ABSTRACT
There are a number of important issues which depend wholly or in part on Kant’s doctrine of the end of willing, and if they are to be profitably understood, so then must it be. Kant’s own notion of a Kingdom of Ends is, or should be, more than the notion of a formal system of non-contradictory and mutually compatible maxims. Kant’s idea seems to rest on, and at all events is propounded in the Groundwork in the context of, a whole metaphysic of morals. When James Harris says that the Sovereign Good is Rectitude of Conduct, and Kant that the purpose of reason is the production of good will, it may not be at once evident that they are both saying the same thing. Kant’s specification of “good will” makes it neatly equivalent to Harris’s Rectitude of Conduct. Ineluctability is a presiding idea both in the Dialogue and in the early paragraphs of the Groundwork.
