Summary
Kant begins by stating that the only thing in the world that is good “without limitation,” that is, universally, is a good will—the desire to good. All other skills of the mind, like intelligence, or courage, can be good or bad, depending on the situation. It is the same with power and wealth, which can be good, but can also make the person who has them arrogant. A good will seems to be the basis for being worthy of happiness.
Some qualities (moderation, clear-headedness) can make it easier for a good will to function. But they presuppose that such a will exists. They, too, can be evil—a rational, calm, evil person, for example.
A good will isn’t good because of what it achieves, or because it’s the best way to attain something specific. Instead, it’s good in itself. Even if a good will never achieved anything, it would still “shine forth” like something that had value in itself.
Nonetheless, Kant acknowledges, this is a strange concept, a will that is valuable despite what it achieves. (We would normally assume the opposite.) It seems too fantastical, and we feel that there must be a mistake in having nature assign the will as the thing that governs our behaviors.
Human beings are organized for life—to live, and to continue living. We assume, then, that nature wouldn’t have given human beings anything that’s contrary to that purpose, and nothing that isn’t best adapted to serve that purpose. If it were nature’s goal only to make us happy and only to preserve ourselves, then the will would have been a bad thing to give us. It could have just given us instinct, and thus made us simply and naturally happy, and fit to live. If such a being had reason, it would be only to realize how happy it already was. It would not have determined reason for a practical use.
In fact, the opposite is true—the more we use reason to try and be happy, the less we get of “true satisfaction.” This brings about a hatred of reason, of philosophy, which we find has only made its user unhappy. The more schooled we become in philosophy and reason, the more we become jealous of common people’s ability to be happy. Kant says that this feeling has insight into reason’s true purpose, which he’ll go into later.
What does it mean to do something out of a sense of duty? If a merchant sells his wares at a fair price, and never cheats anyone, that doesn’t mean he does it out of a sense of duty. It might be because he likes his customers, or because it would ruin his business if he were seen as a cheat. That happens to be the right thing to do, but that doesn’t mean it was done from duty.
To preserve your life is a moral duty; but people preserve their lives with a sense of anxiety that has no real moral content. On the other hand, if somoene’s life is miserable, but they go on living because they feel that they have to, in spite of their inclinations, they are acting from duty.
To be kind to other people is a duty; and many people just happen to be kind, or it makes them feel good to be kind. Kant argues that such actions have no moral worth, because they’re done from inclination. If it pleased the same person to be bad, they would be bad. Now imagine if such a person felt no pleasure in doing the right thing, but still continued doing it because he feels that he has to, that it’s the right thing. Or, if a person was by nature cold, and felt duty-bound to be warm and kind to people.
It is also a duty to assure one’s own happiness, since unhappiness can be a temptation to the transgression of duty. But most people’s understanding of happiness is narrow, and in any case, it’s impossible to satisfy all of your inclinations at once. When a person is happy despite the fact that he has gout, that can be from a duty to preserve his happiness despite believing that health brings happiness.
Hence the Bible says to love your enemy. You can’t command someone to feel love, but you can command them to act based on a sense of duty.
Kant proceeds to a second proposition: an action from duty has more worth, not in what it is supposed to achieve, but with the maxim according to which it’s been arrived at. It’s the principle with which it was thought up—not the goals it achieves (or fails to)—that make it morally worthy. In order to be universal, it must be determined by the former, not the latter.
Kant believes this is clear from the previous examples. The will, he says, stands at a crossroads, between the universal principle that determines it, and the material outcome of its action.
We can therefore conclude that duty consists of seeing an action as absolutely necessary, out of a feeling of respect for the law. So, even promoting other people’s happiness, or one’s own, cannot be a principle for moral behavior, since all of these could be brought about by other causes, and wouldn’t need a rational will, which is the only source of high, unconditional good, because it’s premised on universality. So, the representation of the law (sensory impression, a maxim of respect) can be a determining ground for the will.
Since we can’t rely on effects to determine moral action, the only principle that can determine the will to unconditional goodness is to act in such a way that your actions could be the basis for a universal law.
It's important to make a distinction here. Acting in such a way that accords with the law is not enough. You have to act according to the law because the law is the law. For example: should I make a promise knowing I’m not going to keep it? We can answer this two ways. We can say it’s not prudent, because the inevitable breaking of the promise will cause pain to others, which will lead to guilt on my part; ultimately, it won't be worth it. But we can also say that it does not conform with duty, that it could never be the basis for a universal law, regardless of situation and context. If everyone made promises knowing they would break them, the whole idea of promising would become incoherent.
Kant believes that we don’t have to know the basis of this respect to follow the law. We have a natural sense that this respect we feel for the law confirms a worth that far outweighs that of merely agreeing with a certain end (e.g., in the example above, of not causing pain to others and thus guilt for myself). Thus, Kant argues, human reason can actually easily distinguish good from evil; we can be aware of duty, and we don’t ultimately need a philosophy to be moral. We feel this distinction innately.
Nonetheless, common understanding is too easily misled, and a moral philosophy can avoid situational temptations. Thus, common reason is impelled to philosophy on practical grounds, to avoid confusion and falling into ambiguity.
Analysis
The first section of the Groundwork, and the argument that moral action consists in imagining one’s conduct as the basis for a universal law, is likely the piece of writing for which Kant is best-known. It would serve us well here to examine his argument and place it in its philosophical context, while, at the same time, noting the ways in which the first section is in fact quite atypical for Kant.
Broadly, we can understand the first section of the Groundwork as an attack on the Scottish philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith, and their theory of moral sentiments. Hume and Smith both believed that what causes people to do something good was simply the fact that it felt good. Being kind to someone allowed us to imagine us one day receiving a kindness in return; saving someone’s life allowed us to imagine that, if we were in danger, someone might try to save ours, and so on. When we do good, others around us, like our parents, our teacher, a pastor, praise us for having done good, and the memory of that pleasure causes us to continue to do good. Thus the goal of philosophy, and of enlightenment in general, would be to refine and to deepen these feelings, with the goal of making man more inclined to goodness.
Kant rejects this argument for two reasons. First, he argues that, if we do the good just because we feel like it, that’s no guarantee that we will keep doing good. We just do what our feelings tell us—at that moment, it happens to be something good; in the next moment, it may well be something bad. Arguments from inclination have no real moral heft. If I say that I did something because I wanted to avoid the shame I would feel for not having done it, that’s the same as saying “I did it because I felt like it.” Thus ostensibly moral actions are no different than, say, eating a sandwich when we are hungry, or going to sleep when we are tired. The claim to goodness, in Kant’s view, must be stronger than this. An argument from inclination won’t suffice. Therefore, all that Smith and Hume have successfully shown is how people do make moral decisions, not how they ought to.
How, then, ought we make moral decisions? By letting the law itself be our motivation. An action has moral worth when we do it because it is moral, because it is the law, not because we feel inclined to do it. Only such judgments truly have moral worth. Rather atypically for Kant, he follows by giving us some concrete situations of individuals who do what they know to be morally correct despite being strongly inclined against it, as well as counterexamples of individuals who do the right thing only because it is advantageous to them. Kant insists that only the actions of the former have true moral worth.
Students, as well as philosophers, tend to find this argument of Kant’s rather unappealing. The German poet Friedrich Schiller observed that in Kant, we are obligated to do the good and to take care that we do not enjoy it. G.W.F. Hegel, who borrowed and critiqued many of Kant’s concepts, observed in his early writings that Kant was a “Jew”—that, just as Christ accused the Pharisees of following scripture everywhere except their hearts, Kant was obsessed with following the law to the letter, but not to its real meaning.
This argument is echoed by the twentieth-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who observed that Kant here inverted the traditional understanding of the law. For a philosopher like Plato, Deleuze notes, the goal of the law is to make people good. For Kant, goodness only comes from following the law.
Nonetheless, Kant's examples give us considerable insight into the ethical roots of this line of thinking. The first is undoubtedly Christian. As a youth, Kant was expected to join the seminary, and he was a practicing Lutheran for his whole life. His examples of people who overcome their inclinations in order to follow the moral law undoubtedly echo Christ’s parable of the prodigal son, the moral of which is that nothing pleases God more than when sinners return to the fold of the virtuous. Kant also mentions Christ’s command to love your enemy. Splitting man into his inclinations and his reason echoes St. Paul’s distinction of man into a sinful flesh and a divine soul, a distinction that is central to Lutheranism.
At the same time, there is a powerful humanism and democratic streak to Kant’s argument. The source of that higher law isn’t God—it’s reason, the law man gives himself. Kant also accepts it as axiomatic that humanity possesses an inalienable dignity; the goal is not only to be happy, but to be able to reflect on one’s own happiness and consider oneself worthy of it, to achieve an inner harmony. Every person possesses this dignity, and every person can attain this harmony. Seen from this perspective, what we might take to be the coldness of Kant’s rationalism is not so cold at all, but actually a stance no less bold than the thinkers of the French Enlightenment, or the founders of American democracy.
