ABSTRACT
The short book on ethics which Immanuel Kant published in 1785, three years before the Critique of Practical Reason, occupies a unique place among his works. He first developed his conception of autonomy and his moral rationalism. Kant tries to work out his position in Gothic, not to say, baroque, detail, using a highly intricate scholastic terminology. Some philosophers meet any criticism of the Critique of Pure Reason by saying what Kant tried to do was so profound that it is Philistine to suppose that he could have achieved clarity. Kant struck out in an entirely new direction. His short book on ethics, however, makes it as clear as can be that Kant's lack of rigor was not due to his profundity. Kant was not the kind of thinker who begins by reflecting on concrete instances in the moral life and then attempts to distil from them generalizations that eventually are tested by being applied to other concrete cases.
