن شوم کاملا درک کرده ام. چیزی که خواندن را سخت میکند این است که نثر کانت مملو از جملات معترضه است و گاهی در دل همین جملات معترضه جملات دیگری هست. برای درست فهمیدن کتاب دفعه دوم و سوم که یک بند را میخواندم خودم جملات معترضه را حذف میکردم.
اتفاق عجیبی که در میانه کار افتاد این بود که به یک بند فوق العاده لذت بخش رسیدم. باورم نمیشد خواندن این بند در یک کتاب فنی فلسفی این اندازه لذت بخش باشد:
"مفهوم محض و خالص "وظیفه" که از هر گونه شائبه بیرونی کششهای تجربی برکنار باشد، و در واقع، مفهوم "قانون اخلاقی"، فقط از راه عقل (که نخست از این راه آگاه می شود که می تواند به خودی خود خصلت عملی یابد) بر دل آدمی نفوذی چندان نیرومندتر از همه انگیزه های دیگر برخاسته از حوزه تجربه دارد که با آگاهی از ارزش خود، این انگیزه ها را خوار میشمرد و می تواند بر آنها مسلط شود؛"

کتاب"راهنمای خواندن «بنیادگذاری مابعدالطبیعه‌ی اخلاق» کانت" را هم از دو سال پیش داشتم و در طول خواندن این کتاب گذاشته بودم جلوی چشمم و آقای کانت با آن اخم ملیحش مدام بهم زل زده بود. انشاالله به زودی شروعش خواهم کرد و بلافاصله بعد از پایان آن مجددا همین کتاب را با ترجمه ای که انتشارات سمت درآورده خواهم خواند
بعد از طی این مسیر حتما برداشتم از کتاب دقیق تر خواهد بود. به همین خاطر نوشتم این ریویو تکمیل خواهدشد

[Pinkyivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I understood about 10% but liked what I've read 10/10

[jordan! · Rating 1 out of 5]

kant is a dumb fuck

[laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

i read the groundwork (finally finally) cover to cover in an airport in washington dc, where i spent a fourteen hour day watching one flight after another cancelled cancelled cancelled, and i have to tell you that people are near to their worst (that average daily sort of worst) in airports as their flights are cancelled. everyone was fighting for seats on future flights which would also be cancelled. everyone was arguing their cases to helpless airport staff, and the staff, in turn, treated us like defensive children to be managed, and then as volatile cargo to be shipped. and my toothpaste had been confiscated.

in the middle of this i sat and read about the kingdom of ends, where all people are treated as ends in themselves, never mere means, and about evil as a kind of enslavement, and good as a kind of freedom-- freedom from our own programatic worst natures-- and i have to say that there couldn't have been a moment where i was more receptive to this kantian line that i've been skeptically eyeing for all these years. not that i buy it. or fully grasp it, i'm sure. but i'm going to keep at it.

i'm giving it four star with this caveat: they're four stars of admiration, not of enjoyment, exactly, and certainly not of agreement. i read with my eyes squinted and my mouth set. but i did occasionally nod. of course i also occasionally nodded off.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Kant, but there are some fairly obvious issues with deontology. That is not to say that this is not good stuff. I think it should be required reading for humans generally. The issue is that ethics is not easy. Understatement. If you have it in you after this, read The Critique of Pure Reason. If you want the light version, read The Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. If the Critique is a shot of espresso, the Prolegomena is light and sweet.

[Seppe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deze uitgave is aan te raden door de uitgebreide inleiding en presentatie van het argument, een begeleiding die even lang is als de eigenlijke tekst.

[Armin]

Keine Bewertung mehr möglich, wusste zu wenig, glaubte alles zu verstehen, kann mich aber an nichts mehr erinnern.

[Crito · Rating 2 out of 5]

TL;DR it's frustrating how sloppy it can be and how numerous the problems are, deep and shallow alike, and it's likely altogether just the wrong pursuit for this subject. Probably still worth reading if only for the exercise.

Kant may be among the worst kind of philosophers to write on ethics; it’s a vice of early modern philosophy that every issue is to be wrapped up in a neat little package with one weird trick. Not to say that it’s simple, just that this philosophy is a matter of finding the one umbrella to shove everything under. I identify with the Aristotelian position that ethics, as opposed to metaphysics or something, concerns that which is variable and subject to change across particularized instances, and it behooves us to proceed with a philosophy sensitive to that. Kant’s project is a totalizing metaphysics of morals. We’re not bound to get along.

But I won’t avoid philosophy I don’t think is right, what would I have to read if I did that? And going into this I wholly appreciate that Kant is sensitive to some serious unresolved issues I’ve had with virtue ethics. That being, becoming a great person with all these wonderful virtues is great and all, but do I have to? Why? What if I don’t want to? It concerns me when I don’t have easy answers to boneheaded questions, and so does Kant. The idea of having some kind of duty to virtue is an appealing way of having an answer.

The idea is to have a Categorical Imperative which is self necessitating. What is this imperative and how does it self necessitate? The first formulation is famous already: an action is right if you yourself can will it as a maxim such that it could be a universal law. It’s famous for getting dunked on. Everyone likes the example about lying to save a friend, but I cannot stress enough how easy it is to produce counterexamples to this. Here’s one: there’s a rare billionaire who commits to donating most of what he earns. Our billionaire knows full well that most people in the world can’t do this without ruining themselves but wills it for himself nonetheless as an exception. This is a grave moral error on his part, opposed to the rational a priori moral law within him. Are the Randians salivating yet?

But I’m getting ahead of myself, I haven’t yet approached the question of how the first formulation actually works, I’ve just appealed to the intuitive notion. The successes and criticisms of this version of the imperative often rely on such an intuition. That’s because in most tellings of the first imperative what’s left out is Kant’s actual criterion for what succeeds and what fails. It isn’t a conceivability argument: I CAN imagine willing that I perform embarrassing acts in public and consider it a universal law for everyone. Kant adds the stipulation that the willing and the universal law are without contradiction. That’s how we decide cases: if it contradicts, don’t do it.

But what does it actually mean to contradict? It can’t just be that we give an action the sniff test to figure out how we feel about it, that’s the very opposite of what an a priori moral law is supposed to be. We can’t examine it in light of what we know about the world or how we feel about the outcome of universalizing an action, because that’s not a priori. A law is a priori if it is formal. So we can go ahead and think of it in terms of logical contradiction. From here I will the maxim that I will p or not p such that it becomes a universal law. I’ve willed a maxim in which cannot contradict anything about myself or its universal lawfulness. So I can p. or I can not p. It’s cool.

So maybe it’s not the best idea to think of normative action imperatives in terms of formal logic, what else is in Kant’s kit? Again it must be a priori, which is to say, analytic. I suspect that what Kant actually relates this to is the notion of containment, which probably explains why this imperative is so scuffed, since he has an incredibly scuffed notion of how containment is analytic. Kant already makes the insane assertion that an imperative already implies all the ideal actions it takes to execute on it. Most days I’d say containment isn’t analytic at all, but I’ll play along here. Consider the concept book and everything you know about books in all their plurality. All that you know about that is due to being in a world, being around culturally carried concepts, engaging with thought, writing, etc. What we know analytically about the concept book via containment is that it contains symbols and certain classes of books have those symbols on paper. There is absolutely nothing more meaningful to be said, which means analytically there is pretty much nothing meaningful to say about books compared to the rich expanse of ideas we have it out here in the a posteriori world.

It’s already tremendously fuzzy what it means for a willed or universal action to contradict within the expanded analytic sense. And if that’s the sense Kant’s going with, it means that his criteria for his metaphysical a priori law is based on scary spooky a posteriori knowledge. This is the strongest version of a search for a criterion. If you try to suss out a coherent idea of contradiction from the examples he gives it’s more like he’s operating from the fuzzy intuitive way of looking at it, which is even more scary spooky territory.

People who will defend Kant will retreat from the first formulation to the second (act in a way that considers others as ends in themselves and never as a means), which doesn’t make sense because Kant makes clear that they’re supposed to be expressions of the same law- if it works on one and not the other wouldn’t that mean they’re both wrong? Nonetheless it seems at least the more sound one. Yet it’s not immune to criticism. A quick example would be that a bigot who genuinely considers themselves doing a service to the oppressed class would consider themselves in accordance with this formulation, considering it the rational and humane way. This needs defending of course, but that’s beyond the scope of this writeup.

I’ve focused on just the most famous aspects of the groundwork, which misses what perturbed me about it the most, which is the sheer volume of small venial misfires, sloppy criticisms, unwarranted conclusions and generally uneven philosophy is in this thing. He actively pushes against relying on examples and thinking about how your ethics relates to dilemmas because it turns out those don't concern the a priori, and it totally shows that he approached it that way. It’s shocking that this mess came out of Kant after having read and respected the CoPR some years ago (though I've definitely grown less and less impressed with him on other issues.) And I think the particular problems he has are indicative of my initial diagnosis, which is that the exact kind of project he’s doing here is forlorn and mistaken. You don’t do a metaphysics of morals in the same way you don’t an acoustics of deep space.

This is a rare two star recommendation for me. I spent a lot of time on this 80 page pamphlet, and most of that is for bad reasons, but nonetheless it is still worth engaging as many big thinks were had. And yet my usual recommendation score is still too high for a work as flawed as this one is.