- Length
- 128 pagesGregor and Timmermann, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Cambridge, rev. ed. 2012
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
A hundred pages establishing that morality is a matter of the principle you act on rather than what your action produces, and that the test of a principle is whether everyone could act on it. Almost every modern argument about rights, dignity and using people as means starts here.
- Date
- 1785
- Author
- Immanuel Kant
- Region
- Königsberg, East Prussia
- Language
- German
- 1836 English, John Richardson Early English version Consensus
- 1873 English, T. K. Abbott Public domain Attested
- 2012 English, Gregor and Timmermann Revised Cambridge edition; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 46 years
The most taught text in moral philosophy after the Nicomachean Ethics, and the origin of one of the two positions every undergraduate is asked to choose between.
What the book says
A short book in three sections, looking for the supreme principle of morality and finding it in the form of a rule rather than in any result. Kant begins from ordinary moral judgement: nothing is good without qualification except a good will, since intelligence, courage and even happiness can be put to bad use by someone whose will is bad. An action has moral worth when done from duty rather than merely in accordance with it - the shopkeeper who is honest because honesty pays acts rightly and not morally. What makes a will good is not what it aims at but the principle it acts on, and the test is whether that principle could be a law for everyone: act only on a maxim you can at the same time will to be universal. Kant then gives the same principle other formulations - treat humanity, in yourself and in anyone else, always as an end and never merely as a means; act as a legislating member of a kingdom of ends. The third section argues that a will bound by such a law must be free, and that freedom and the moral law imply each other, which is where the argument becomes hardest and Kant admits the limit.
What it argues
That moral requirements are categorical - they hold regardless of what you want - and that only a principle derived from rational willing itself could bind that way. A hypothetical imperative tells you what to do if you want something, and its authority depends on the wanting; morality does not work like that, since we do not think a person is released from a promise by ceasing to care about keeping it. So the moral law must have its authority from the form of a maxim rather than its content, and the form in question is universality. The second formulation supplies what the first is often accused of lacking: rational beings have dignity rather than price, cannot be substituted for one another, and may never be treated merely as instruments - which is the source of the modern language of human dignity.
What it answered
A Treatise of Human Nature 1739-40David Hume
Hume and the sentimentalists on one side and the utilitarian tendency on the other, though Bentham's book came four years later. Kant's objection to grounding morality in consequences is that it makes obligation contingent on how things turn out, which is exactly what a moral requirement is not; his objection to grounding it in feeling is that feelings differ and can be corrupted, so a principle resting on them cannot bind universally. He also answers the theological grounding: if we obey because God commands, then either the command is arbitrary or it tracks a standard that does not depend on it.
What answered it
Hegel, who called the principle empty - a test of consistency can rule out maxims that contradict themselves and cannot tell you which ends are worth having, so the content has to come from somewhere the theory does not supply. Constant pressed the case of the murderer at the door, and Kant's reply, that one may not lie even then, has done more damage to his reputation than any argument. Mill objected that Kant, when he works out the examples, is really showing that universal adoption would have bad consequences, and is therefore a consequentialist in spite of himself. Bernard Williams attacked the whole picture of morality as impartial law.
How it argues
By starting from what ordinary people already believe and working back to what must be true for it to be justified. Kant is explicit that he is not introducing a new morality but exhibiting the principle common morality already uses, which is why the book opens with the good will rather than with the imperative. The four worked examples - the suicide, the false promise, the neglected talent, the refusal to help - are where readers meet the machinery, and they are also where most objections begin. The prose is compressed, technical and much harder than its length suggests.
The moment
Königsberg in the mid-1780s, in the burst of productivity that followed the first Critique. Kant was in his sixties, had spent his life in one city, and produced in about fifteen years the works on knowledge, morality, politics, religion and judgement that reorganised the subject. The Groundwork was written quickly and is a preliminary by its own account, which is why it is both the most read and the least final of his ethical works.
How it travelled
As one of the two options. Kantian ethics became, and remains, the standing alternative to utilitarianism in teaching and in argument, and its vocabulary - autonomy, dignity, treating people as ends, universalisability - passed into law, medical ethics and human rights instruments well beyond philosophy. The mid-twentieth-century revival through Rawls put a Kantian framework at the centre of political philosophy again, and the phrase about persons being ends in themselves is now quoted by people who have never heard of the Groundwork.
The strongest objection
Hegel's, because it goes to what the test can do rather than to any particular verdict. Universalisability rules out maxims that could not be generally adopted without contradiction - but whether a maxim contradicts itself depends on how it is described, and any action can be described in more than one way. A maxim narrow enough to be about my exact circumstances can be universalised without difficulty; a maxim broad enough to be substantive smuggles in a judgement about which features matter, and that judgement is the moral work the test was supposed to do. Kantians have spent two centuries specifying how maxims must be formulated, and the problem has not gone away.
Why read it
Because it is a hundred pages and the first section is the clearest statement anywhere of why motive might matter more than outcome. Read the preface and section one first and stop if section three defeats you - it defeated Kant, who rewrote its argument three years later. Use a translation with the Academy pagination and notes.
- First printed
- 1785
- First in English
- 1836
- Digitised
- Yes
Short and dense, and standardly cited by the Prussian Academy pagination. The Critique of Practical Reason of 1788 revises the argument of the third section, which Kant seems not to have been satisfied with.
Abbott's 1873 English is public domain. Paton's, Gregor's and Wood's are in copyright and are what teaching uses.
Where it stands
Live and central. Kantian constructivism, the debates about the formula of humanity, and the question whether moral requirements can be categorical at all are active fields, and any argument about whether the ends justify the means is being conducted on this ground.
On quoting this book
The German is public domain and Abbott's English is too, but the formulations everyone knows circulate in modern in-copyright translations whose wording differs at the points that matter. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the several formulations of the imperative are equivalent, as Kant claims, is doubted by most commentators. Whether the third section succeeds in showing that we are free, and whether the Critique of Practical Reason abandons the attempt, is a live dispute. Whether the emptiness charge lands depends on how maxims are individuated and there is no agreed answer. And Kant's own remarks on race and on women, in other works, have prompted a substantial argument about whether the universality he claims is compromised by what he took himself to be applying it to.