Work · German Idealism & Its Heirs
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
The categorical imperative and the dignity of the person.
Introduction
A short book, published in Riga in 1785, that Kant wrote as groundwork for a fuller ethics; the “Metaphysics of Morals” itself followed only in 1797. After a preface come three sections. The first starts from ordinary moral understanding: only a good will is good without qualification, and an action has moral worth when done from duty, as with the shopkeeper who is honest because it is right, not because it pays. The second distinguishes hypothetical from categorical imperatives and gives several formulations of the latter, among them treating humanity always as an end and never merely as a means. The third links morality to freedom.
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Connections
Builds on
- The Social Contract1762 · Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Taken up in
- Critique of Practical Reason1788 · Immanuel Kant
- The Methods of Ethics1874 · Henry Sidgwick
- The Moral Judgment of the Child1932 · Jean Piaget
- A Theory of Justice1971 · John Rawls
- The Imperative of Responsibility1979 · Hans Jonas
- The Sources of Normativity1996 · Christine Korsgaard
- Towards Justice and Virtue1996 · Onora O’Neill
- On What Matters2011 · Derek Parfit
Criticized in
- Elements of the Philosophy of Right1820 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Utilitarianism1863 · John Stuart Mill
- Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values1913 · Max Scheler
- Modern Moral Philosophy1958 · G. E. M. Anscombe
- Moral Luck1976 · Bernard Williams
- Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy1985 · Bernard Williams
More works by Immanuel Kant
- 1795Perpetual Peace
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