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Kant began his ethical theory by arguing that the only virtue that can be an unqualified good is a good will. No other virtue, or thing in the broadest sense of the term, has this status because every other virtue, every other thing, can be used to achieve immoral ends.
The typical dichotomy in choosing ends is between ends that are right (e.g., helping someone) and those that are good (e.g., enriching oneself). Kant considered the right prior to the good; to him, the latter was morally dependent on the former. In Kant's view, a person cannot decide whether conduct is right, or moral, through empirical means.
Kant's ethics are founded on his view of rationality as the ultimate good and his belief that all people are fundamentally rational beings. This led to the most important part of Kant's ethics, the formulation of the categorical imperative , which is the criterion for whether a maxim is good or bad.
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785; German: Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten; also known as the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals, and the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals) is the first of Immanuel Kant's mature works on moral philosophy and the first of his trilogy of major works on ethics alongside the Critique of ...
Immanuel Kant [a] (born Emanuel Kant; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern Western philosophy.
Kant did not initially plan to publish a separate critique of practical reason. He published the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in May 1781 as a "critique of the entire faculty of reason in general" [1] [2] (viz., of both theoretical and practical reason) and a "propaedeutic" or preparation investigating "the faculty of reason in regard to all pure a priori cognition" [3] [4] to ...
Kant defined it as the formula of the command of reason that represents an objective principle "in so far as it is necessitating for a will", [1] in other words, imperatives act as the empirical formulas for knowing and enacting with reason. Hypothetical imperatives tell us how to act in order to achieve a specific goal and the commandment of ...
Immanuel Kant considered the will to be guided by laws and maxims. Immanuel Kant's theory of the will consists of the will being guided subjectively by maxims and objectively via laws. The former, maxims, are precepts. [24] On the other hand, laws are objective, apprehended a priori—prior to experience.