Some Remarks on Kant’s Groundwork
Let us begin with two cases of truth-telling. I will use these examples to illustrate some of the key
conceptual distinctions K draws in order to analyze what makes for an ethical situation. I will
stick to the backbone of this account, so not every nuance K stresses will be present in what
follows; but this should serve our purposes. Then I will offer a brief account of what K is trying
to achieve in the Groundwork and how, followed by a summary of some of the central tenets of
Kantian ethics.
Truth-telling, then. Imagine the following situations:
a) You are called upon to give testimony against the boss of the local mob. Let’s say you
witnessed a murder committed by him and your testimony will help the prosecutor to lock
him up for good. You know that if you so testify, you will be facing immense risk to your
life. It is very likely that the mob will try to hunt you down and kill you. Not only that, the
mob-boss is like Keiser Soze of the Usual Suspects, and he will try to torture and kill
everyone you ever held dear to your heart. Let’s not fail, however, to note that the
community’s good and well-being will increase immeasurably as a result of your
testimony: no more drugs or guns on the streets, and people will enjoy idyllic days, the
likes of which are found only in Sweden.
b) This same mob boss shows up knocking at your door. You know that his intention is to
kill your friend and you know that your friend is hiding in a closet on the second floor at
that very moment. The boss asks you whether your friend is in the house. For our
purposes, let’s stipulate that you are not allowed to simply refuse to give an answer: you
must give either a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.
Let’s spell out what is involved in decision-making in these situations. First, for Kant all rationalactivity is rule-governed activity. What this means is that we need to distinguish between
completely arbitrary ‘performances’ from genuine actions. A genuine action is one which is done
for the sake of an end, it is action in view of an end. This also means that the agent is able to
formulate his action in terms of a rule. A maxim, in Kantian parlance, is precisely such a rule: it
is the subjective principle, or rule, which articulates the different components of an action and
serves as the basis of one’s actions. A simple maxim will have two components: the act and the
end for the sake of which it is done (its purpose). So let’s formulate some of the possible
responses to the situations (a) and (b) in terms of maxims.
(a) 1 I will testify truthfully, b/c I want the award offered for the prosecution (of the boss).
2 I will testisfy truthfully, b/c I want to contribute to the well-being of the community.
3 I will not testify truthfully, b/c I do not want to put my family at risk.
(b) 1 I will tell the truth, b/c I fear that he will kill me instead if I don’t.
2 I will not tell the truth, b/c I want to save my friend’s life.
You can see that in both situations we have two possible acts (by definition): you either tell the
truth or you don’t tell the truth. You can also see that there are (perhaps) an indefinite number of
ends for which they could be willed: in some they serve selfish purposes (financial or physical
gain), in others altruistic ones (contributing to the well-being of the community, one’s friend).
The question K asks himself is what makes an action have moral worth, and it is
concerning this question that he introduces the distinction b/w an action that is in conformity w/
duty and one that is done for the sake of duty. Let’s consider (a)2 and (b)1. We generally
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recognize being truthful as a moral duty. In both (a)2 and (b)1, we have acts that are strictly in
conformity w/ duty: the agent tells the truth. Now let’s look at the ends for which the agent tells
the truth: in the former, it is to increase general well-being (happiness), in the latter it is to
preserve the agent’s own well-being. One of the central claims K makes is that we cannot simply
appeal to our ends (purposes) to account for our actions, as if they were naturally given ‘causelike’ factors determining our will (to act in this or that way). Recall that that way of conceiving
the matter would turn us into a leaf which falls down from or remains attached to its branch
depending on the relative strength of the forces acting on it in this or that way. We must be able
to see ourselves as choosing our ends, making it our maxim to act for this or that reason. So for
both (a)2 and (b)1, we have actions that are in conformity w/ duty—(b)1 poses further problems I
will mention below—but they do not, strictly speaking, have moral worth, because the agent
chooses to tell the truth only because he happens to value the well-being of the community, or the
preservation of his/her life. In both cases, we have an agent who makes it his maxim to tell the
truth, which is an act in conformity w/ the duty of telling the truth, only because such an act
contributes to the pursuing of other ends, namely, personal or communal happiness. To make the
same point in different terms, the agent chooses to be guided in the selection of his/her ends by
his desires. For K, however, for an action to have moral worth, the agent must make it his maxim
to tell the truth because it is his duty to do so, because it is what is required of him as a rational
moral agent, because it makes a claim on him. Such an agent is said to act for the sake of duty, or
from duty. Note that it can in fact be the case that by telling the truth the agent may be
accomplishing other ends, such as his happiness or that of the community, but the important thing
is that if the action is to have moral worth, then it must be done for the sake of duty: the agent
chooses to tell the truth, because he conceives of it as a moral obligation.
What is it to conceive of an action as a moral obligation? It is to conceive of the action (or
its end) as what is required of you. And when K says that if the action is to have moral worth,
then it must be so conceived, he also means that the agent chooses to do what is required of him,
only because he takes it to be required of him. To put it bluntly, you must choose to do what you
do, only because you conceive of it as your duty; the sole motivating force behind your action is
the thought that that is what duty commands you to do. I will tell the truth, because it is my duty
to do so.
Let’s pursue this line of reasoning to give a basic account of what K is attempting to do in
the Groundwork and why. To give a one-line description of this, we can say that K is explicating
the claim that if we are to have genuine moral obligations, then we must conceive of ourselves as
autonomous beings. So, we must figure out what it is to have a genuine moral obligation and
what it is to be an autonomous being. Let’s follow up on the guiding question introduced above:
what makes an action have moral worth? We value many things: health, wealth, good-looks, ….
Recall that Aristotle also started the NE 1with a reflection on the ends we seek to achieve in
different spheres of activity. Some things we value for the sake of other things, some things we
value for their own sake. For A, eudaimonia turned out to be the supreme good, self-sufficient
and final; and he continued to spell out the conditions necessary for the attainment of the activity
that is eudamonia. K does not deny that we could desire something like happiness for its own
sake. But he regards a good will as the only thing that really deserves the name of good in itself.
What is a good will and why is it the only thing deserving of the name? It is doing the right thing
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I will explain this when I tell you about the three fundamental theories of ethics.
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for the right reason, i.e., because it is the right thing to do; and it has moral worth in itself,
because it is independent of all external conditions. K is usually taken as putting the emphasis (in
accounting for moral activity) on the intention (motive) and the will of the moral agent at the
expense of the act itself, or its consequences. What does all this mean? Recall example (a) above.
You testify truthfully. But perhaps the judge was corrupt and bribed, the jury intimidated and
coerced, etc. So no good comes out of your act of testifying truthfully. But we would still regard
your decision to testify truthfully as having moral worth in itself (especially since we know that
in so doing you risked considerable danger to yourself, to your family, etc.) Why did you do what
you did? You knew the bad guy would get away anyway (b/c of corruption, etc.) and you knew
what your decision would entail (personal misery, etc.), yet you said the truth. You did the right
thing b/c it was the right thing to do. Your action deserves our respect and has moral worth even
though no beneficial consequence came out of it. A good will, then, is where we will need to
look, if we want to find out what makes an action have moral worth.
This is where motives become crucial. Motives are strange things. They are like causes,
because we say that the motive is what determines us to will in this or that way. Why did you
testify truthfully? B/c x (where x is a statement of the motive that ‘forced’ you to do what you
did). But we also think that motives are not physical causes. The leaf mentioned above could not
have acted otherwise, once the relative strength of forces acting on it is given. Pull of gravity >
push (up by the branch) I fall. But you could have not testified (or so we think when we think
of ourselves as free beings, unlike the leaf.) A motive is the principle by which we choose to do
what we do. Recall the truth-teller again: he could be testifying b/c he wanted the reward, etc.
What is the motive by which a good will would be determined? To find out what this is, K looks
at actions that are done for the sake of duty, b/c in such cases we can see conflicting motives. Our
truth-teller also has the motives to preserve his life and avoid pain, not to risk his family’s life. In
such a case, the agent would rather not do what she does; but she does it. This is why such cases
are instructive for K’s purposes: it enables him to abstract from all those other motives and attend
to the one in which the thought of duty determines the will of the agent. Once again, what makes
you decide to tell the truth is the thought that it is your duty to do so.
But we need to complicate a little further this idea of what makes you decide to do x. As I
showed above, since morality is a matter of rule-governed activity, the agent must formulate the
rule according to which she acts: I will do x, because of y. This is the maxim of her action. You
also know (from what I showed above) that the agent must make it her maxim: the truth-teller
could say, “I’d rather not testify, because this entails great personal cost for me and my family,
but I make it my maxim to tell the truth, because it is my duty to do so.” K’s point is that,
attention to how a good will would be determined shows us that we must abstract from all
personal desires and inclinations as possible motives for our actions, and focus on the thought of
duty alone as the sole determining factor for our will. When you tell the truth not b/c of some
desire or inclination (even ones we would think of as legitimate ones such as the desire to make
others happy), but b/c you take truth-telling to be what is morally required of you, as making a
demand and claim on you, this is like taking truth-telling as a law. And since you have abstracted
from all personal desires in the formulation of your maxim, it has the form of a law, valid for
everyone. What does this mean for the motive of our action, what is it in such a case that ‘moves’
us to tell the truth? The thought that our maxim has the form of a law is the sole incentive for our
action. K calls this acting solely out of respect for the law.
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Another way by which we can arrive this point is the following. A moral obligation
requires you to do something, it makes a demand on you: you ought to do x. What is the force of
this ought? The strange thing about it is that, if we consider it a legitimate obligation, then its
validity remains in force even if we do just the opposite of what it tells us to do. So, if truthtelling is an obligation, then its force remains valid (i.e. ‘you still ought to tell the truth’) even if
you end up not doing so (b/c you want to avoid danger, etc.) For K, a moral obligation is
necessarily binding for us, regardless of what we end up doing in fact; moreover, such an
obligation must be universal, i.e. valid for every rational being. Universality and necessity, then,
are two essential features of an obligation. For K, only something that has the form of a law can
have the required universality and necessity. So, if we are to have genuine obligations, then we
must act according to a maxim that has the form of a law.
A law is a command, i.e. an imperative. The law of gravity commands the leaf to fall
down. But we saw how this is a matter of forces external to the leaf, pulling and pushing it this or
that way. For K, most of our desires are precisely such external forces pulling and pushing us in
whichever way—but more on this later. Rational beings have the capacity to form representations
of the commands according to which they are supposed to act. And they do this by forming
maxims for their actions. We saw that a genuine obligation requires a will to be motivated by a
maxim that has the form of a law. How does a command become rationally binding? This
requires us to find out what kinds of commands (imperatives) are possible for human beings, and
this is where K tells us that there are two, namely, hypothetical and categorical imperatives. A
hypothetical imperative is a conditional that tells you that ‘if you want x, then you must do y’.
Notice that the imperative that says ‘you must do y’ is conditional upon your wanting x. In such
imperatives an end we set for ourselves is always for the sake of another end: if you want to be
healthy, then you must exercise; or, if you want to spare your family, then you must not testify.
Such imperatives are valid, rationally binding, in virtue of the principle according to which if you
will the end, you must will the means necessary for its attainment. For K, this is simply an
analytic principle, because he thinks that any rational being who wants to get something, must
also want to do the things necessary for getting it. But it is also clear that such imperatives cannot
provide the kind of law necessary for genuine moral obligations. We saw that we must do the act
for its own sake, b/c it is the right thing to do, from duty. But a hypothetical imperative is one that
always tells you what you must do for the sake of some other end, external to it; in other words,
the necessity of one action is conditional upon us wanting something else other than it. If you
want x, then you must do y; if you want to do y, then you must do z … So we need an imperative
that commands uncondionally, that tells us what we must do, not for the sake of something else,
but because it is our duty to do so.
Enter categorical imperative. What is it to be a categorical imperative? Precisely what I
just said: to be unconditional. But if there are no conditions, as opposed to hypothetical
imperatives, in virtue of what is a categorical imperative valid? Let’s recall our example (a). You
decide to testify because you want to increase communal welfare. What is the maxim? I will
testify, because I want to increase communal well-being. Notice that this would require us to
include the condition that we must increase communal well-being as part of our imperative. If
you want to increase communal well-being, then you must testify. But this is a hypothetical
imperative, and we know that truth-telling, if it is a duty, must be so unconditionally, not for the
sake of something else. But if we get rid of all such conditions (personal happiness, wanting to
please God, the good of others, etc.), what remains? Precisely the form of law: your maxim must
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have the form of a law, hence universal and necessary for all rational beings. And this is precisely
what the categorical imperative says: act only in accordance w/ that maxim through which you
can at the same time will that it become a universal law. The term ‘form’ is important. The
categorical imperative, in itself, does not tell us anything substantial, does not tell us that we must
do the specific acts of telling the truth, not murdering, being nice to people … . It is a formal
criterion, and as regards all specific actions, it is empty. If it says anything about duties at all it
says this: your duty is to do your duty, or you must do your duty. But it proposes to give us a
means through which we can figure out what our duties are. This is why it is taken to be a test
through which we can rule out certain maxims as immoral. Those maxims which cannot be
willed as universal laws, i.e. those maxims that will be seen as generating some sort of
contradiction in the attempt to conceive of them as universal laws valid for every rational being,
will be discounted. (I do not quite agree w/ this view of the categorical imperative as a test and
there are many more things to be said in connection w/ it; but if I get into the reasons why, then
you will make it your cat. imp. to hate me for making things unnecessarily more difficult.) So
let’s leave it at this. For our purposes, you might find it helpful to think about it in terms of
Korsgaard’s2 suggestion: a formalized version of the question ‘what if everybody did that?’ We
will discuss several examples, for instance suicide, in order to figure out the nature of such
contradictions.
Rational reflection as an expression of freedom: K is offering an independent conception
of and justification for morality—independent of both religion and the pursuit of happiness. His
view is based on a notion of human dignity that is a function of a human being as a rational free
agent. According to this conception most of our desires (inclinations)—including the one for
happiness, which in fact can be seen as a blanket term for all our empirical ends—are discounted,
or rather, are irrelevant b/c a moral law cannot be binding for a rational free agent simply in
virtue of the contingent desires he happens to have. Thinking of one’s self as deciding under the
sway of such desires turns such a self into the leaf that gets pushed and pulled in every which
way by the forces acting on it now and again. It is precisely our capacity to abstract from such
desires and make it our maxim whether or not to be determined by them that opens up the space
for freedom in K’s conception. K is saying: you are not simply determined to act in this or that
way b/c you happen to have a desire to achieve this or that; you choose to make it your maxim to
be so determined. Remember truth-telling (if you are not sick of it by this point): it is not that you
tell the truth simply b/c you happen to want to contribute to communal happiness; you choose to
make communal happiness the kind of end requiring your action. This is what makes us
autonomous beings for K. What is autonomy? It is self-determination, self-legislation, giving the
law to oneself. The categorical imperative tells you that you must act only in accordance w/ a
maxim that can be universalized, i.e. that can be seen as a universally valid law binding for all
rational beings. It is precisely this capacity, for K, that makes the moral law something that is
legislated by the rational agent itself: the law on the basis of which we act is not found written
outside on some granite block by God, it is not laid down by our corporeal nature which imposes
the force of this or that desire, but, as the categorical imperative, it is written by us qua (that is,
only under the aspect of) rational beings. Allowing yourself to be determined by any other end is
heteronomy, for K; that is, being determined by something external, other.
A famous and long-standing objection to Kantian ethics will make this point clearer. It is
the charge that K’s ethics lacks any substantial content and it goes something like this: from a
formal principle of rationality, it is impossible to derive any substantial conclusions about how to
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See the introduction to our translation if you have the time.
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act. A purely rational will, so isolated from all corporeal desires, concrete circumstances of
action, etc., will have no basis for making any decisions about how to act. Why, we may wonder,
K so radically deprives the will of any determining motivation other than respect for the law; why
would anybody regard any action that is not done strictly for the sake of duty, but rather in some
way motivated by other desires, as inherently suspicious, lacking genuine moral worth? The
answer is that, for K, since all empirical desires are contingent and subjective, only by
reflectively detaching myself from them, that is detaching myself from my present interests and
concerns as this particular individual, can I attain an objective, universal standpoint—the only
standpoint that can generate objective laws binding for all. And the categorical imperative tells us
precisely to regard ourselves as one moral agent among others, untainted by the subjective
coloring of our desires, interests. The objection I just mentioned maintains that from such a
detached perspective, one will have no motivations left for acting in a particular way. What could
K say to this? After all, it is precisely the formality, and hence the substantive emptiness of the
categorical imperative that he considered to be the supreme achievement of his conception of
ethics. He might claim that the point is not to generate motivations, but to offer rational
justification for the ones we already have, from a perspective that is outside these motivations. To
this, the above objection responds that either it is not possible to offer such justifications from the
objective standpoint (b/c it is so abstract), or it will smuggle precisely those motivations (desires)
into the objective standpoint that it ends up endorsing, in which case it would be self-deception to
consider it objective.
Consider the following example: You would all expect me to grade fairly; in fact, you
would all claim that I have an obligation to grade everybody’s paper based on its merits, and not
based on whether or not I happen to like a particular student. In short, you would demand that I
grade objectively. What does that mean? Among other things, it means that I abstract from your
particular features, as well as from my own personal inclinations. According to the Kantian view
of the matter, it would be the easiest thing in the world for me to give one paper a higher grade
than it merits, b/c I like its author. In fact, it would increase overall happiness in the world by
making that student happier, and not reducing any happiness elsewhere, for no one would know
about it. Besides, what is, after all, a single paper in the over all scheme of things? Yet you would
probably say that I still have the obligation. In light of the above, the questions to consider would
be whether I could ever attain such an objective viewpoint and what it would be like to make
decisions from this viewpoint. Of course, this problem is not hard to solve, since I could just
cover the names written on the paper and grade without knowing who in fact wrote that paper.
This is what people do all the time in what they call blind-review. But the example is still
instructive: it shows us that what is at stake in what K asks us to do is to regard ourselves as
anonymous in moral decision-making, just one rational agent among others. This is what
universalization amounts to: figuring out what any rational being would agree to do, divorced
from his/her particular perspective, ignorant of his/her particular make-up. The trouble is that it is
not an abstract rational being who is asked to engage in this reasoning, but you and I. But this is
precisely what makes it possible for human beings to have moral obligation, and hence freedom,
for K. If we were angels, always willing solely out of respect for the law, that is, always doing the
right thing because it is the right thing to do, w/o ever facing the problem of empirical and
contrary desires, then there would be no talk of freedom. It is human beings, who participate both
in the sensible world (because our bodies, as well as psychological states, are objects among
other objects, obeying the laws of physics) and in the intelligible world, for whom freedom is
both a necessity and a possibility.
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