ABSTRACT
At the end of the second part of the Groundwork Immanuel Kant reflects that he has so far shown only that the autonomy of the will is the supreme principle of morality in the sense of being the ultimate presupposition of morality as it is commonly understood. Undoubtedly, most of the confusion can be traced to Kant’s own confusing and sloppy formulations of both his problematic and his argument, especially in Groundwork III. The best known and most perplexing of Kant’s formulations of the Reciprocity Thesis is at the beginning of Groundwork III. As is all too frequently the case, in his characterization of maxims Kant succeeds in being technical without being precise. Given Kant’s own definitions, there can be no immediate transition from being maxim-governed to being subject to an ‘unconditional practical law.’ Kant there first defines freedom as ‘the power of pure reason to be of itself practical.’.
