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WorkImmanuel Kant

Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals

The hundred pages, from 1785, where Kant hunts down the one principle behind all morality — and states it as the categorical imperative.

by Immanuel Kant346 passages held

  • German, the original language
  • English, a translation held here, and your language
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Original title
Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten
First published
(aged 61)
Original language
German

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Overview

Two centuries of undergraduates have met moral philosophy through this short book, most of them without knowing they were reading the runt of Kant's output — a hundred-odd pages he wrote to clear the ground before the real work. Published in 1785, it sets out to do one thing: find the supreme principle of morality and state it exactly. Kant's route there is austere. Strip away everything a good action might get you — the results, the feelings, the approval — and what is left with any unconditional worth is a will acting from duty alone, out of respect for a law it gives itself. That law is the categorical imperative, and its first form is a test anyone can run: act only on a rule you could will everyone to follow. He restates it twice more — treat humanity, in yourself and others, never merely as a means but always also as an end; act as a member of a kingdom in which each rational being is at once subject and lawgiver — and argues that the three are one principle seen from three sides. The claim that morality binds unconditionally, out of reason alone and not out of God, sympathy or consequence, is the most influential and the most attacked position in modern ethics: Hegel called it empty, Schiller mocked its coldness, and a line of philosophers from the twentieth century onward has rebuilt liberal moral theory on it. It is the book deontology grew from.

Key concepts

What does Kant mean by the categorical imperative?

It is the one unconditional command of reason, binding every rational being regardless of what they happen to want. Its canonical statement: act only on that maxim you could at the same time will to become a universal law. The whole book's labour is to isolate this single principle and show that it is what morality has always meant.

What is a 'maxim' in Kant's ethics?

A maxim is the personal rule or principle on which you actually act — 'I will break a promise whenever it suits me.' The categorical imperative is a test of maxims, not of outward deeds: you ask whether the rule behind your action could be willed as a law for everyone. Two identical acts can carry very different maxims.

What does Kant mean by a 'good will'?

A good will is the only thing good without any qualification. Talents, wealth, courage, even happiness can all be turned to bad use; a will that acts from duty out of respect for the law cannot be. Its worth lies in the willing itself — in the maxim it acts on — and not in anything it manages to bring about.

What are the three formulations of the categorical imperative?

Universal law: act only on a maxim you could will everyone to follow. Humanity as an end: treat humanity, in yourself and others, never merely as a means but always also as an end. And the kingdom of ends: act as a lawgiving member of a community in which each is at once subject and legislator. Kant insists the three are one principle.

What does Kant mean by 'dignity' as opposed to 'price'?

Whatever can be exchanged for an equivalent has a price; whatever is raised above all price and admits no equivalent has dignity. Rational beings, as ends in themselves, have dignity, not price. This is the ground of the second formulation: a being with dignity may never be handled as a mere means or traded off for some advantage.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Categorical Imperative

Is there a single principle behind all morality, and can it be stated exactly enough to test any action a person might take?

One test underwrites every genuine duty: act only on a rule you could will everyone to follow. Kant reaches it by stripping away everything an action might get you — results, feelings, approval — until what carries unconditional worth is a will acting from duty, out of respect for a law it gives itself. The imperative is categorical, binding regardless of what one wants, and it derives from reason alone rather than from God, sympathy or consequence. That claim, the most influential and the most attacked in modern ethics, is the seed deontology grew from.

  • categorical imperative
  • moral law
  • duty
  • rationality
  • practical reason
  • moral obligation
  • happiness

Enter a dialogue

The Good Will and Duty

If results, feelings and applause are all stripped away, what in an action is left with a worth that nothing can qualify?

Only a good will is good without limit — not for what it accomplishes but for its willing — and an action has moral worth precisely when it is done from duty rather than from inclination, however agreeable the inclination. The shopkeeper who is honest because honesty pays acts rightly without acting morally; worth lies in the maxim, in why one acts, not in the deed's visible surface. It is the austerity critics seized on — Schiller mocked its coldness, Hegel called it empty — and the point on which Kant refused to bend.

  • good will
  • duty
  • will
  • moral worth
  • motivation
  • morality
  • moral motivation

Enter a dialogue

Dignity and the Kingdom of Ends

What does it commit us to that every rational being gives itself the very law it must obey, and may never be used as a mere tool?

The one principle shows a second face: treat humanity, in yourself and others, never merely as a means but always also as an end. From it follows dignity — a worth beyond price that rational beings hold as lawgivers, not subjects only — and the kingdom of ends, a community in which each is at once author and citizen of the moral law. Autonomy, a will legislating for itself, is what makes any of this binding; heteronomy, obeying a law imposed from outside, is where earlier ethics went wrong. Modern liberal theory rebuilt itself on the thought.

  • autonomy
  • dignity
  • freedom
  • moral agency
  • agency
  • free will

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
346
distinct concepts
323
by passages held, corpus-wide
#90

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: ethics with rationality.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 373 shared passages in all. 77 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
ethicsrationality44
dutyethics40
ethicsmoral philosophy30
autonomyethics22
dutyrationality19
autonomyrationality18
autonomymoral agency17
ethicsmoral agency17
moral philosophyrationality17
autonomywill16
dutymoral philosophy16
autonomyduty15
dutymorality13
ethicsmorality13
moral agencyrationality13
dutywill11
ethicswill10
autonomymorality9
rationalitywill9
dutymoral agency8
autonomymoral philosophy6
moralityrationality6
moralitywill4

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1764 Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral)

    Kant's runner-up entry in the Berlin Academy's prize contest, and the sharpest of the pre-critical essays: it already sets philosophy's method against mathematics', the problem the first Critique would finally resolve.

     DE
  2. 1764 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen)

    The popular essay of Kant's pre-critical years, twenty-six years before the Critique of Judgement gave taste a rigorous grounding; its remarks on race and sex now drive much of the scholarship on him.

     DE
  3. 1766 Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics (Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik)

    The anonymous, ironic book of 1766 in which Kant's faith in speculative metaphysics visibly collapses — the clearing of the ground that the first Critique, fifteen years later, would build on.

     DE
  4. 1781 The Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)

    The book at the centre of everything after it: the first of the three Critiques, revised almost past recognition for its 1787 second edition, and the work the Prolegomena was written to explain.

     DEEN
  5. 1784 An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?)

    The most quoted thing Kant wrote, and among the shortest: a 1784 magazine answer to a question a Berlin pastor had left hanging, and the defining slogan of the German Enlightenment.

     DE
  6. 1784 Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht)

    The essay where Kant first treats history as more than chronicle — nine propositions arguing it has a hidden rational shape; the seed of Perpetual Peace, and a device Hegel later took over.

     DE
  7. 1785 Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten) you are here DEEN
  8. 1786 What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? (Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren?)

    An intervention in the pantheism controversy that split the German Enlightenment: written months after Mendelssohn's death, it stakes out a rational faith between dogmatic proof and Jacobi's leap.

     DE
  9. 1788 The Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft)

    The second of the three Critiques, and Kant's reply to those who doubted the Groundwork's freedom; it introduces the fact of reason and the postulates of God and immortality.

     DEEN
  10. 1793 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft)

    The book that got Kant ordered to stop writing on religion: four essays, from 1793, rebuilding Christian doctrine on reason and consigning revelation and clergy to what Kant called counterfeit service.

     DE
  11. 1795 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf)

    The late essay whose plan for a league of free states reached the twentieth century intact; Kant, past seventy, wrote it as Prussia pulled out of the war against revolutionary France.

     DE
  12. 1797 Einleitung in die Rechtslehre

    The framing section of the Doctrine of Right, the legal half of Kant's 1797 Metaphysics of Morals; it defines a right through freedom alone and ties every right to a power to coerce.

     DE
  13. 1798 Von der Macht des Gemüts, durch den bloßen Vorsatz seiner krankhaften Gefühle Meister zu sein

    The third part of Kant's late Conflict of the Faculties (1798), written as a reply to the physician Hufeland — a philosopher's dietetics, and his most personal page on governing the body through the mind.

     DE
  14. 1803 Lectures on Pedagogy (Über Pädagogik)

    One of the last books to appear under Kant's name (1803), though his editor Rink built it from lecture notes; the fullest record of Kant on education, and of his debt to Rousseau.

     DE
  15. Critique of Judgement

    The book the Romantics and the German Idealists built on: Kant's 1790 account of beauty and of purpose in nature, written to bridge the gulf that had opened between his first two Critiques.

     DEEN
  16. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

    Written to salvage the Critique of Pure Reason after its baffled reception, this shorter 1783 restatement runs the same argument in reverse, and became most readers' first encounter with Kant.

     DEEN
  17. The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics (Die Metaphysik der Sitten)

    Long read as a mere appendix to the Groundwork, this ethical half of the 1797 Metaphysics of Morals is where Kant spells out the duties of virtue; later Kantians recovered it as his theory of character.

     DEEN
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