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WorkImmanuel Kant

The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics

The ethics half of Kant's Metaphysics of Morals (1797), where — twelve years after the Groundwork's formula — he finally works out concrete duties of virtue, gratitude and self-respect.

by Immanuel Kant400 passages held

  • German, the original language
  • English, a translation held here, and your language
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Original title
Die Metaphysik der Sitten
First published
(aged 73)
Original language
German

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Overview

Readers who know Kant only from the Groundwork often think he had a formula and no ethics — a single stern test and nothing to say about the texture of a good life. This is the book that answers them, though "book" overstates it: the Doctrine of Virtue is the second half of Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, published in 1797 as the ethical companion to the Doctrine of Right. Twelve years after stating the categorical imperative in the abstract, here Kant finally spends it. The Doctrine of Right had handled the duties a state can enforce; virtue covers the ones it cannot — the duties no one may compel you to keep, which is why keeping them takes the inner strength Kant calls virtue. He organises them around two ends that reason makes obligatory: your own perfection and the happiness of others. From these he works out concrete matter the Groundwork never touched — duties against lying and servility and self-contempt, duties of beneficence, gratitude and respect, even reflections on friendship — and treats each with "casuistical questions" that pointedly refuse to hand over a rule for every case. Overshadowed for most of two centuries by its famous predecessor, the Doctrine of Virtue was recovered by later Kantians as the proof that Kant's ethics was always more than its most quoted principle: an account of character, and of what one is freely to make of a life.

Key concepts

Why does the Doctrine of Virtue concern ends rather than particular acts?

Because no one can compel your inner maxim, virtue cannot be a list of enforceable deeds the way right can. Its duties instead command that you adopt certain ends — your own perfection and the happiness of others — and then leave how far and how you pursue them to your own judgment. Duty here fixes the goal, not the exact action.

What is the difference between 'wide' and 'narrow' duties?

Narrow, or perfect, duties forbid a definite act — do not lie, do not be servile, do not treat yourself with contempt. Wide, or imperfect, duties of virtue prescribe an end without fixing how much — be beneficent, cultivate your talents — leaving latitude for judgment. Most of virtue's duties are wide, which is why they call for character rather than a rulebook.

What are the 'casuistical questions,' and why include them?

They are hard cases Kant appends to particular duties and pointedly leaves open: is the "your most obedient servant" at the end of a letter a lie, and how much of one's wealth should go to helping others? Because most duties of virtue fix a goal and not an amount, applying them takes practised judgment. The questions train that judgment instead of handing over a rule for every situation.

What does Kant mean by a duty to oneself?

A duty to oneself is an obligation owed to your own person rather than to others: against lying, miserliness and servility, and toward developing your talents and moral character. Kant puts these first. A person can be bound to others only by a law he also lays on himself, so if nothing were owed to oneself, he argues, there would be no duties at all.

How do duties of love differ from duties of respect?

A duty of love, such as helping someone or showing gratitude, goes beyond what the other person could demand, so fulfilling it earns merit and leaves the other obliged. A duty of respect is simply owed: nobody is thanked for not being arrogant or for not mocking someone. Giving to a poor person is the first kind, and sparing him humiliation while giving is the second.

What does Kant mean by moral friendship?

Moral friendship is the complete trust of two people who tell each other their private judgments and feelings, as far as that fits with respect for one another. Kant sets it apart from friendship built on helping each other out, which burdens both sides. People keep their real opinions of government, religion and their own faults to themselves for fear of misuse, he says, and with such a friend that guard can drop.

Themes of the book

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

The Duties of Virtue

The Groundwork gave a formula and, critics said, no ethics — so where does the categorical imperative finally get spent on the concrete matter of a good life?

Twelve years after stating the imperative in the abstract, Kant spends it. The Doctrine of Right had covered the duties a state can enforce; virtue covers the ones it cannot, organised around two ends reason makes obligatory — one's own perfection and the happiness of others. From these he works out matter the Groundwork never touched: duties against lying, servility and self-contempt, duties of beneficence, gratitude and respect. His casuistical questions pointedly refuse a rule for every case, and later Kantians recovered the book as proof his ethics was always more than its single most quoted principle.

  • ethics
  • duty
  • virtue
  • virtue ethics
  • moral obligation
  • freedom
  • moral motivation
  • practical reason

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Virtue as Inner Strength

If no one may compel the duties you owe yourself and others in conscience, what keeps them — beyond a law, an actual strength of will exercised against oneself?

Virtue is the strength a person needs precisely because these duties cannot be coerced: keeping them is inner work, waged against inclination, and Kant names it a kind of self-mastery. He treats conscience, self-command, the regulation of one's own feelings and the slow forming of good habit as the very texture of moral character — an account of what one is freely to make of a life, not merely a list of acts to avoid. Overshadowed for two centuries by the Groundwork, it is where Kant's ethics shows itself as a theory of character.

  • moral psychology
  • self-mastery
  • habit
  • conscience
  • moral education
  • ends
  • jurisprudence
  • happiness

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What One Owes Oneself

Can a person wrong himself? Kant answers yes, and counts lying, miserliness and servility as offences against one's own dignity before they harm anyone else.

Duties to oneself stand first in the book, and Kant holds that without them there could be no duties to others at all. A human being has a dignity beyond any price, and three vices betray it: the lie, which makes the speaker contemptible in his own eyes, the miserly hoarding that denies oneself every enjoyment, and the false humility that crawls before others. Even cruelty to animals is forbidden on this ground, because it blunts the fellow-feeling morality depends on. The first command is to search one's own heart.

  • duties to oneself
  • self-respect
  • human dignity
  • truthfulness
  • vice

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Love, Respect and Friendship

How close may one person come to another without slighting them? Every duty to others pulls between helping and keeping a respectful distance.

Kant pictures the moral world as held together by two forces: love draws people towards one another, respect keeps them apart. Helping is a duty of love, but it puts the receiver in debt, so the giver must spare him humiliation and, best of all, give in secret. Respect is owed to everyone and is broken by arrogance, by gossip and by mockery. Friendship is the rare case where the two balance: full trust between two people who can open their thoughts to each other without fear.

  • duties to others
  • love
  • respect
  • beneficence
  • benevolence
  • friendship
  • humanity

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Within this work

passages held
400
distinct concepts
337
by passages held, corpus-wide
#184

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “duty” and “virtue”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 83 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
dutyvirtue19
dutyhappiness16
dutymoral law15
dutypractical reason14
dutyethics11
moral lawvirtue10
ethicsvirtue9
ethicspractical reason8
happinessvirtue6
practical reasonvirtue6
duties to oneselfpractical reason5
duties to oneselfvirtue4
dutyrespect4
ethicsmoral law4
happinessmoral law4
moral lawrespect4
duties to oneselfmoral law3
moral lawpractical reason3
respectvirtue3
duties to oneselfhappiness2
duties to oneselfduty1
happinesspractical reason1

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. 1783 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
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 1785 Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten)

    The short, deliberately preliminary book that isolates the categorical imperative before building anything on it; three years later the Critique of Practical Reason would give the same moral law its fuller grounding.

     DEEN
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. 1790 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
  12. 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
  13. 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
  14. 1797 Introduction to the Doctrine of Right (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
  15. 1797 The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics (Die Metaphysik der Sitten) you are here DEEN
  16. 1798 On the Power of the Mind to Master Its Morbid Feelings by Sheer Resolution (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
  17. 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
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