Immanuel Kant's Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals: Second Section and Third Section

Read the Second Section from Immanuel Kant's Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals. Kant says five things are clear:

  1. The origin of moral concepts is entirely a priori in reason.
  2. Moral concepts cannot be abstracted from empirical knowledge.
  3. The non-empirical, pure, nature of moral concepts dignify them as being supreme practical principles.
  4. This value of moral concepts as pure and thus good practical principles is reduced if any empirical knowledge is added in.
  5. One must derive for oneself and apply these moral concepts also from pure reason ­– unmixed with empirical knowledge.

Do these claims seem as clear and correct to you as they do to Kant? What is Kant referring to in his concept of the categorial imperative? 

Kant gives a second version of the categorical imperative which he called the practical imperative. Interpreters sometimes call it the imperative of dignity or of human dignity. Can you describe that version of the categorical imperative?

Kant says these two versions of the categorical imperative ultimately say the same thing. Why do you think he believes this?

Unlike our study of hypothetical examples in this course, Kant believes that morality is not something that can be derived from examples. What he wants is to find universal principles of morality that spring wholly from reason and not from experience. This is why he calls his system metaphysics of morals. In the second section, Kant argues forcefully against utilitarian (or popular) moral theories, and he puts forward his own, absolutely binding moral principle: the categorical imperative.

In Kant's ethical theory, a categorical imperative is a universal command, a principle that should be followed by anyone in any situation. If a command like "always tell the truth" can be chosen and represents a moral rule we all should follow, then it has the status of a categorical imperative, and is therefore a duty. Kant's examples in this section are meant to show that actions can only be considered truly moral if they are motivated by the duty to follow this imperative.

What does Kant mean by autonomy and heteronomy? Kant gives a third version of the categorical imperative in this section. What is this version? Here, Kant is concerned here that our principles of morality must come from ourselves and from our own rationality. However, he thinks of our rationality in universal terms, not as our own individual persuasion or opinion. Rationality and rational morality is always an objective science for Kant.

In the third section, Kant presents his view of what human freedom consists in, namely, following our rational principles rather than being guided by our appetite for please and our desire to avoid pain. Because Kant has based both freedom and morality on rationality, this means that to be free is to be moral. Or, in other words, to be free is to be bound by our duty to ourselves.

THIRD SECTION ­– TRANSITION FROM THE METAPHYSIC OF MORALS TO THE CRITIQUE OF PURE PRACTICAL REASON

The Concept of Freedom is the Key that explains the Autonomy of the Will

The will is a kind of causality belonging to living beings in so far as they are rational, and freedom would be this property of such causality that it can be efficient, independently of foreign causes determining it; just as physical necessity is the property that the causality of all irrational beings has of being determined to activity by the influence of foreign causes.

The preceding definition of freedom is negative and therefore unfruitful for the discovery of its essence, but it leads to a positive conception which is so much the more full and fruitful.

Since the conception of causality involves that of laws, according to which, by something that we call cause, something else, namely the effect, must be produced; hence, although freedom is not a property of the will depending on physical laws, yet it is not for that reason lawless; on the contrary it must be a causality acting according to immutable laws, but of a peculiar kind; otherwise a free will would be an absurdity. Physical necessity is a heteronomy of the efficient causes, for every effect is possible only according to this law, that something else determines the efficient cause to exert its causality. What else then can freedom of the will be but autonomy, that is, the property of the will to be a law to itself? But the proposition: "The will is in every action a law to itself," only expresses the principle: "To act on no other maxim than that which can also have as an object itself as a universal law." Now this is precisely the formula of the categorical imperative and is the principle of morality, so that a free will and a will subject to moral laws are one and the same.

On the hypothesis, then, of freedom of the will, morality together with its principle follows from it by mere analysis of the conception. However, the latter is a synthetic proposition; viz., an absolutely good will is that whose maxim can always include itself regarded as a universal law; for this property of its maxim can never be discovered by analysing the conception of an absolutely good will. Now such synthetic propositions are only possible in this way: that the two cognitions are connected together by their union with a third in which they are both to be found. The positive concept of freedom furnishes this third cognition, which cannot, as with physical causes, be the nature of the sensible world (in the concept of which we find conjoined the concept of something in relation as cause to something else as effect). We cannot now at once show what this third is to which freedom points us and of which we have an idea a priori, nor can we make intelligible how the concept of freedom is shown to be legitimate from principles of pure practical reason and with it the possibility of a categorical imperative; but some further preparation is required.