Kant's Preface


Read carefully this extract from the Preface (page 5 in Beck's edition)

Since my purpose here is directed to moral philosophy, I narrow the question I am asking down to this: Isn’t it utterly necessary to construct a pure moral philosophy that is completely freed from everything that may be only empirical and thus belong to anthropology? That there must be such a philosophy is self-evident from the common idea of duty and moral laws. Everyone must admit that if a law is to hold morally (i.e. as a basis for someone’s being obliged to do something), it must imply absolute necessity; that the command: You are not to lie doesn’t apply only to human beings, as though it had no force for other rational beings (and similarly with all other moral laws properly so called); that the basis for obligation here mustn’t be looked for in people’s natures or their circumstances, but must be found a priori solely in the concepts of pure reason; and that any precept resting on principles of mere experience may be called a practical rule but never a moral law. This last point holds even if there is something universal about the precept in question, and even if its empirical content is very small (perhaps bringing in only the motive involved). Thus not only are moral laws together with their principles essentially different from all practical knowledge involving anything empirical, but all moral philosophy rests solely on its pure or non-empirical part. Its application to human beings doesn’t depend on knowledge of any facts about them (anthropology); it gives them, as rational beings, a priori laws—ones that are valid whatever the empirical circumstances may be (Admittedly experience comes into the story in a certain way, because these laws require a power of judgement that has been sharpened by experience— partly in order to pick out the cases where the laws apply and partly to let the laws get into the person’s will and to stress that they are to be acted on. For a human being has so many preferences working on him that, though he is quite capable of having the idea of a practical pure reason, he can’t so easily bring it to bear on the details of how he lives his life.)

Comment and Questions to think about:

(1) Look at the two sentences that I have highlighted in bold above. These seem to contain Kant's essential position, the assumption on which he proceeds to build his moral philosophy. Kant points to the fact that we all share notions of duty and moral law, that's to say, we all share notions that there are some things that we ought to do without qualification, so what he is saying comes to this - Because there exist in the range of all our utterances some assertions which have a distinct logical character as unqualified commands which tell what our duty or responsibilities are, that therefore we should be able to abstract from this set of utterances a set of imperatives that will count as moral, but to count as moral they must not have any mixture with the empirical world. The cartoon opposite explains Kant's position better than my words. If you are fixing her tyre because you hope to gain her favours or if you are doing it because you are feeling sorry for her, then your actions are still mired in the real world. They don't count as moral. Your action is moral if and only if you are doing this because you recognize that you ought to help your neighbour. There's nothing in it for you - and if you think you are doing it out of duty but have in the back of your mind some advantage you hope to gain from this action - say, being counted by the lady and others as a kind and generaous person, then you have once again failed to act in a purely moral manner. 


(2) When Kant says that all moral philosophy rests solely on its pure or non-empirical part, what he seems to mean is that you should be a person of a certain sort - someone who acts without any wish to gain personal advantage of any kind from what he or she does. The man in the cartoon may be seen as the same man on three different occasions. His action on each occasion may from an external behavioural point of view be exactly the same, but the thoughts going through his head - whatever it is that prompts him to this action - is on each occasion different. Only on the third imagined occasion is he acting in Kant's view as a genuinely moral agent, yet, to my mind, there is something strange about Kant thinking of this third situation as one of acting out of a sense of duty. If I do something like this for my neighbour, I may well be doing it purely out a sense of being well-disposed to wards her or I might be doing this because I am applying a rule about helping people in difficulties. Kant seems to suggest that these two are instances of the same kind of action, but are they? He does have a way out of this problem as we shall see when we come to his notion of a 'good will'. This is for him the real basis of moral action. We must have the right kind of disposition.


(3) Having the right kind of disposition in everything we do would seem to be strikingly similar to having a religious attitude or stance towards the world. Is it perhaps true that what Kant is doing is to take our generally accepted Christian notions of what we should and should not do and then trying to reduce them to a particular psychological attitude to the world - good will - and then equipping us with a set of logical tests to see if what we do is really an example of selfless good-will or if it is secretly motivated by some desire for personal advantage. Kant's tests start to look like a secular version of pietistic self-examination, but they are not necessarily any the worse for that or are they?

Does good will have to be universal to count as good will?