Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

The Groundwork introduces Kant’s moral philosophy. Kant was a child of the Enlightenment, and his philosophy is characterized as rational idealism – the idea that the world makes sense when we exercise rational thinking. He espouses a deontological moral theory, which emphasizes following a set of rules that delineate what is right or wrong, instead of teleological ethics, which focuses on weighing the utility of consequences to decide the best action. He introduces the well-known categorical imperative in this work, as well as a suite of other moral laws. Reading through this was hard since fundamentally I (and practically no one today) don’t believe in the old style of Enlightenment idealism so it does take a strenuous suspension of viewpoint to understand what Kant’s saying, though the key ideas in the work could be taken and applicable to the real world. Thankfully these core ideas take little effort to understand and yet still stand tall, having irreversibly influenced fields like law and the rest of philosophy after Kant.

The categorical imperative is a fancy term which describes an obligation that everyone should heed in all circumstances, and for Kant there’s only one such imperative: act in a way that you can at the same time will that your action becomes a universal law. For example, if you are thinking of falsely offering a promise to someone, you should think: would I be fine with a world where everyone made false promises? The answer would likely be no, since you don’t want others to renege on you. Kant defends this imperative using his fictitious ideal, rational people, who would always act rightly; they always will the right action, and thus us normal people ought to do what’s right following their example; it’s an easy abstraction to imagine but neither you nor I believe this. The better defense of the imperative would rather be primate psychology, in that embedded fairness and reciprocity sense biologically and socially wired deep into us (as empirically shown by research on fairness in Capuchin monkeys). Perhaps this is a reason why his categorical imperative (and similarly the golden rule in many religions) is so intuitive to us, even if we might not know anything about or agree with Kant’s ideal world of rationality of his imaginary kingdom of rational agents.