ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to argue for a new approach to the question about the purity of the Kantian moral motive. It shows that the whole controversy has a life of its own and that a grasp of Immanuel Kant’s own view forces a reorientation to the issue. Kant typically assumes that the natural causal explanation of action is in terms of such psychological items as desires and aversions, which determine the will according to some empirical principles of motivation. Kant’s idea is that upbringing and temperament serve as background conditions for the more specific, proximate causes of the lie. Kant begins those Grundlegung passages by identifying the moral motive with the motive of duty, or respect for the moral law, and he illustrates his meaning with examples of acts that are done “not from inclination but from duty".
