ABSTRACT
We now turn from the abstraction of Kant’s philosophy of science to his practical philosophy, which can seem equally remote from our everyday experience. Kant is famous for the derivation of an apparently formalistic fundamental moral law from the most abstract and austere premises. He begins his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) with the claim that the only thing of unconditional value is a good will, argues that such a will manifests itself only in doing one’s duty for its own sake, and then concludes that since doing duty for its own sake deprives the will of any object of desire as a reason for action, nothing is left as a possible principle of morality “but the conformity of actions as such with universal law” (G, 4:402). In the second section of the same work, he maintains that “moral laws are to hold for every rational being as such” and must therefore be derivable from the very “universal concept of a rational being as such” (4:412). In the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), he premisses that a moral law must be completely necessary and universal and then concludes that only a moral principle that is entirely formal and makes no reference to any object of desire can satisfy that requirement. Specifically, he argues that genuine moral laws or “practical principles” must hold “for the will of every rational being as such” (CPracR, 5:19), that any “practical principles that presuppose an object (matter) of the faculty of desire as the determining ground of the will are, without exception, empirical and can furnish no practical laws” (5:21), and thus that “If a rational being is to think of his maxims as practical universal laws, he can think of them only as principles that contain the determining ground of the will not by their matter but only by their form” (5:27). We will give these arguments a hearing shortly, but it seems clear from the outset that they presuppose what might be a controversial assumption about what a moral law must be
like, and it is by no means obvious how they could be expected to gain a grip on the moral sensibilities of ordinary human beings.
