Immanuel kant grounding for the metaphysics of morals pdf

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The first section of the Groundwork begins “It is impossible to imagine anything at all in the world, or even beyond it, that can be called good without qualification–except a good will”(G 4: 393). Kant's explanation and defense of this claim is followed by an explanation and defense of another related claim, that only actions performed out of duty have moral worth.

accepted for publication in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. Published version available on SpringerLink: http://link.springer.com.proxy-remote.galib.uga.edu/article/10.1007/s10677-014-9546-4 Kant’s moral philosophy usually considers two types of duties: negative duties that prohibit certain actions and positive duties commanding action. With that, Kant insists on deriving all morality from reason alone. Such is the Categorical Imperative that Kant lays at the basis of ethics. Yet while negative duties can be derived from the Categorical Imperative and thus from reason, the paper argues that this is not the case with positive duties. After answering a number of attempts to derive positive duties from the Categorical Imperative, most notably those of Barbara Herman, it sketches an alternative approach to understanding the relationship between the universal moral law and specific moral contents.

Kant says that there is only a single categorical imperative, but he also articulates and de-fends a number of distinct formulae of this supposedly singular principle. Most interpret-ers take Kant to mean that the different formulae are either intensionally or extensionally equivalent. I argue that we should reject these interpretations and offer an alternative.

This paper proposes a new account of the relationship between Kant's ethics and Kant's philosophy of right. I reject the claim of some philosophers that Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals cannot offer a foundation for Kant's philosophy of right. While I agree that the basic principles of Kant's philosophy of right cannot be deduced from Kant's ethical Categorical Imperatives, I try to show that we find in Kant's Groundwork the normative resources for grounding his philosophy of right. My thesis is that Kant's conception of a realm of ends, as he develops it in the Groundwork, provides a common normative source for Kant's ethical Categorical Imperatives, on the one hand, and the Universal Principle of Right, on the other. Agreement on common universal principles, which is crucial for Kant's notion of a realm of ends provides, I will argue, a justification of the ethical Categorical Imperatives and the Universal Principle of Right. 2

Description, Handouts, Slides, and Coursework Question for my course on Kant's 'Groundwork', Michaelmas Term 2017.

Within Kantian ethics and Kant scholarship, it is widely assumed that autonomy consists in the self-legislation of the principle of morality (the Moral Law). In this paper, we challenge this view on both textual and philosophical grounds. We argue that Kant never unequivocally claims that the Moral Law is self-legislated and that he is not philosophically committed to this claim by his overall conception of morality. Instead, the idea of autonomy concerns only substantive moral laws (in the plural), such as the law that one ought not to lie. We argue that autonomy, thus understood, does not have the paradoxical features widely associated with it. Rather, our account highlights a theoretical option that has been neglected in the current debate on whether Kant is best interpreted as a realist or a constructivist, namely that the Moral Law is an a priori principle of pure practical reason that neither requires nor admits of being grounded in anything else.

This paper argues the case for the centrality of virtue in Kant’s ethics. It argues that Kant has plenty to contribute to the normative turn away from utilitarian and deontological ethics, with increasing emphasis coming to be placed upon agents and the sorts of lives they lead rather than upon atomic acts and the rules for making choices, even less upon the consequences of such acts It argues that although Kant has been understood as a deontologist pure and simple, Kant sought not to turn away from virtue, but to place virtue ethics on a more secure foundation. In recovering Kant’s conception of virtue, this paper argues that Kant sought to build an ethical theory based not just on rules but upon agents and the kinds of lives they lead. The paper argues that Kant’s great achievement is to have created a moral theory which, in paying close attention to both the life plans of moral agents and to their discrete acts, combined rule ethics and virtue ethics. First published praxisphilosophie.de

This article explores Darwall’s second-personal account of morality, which draws on Fichte’s practical philosophy, particularly Fichte’s notions of a summons and principle of right. Darwall maintains that Fichte offers a philosophically more appealing account of relations of right than Kant. Likewise, he thinks that his second-personal interpretation of morality gives rise to contractualism. I reject Darwall’s criticism of Kant’s conception of right. Moreover, I try to show that Darwall’s second-personal conception of morality relies on a Kantian form of contractualism. Instead of accepting Darwall’s claim that contractualism depends upon a second-personal account of morality, I will argue that contractualism provides the foundations not only for second-personal moral relations, but also for first-personal moral authority.

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