The Moral Motive

Abstract

We now come to a particularly difficult aspect of Kant’s ethics — his account of the moral motive. So far we have seen that Kant held that the moral value of an action depends upon the intention of the individual who performs it and that an act has moral value only if it is done ‘from duty’. This means that it must not merely accord with what duty requires, but must be done for the sake of fulfilling the agent’s duty. An act might accord with duty if done from fear of punishment or with a view to some other personal advantage, but it would not then have moral value. This is easy to understand, and many would agree with Kant thus far. Kant also believed, however, that an act done from duty is as such done for the sake of fulfilling the pure a priori moral law, and this is not so easy to understand. According to Kant, a law is pure when the expression of it contains no empirical concepts. Now the moral laws prohibiting murder and theft do contain empirical concepts. The concept of murder, for example, contains the empirical notion of killing. The pure a priori moral law must therefore, as we have seen, be more fundamental than such specific moral principles and be expressed in the form of the Principle of Universal Law: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’