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3 results

  • Chapter 4 - The Kantian Revolution

  • Douglas Moggach, University of Ottawa and University of Sydney
  • Book:
    Freedom and Perfection
    Published online:
    25 July 2025
    Print publication:
    14 August 2025, pp 83-125

  • Summary

    Kant’s critique of perfectionism in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals launches lively debate on the limits of coercion and the requisites for free action, foundational for post-Kantian perfectionism. The Critique of Practical Reason reformulates the Leibnizian concept of spontaneity as a ‘true apology for Leibniz’, salvaging what is most vital in his thought. Spontaneous freedom does not externalise a unique content, as in Leibniz, but now conceived as negative liberty, signifies the will’s ability to abstract from external causes or to admit them selectively according to rational criteria. Spontaneity is the condition for an order of right, as the sphere of compatible external actions among juridical subjects. Here Kant effects a second modification of Leibniz, in the idea of mutual causality or reciprocity. The Metaphysics of Morals of 1797 elaborates the distinction between pure and empirical practical reason, freedom and happiness, and delineates the sphere of rightful interaction. Neither happiness nor virtue are subject to constraint, but in the sphere of right coercion or mutual limitation is the condition that assures and generalises freedom.

  • 4 - Reversal or retreat? Kant's deductions of freedom and morality

  • Edited by Andrews Reath, University of California, Riverside, Jens Timmermann, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason'
    Published online:
    06 August 2010
    Print publication:
    08 April 2010, pp 73-89

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the sentence in the Critique of Practical Reason in which Immanuel Kant explicitly discusses the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and its relation to the new book. In a surprising reversal towards the end of the deduction section of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant tells one that the 'vainly sought deduction of the moral principle' is replaced by another deduction, namely the deduction of freedom. Kant never quite identifies freedom and the fact of reason, which is the awareness of the authority of the moral law. He returns to the role of morality as the ratio cognoscendi of freedom and accords the support freedom receives from these quarters the status of a deduction. In a striking note from the Duisburg papers, Kant explicitly turns to the task of a 'critique of practical reason'.

  • 3 - What Is the Purpose of a Metaphysics of Morals? Some Observations on the Preface to the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

  • Edited by Karl Ameriks
  • Otfried Höffe, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Germany
  • Book:
    Kant's Moral and Legal Philosophy
    Published online:
    13 November 2009
    Print publication:
    27 April 2009, pp 77-92

  • Summary

    Immanuel Kant's late work, The Metaphysics of Morals, is treated as a kind of retreat from the critical self-limitation to a formal ethics that characterises the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant made it clear that the idea of a metaphysics of morals represents a Platonism of practical reason. In this chapter, the author focuses on the Preface and on one or two specific passages from the main text of the Groundwork that expressly pursue the argument in the Preface concerning the necessity for such metaphysics. Kant's speculative arguments concern the systematic structure of philosophy and the articulated presentation of its relevant objects. His arguments concern the way in which Kant's position coincides with the understanding that everyone already possesses concerning morality. The author elucidates these arguments and questions whether it is really necessary to provide a metaphysical grounding of ethics at all.