The moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant I

By "reason", Kant suggests that in humans, actions must be guided by something other than instinct. As intelligent beings, humans are endowed with reason as "a practical faculty, i.e. as one which is to have influence on the will" (20). The purpose of reasonùindeed, the culmination of itùis to produce a will in the individual that is good. As Kant explains, individuals should use reason "to produce a will, not merely good as a means to something else, but good in itself, for which reason was absolutely necessary" (21). In this, Kant is showing that reason has a practical destination: the establishment of a good will. In the human condition, a good will is manifested wherever one acts for the sake of "duty". Reason helps us to understand just what our duties are.

Kant explains that actions done from duty create moral value or, in other words, that an action can only have moral worth if it is performed from a sense of duty (24). This idea constitutes the crux of Kant's first proposition. Kant's second proposition explains that "an action done from duty derives its moral worth, not from the purpose which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim by which it was determined" (24). On this view, an acti

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ve, ultimately fail us as action-guiding maxims. Kant mistakenly assumes that a concept of right action can presuppose a concept of the good; in fact, the opposite is true. A priori reasoning cannot deduce moral precepts without first conceptualizing a preeminent "good". In Kant's case, the "good" reveals itself as a universally applicable principle, a "categorical imperative" that provides a framework for moral action. And yet Kant's metaphysics intends to show us that the opposite phenomenon is taking place, namely that deductive, pure reasoning builds a system of morals that leads us to the good through a system of interconnected concepts. In reality, it is the categorical imperative that provides for the Kantian conception of "reason", "duty" and "principle", not the other way around. Kant seeks to build a political philosophy based solely on the right, but the right can never be prior to the good. Indeed, Kant's fundamental assumption that the good life can be something singular and unequivocal is itself an inversion of what many of us know to be true by day-to-day experience: that the demands of justice can conflict, that our duties are not clearly delineated by reason, and that our principles of right can, and of
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