A Mandatory Reading of Kant's Ethics?

Abstract

At the beginning of his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant claims that an ordinary view of morality would have it that moral experience is essentially the experience of obligation. There are clearly occasions, he notes, when our own and others' interests would be greatly damaged were we to do what is morally required, and when no gain in satisfaction, happiness, well-being or flourishing can be imagined a consequence of the act, yet we understand that we are obliged anyway, unconditionally. We also reserve our highest approval for agents who do what is required just because it is required, who act 'from duty alone'. When Kant tries to account for what morality must be like if the possibility of strict obligation is so central to it, he argues that the constraint of this moral principle cannot lie in any responsiveness to an 'external' source of obligation. The principle of morality can only be what our own unaided human reason decrees, legislating practically (determining what ought to be done) a moral law. But this rational self-determination is possible only within the limitations of human reason when it legislates practically. While everyone without exception seeks happiness, reason cannot determine the content of any material end the achievement of which would constitute happiness for everyone, an end that would then always be rational for all humans to seek. There is only one other option; and so reason's being practical must be a matter of subscribing to the form of any rational willing. We can even test to see if our maxim has the right universalizable form. Universalized maxims which are contradictory in their very form, or which it would be a contradiction to will, are forbidden. Obligation, practical rationality, form, moral law, maxims and their universalizability could this familiar picture of Kant as the paradigmatic deontologist possibly be wrong? Could it be profoundly misleading? Kant commentators like