Section II
Original German
406 Zweiter Abschnitt.
Übergang von der populären sittlichen Weltweisheit zur Metaphysik der Sitten.
Wenn wir unsern bisherigen Begriff der Pflicht aus dem gemeinen Gebrauche unserer praktischen Vernunft gezogen haben, so ist daraus keinesweges zu schließen, als hätten wir ihn als einen Erfahrungsbegriff behandelt. Vielmehr, wenn wir auf die Erfahrung vom Thun und Lassen der Menschen Acht haben, treffen wir häufige und, wie wir selbst einräumen, gerechte Klagen an, daß man von der Gesinnung, aus reiner Pflicht zu handeln, so gar keine sichere Beispiele anführen könne, daß, wenn gleich manches dem, was Pflicht gebietet, gemäß geschehen mag, dennoch es immer noch zweifelhaft sei, ob es eigentlich aus Pflicht geschehe und also einen moralischen Werth habe. Daher es zu aller Zeit Philosophen gegeben hat, welche die Wirklichkeit dieser Gesinnung in den menschlichen Handlungen schlechterdings abgeleugnet und alles der mehr oder weniger verfeinerten Selbstliebe zugeschrieben haben, ohne doch deswegen die Richtigkeit des Begriffs von Sittlichkeit in Zweifel zu ziehen, vielmehr mit inniglichem Bedauern der Gebrechlichkeit und Unlauterkeit der menschlichen Natur Erwähnung thaten, die zwar edel gnug sei, sich eine so achtungswürdige Idee zu ihrer Vorschrift zu machen, aber zugleich zu schwach, um sie zu befolgen, und die Vernunft, die ihr zur Gesetzgebung dienen sollte, nur dazu braucht, um das Interesse der Neigungen, es sei einzeln oder, wenn es hoch kommt, in ihrer größten Verträglichkeit unter einander, zu besorgen.
407 In der That ist es schlechterdings unmöglich, durch Erfahrung einen einzigen Fall mit völliger Gewißheit auszumachen, da die Maxime einer sonst pflichtmäßigen Handlung lediglich auf moralischen Gründen und auf der Vorstellung seiner Pflicht beruht habe. Denn es ist zwar bisweilen der Fall, daß wir bei der schärfsten Selbstprüfung gar nichts antreffen, was außer dem moralischen Grunde der Pflicht mächtig genug hätte sein können, uns zu dieser oder jener guten Handlung und so großer Aufopferung zu bewegen; es kann aber daraus gar nicht mit Sicherheit geschlossen werden, daß wirklich gar kein geheimer Antrieb der Selbstliebe unter der bloßen Vorspiegelung jener Idee die eigentliche bestimmende Ursache des Willens gewesen sei, dafür wir denn gerne uns mit einem uns fälschlich angemaßten edlern Bewegungsgrunde schmeicheln, in der That aber selbst durch die angestrengteste Prüfung hinter die geheimen Triebfedern niemals völlig kommen können, weil, wenn vom moralischen Werthe die Rede ist, es nicht auf die Handlungen ankommt, die man sieht, sondern auf jene innere Principien derselben, die man nicht sieht.
Man kann auch denen, die alle Sittlichkeit als bloßes Hirngespinst einer durch Eigendünkel sich selbst übersteigenden menschlichen Einbildung verlachen, keinen gewünschteren Dienst thun, als ihnen einzuräumen, daß die Begriffe der Pflicht (so wie man sich auch aus Gemächlichkeit gerne überredet, daß es auch mit allen übrigen Begriffen bewandt sei) lediglich aus der Erfahrung gezogen werden müßten; denn da bereitet man jenen einen sichern Triumph. Ich will aus Menschenliebe einräumen, daß noch die meisten unserer Handlungen pflichtmäßig seien; sieht man aber ihr Tichten und Trachten näher an, so stößt man allenthalben auf das liebe Selbst, was immer hervorsticht, worauf und nicht auf das strenge Gebot der Pflicht, welches mehrmals Selbstverleugnung erfordern würde, sich ihre Absicht stützt. Man braucht auch eben kein Feind der Tugend, sondern nur ein kaltblütiger Beobachter zu sein, der den lebhaftesten Wunsch für das Gute nicht sofort für dessen Wirklichkeit hält, um (vornehmlich mit zunehmenden Jahren und einer durch Erfahrung theils gewitzigten, theils zum Beobachten geschärften Urtheilskraft) in gewissen Augenblicken zweifelhaft zu werden, ob auch wirklich in der Welt irgend wahre Tugend angetroffen werde. Und hier kann uns nun nichts vor dem gänzlichen Abfall von unseren Ideen der Pflicht bewahren und gegründete Achtung gegen ihr Gesetz in der Seele erhalten, als die klare Überzeugung, daß, wenn es auch niemals Handlungen gegeben habe, die aus solchen reinen Quellen
408 entsprungen wären, dennoch hier auch davon gar nicht die Rede sei, ob dies oder jenes geschehe, sondern die Vernunft für sich selbst und unabhängig von allen Erscheinungen gebiete, was geschehen soll, mithin Handlungen, von denen die Welt vielleicht bisher noch gar kein Beispiel gegeben hat, an deren Thunlichkeit sogar der, so alles auf Erfahrung gründet, sehr zweifeln möchte, dennoch durch Vernunft unnachlaßlich geboten seien, und daß z. B. reine Redlichkeit in der Freundschaft um nichts weniger von jedem Menschen gefordert werden könne, wenn es gleich bis jetzt gar keinen redlichen Freund gegeben haben möchte, weil diese Pflicht als Pflicht überhaupt vor aller Erfahrung in der Idee einer den Willen durch Gründe a priori bestimmenden Vernunft liegt.
Setzt man hinzu, daß, wenn man dem Begriffe von Sittlichkeit nicht gar alle Wahrheit und Beziehung auf irgend ein mögliches Object bestreiten will, man nicht in Abrede ziehen könne, daß sein Gesetz von so ausgebreiteter Bedeutung sei, daß es nicht bloß für Menschen, sondern alle vernünftige Wesen überhaupt, nicht bloß unter zufälligen Bedingungen und mit Ausnahmen, sondern schlechterdings nothwendig gelten müsse: so ist klar, daß keine Erfahrung, auch nur auf die Möglichkeit solcher apodiktischen Gesetze zu schließen, Anlaß geben könne. Denn mit welchem Rechte können wir das, was vielleicht nur unter den zufälligen Bedingungen der Menschheit gültig ist, als allgemeine Vorschrift für jede vernünftige Natur in unbeschränkte Achtung bringen, und wie sollen Gesetze der Bestimmung unseres Willens für Gesetze der Bestimmung des Willens eines vernünftigen Wesens überhaupt und nur als solche auch für den unsrigen gehalten werden, wenn sie bloß empirisch wären und nicht völlig a priori aus reiner, aber praktischer Vernunft ihren Ursprung nähmen?
Man könnte auch der Sittlichkeit nicht übler rathen, als wenn man sie von Beispielen entlehnen wollte. Denn jedes Beispiel, was mir davon vorgestellt wird, muß selbst zuvor nach Principien der Moralität beurtheilt werden, ob es auch würdig sei, zum ursprünglichen Beispiele, d. i. zum Muster, zu dienen, keinesweges aber kann es den Begriff derselben zu oberst an die Hand geben. Selbst der Heilige des Evangelii muß zuvor mit unserm Ideal der sittlichen Vollkommenheit verglichen werden, ehe man ihn dafür erkennt; auch sagt er von sich selbst: was nennt ihr mich (den ihr sehet) gut? niemand ist gut (das Urbild des Guten) als der einige Gott (den ihr nicht seht). Woher haben wir aber den Begriff von Gott
409 als dem höchsten Gut? Lediglich aus der Idee, die die Vernunft a priori von sittlicher Vollkommenheit entwirft und mit dem Begriffe eines freien Willens unzertrennlich verknüpft. Nachahmung findet im Sittlichen gar nicht statt, und Beispiele dienen nur zur Aufmunterung, d. i. sie setzen die Thunlichkeit dessen, was das Gesetz gebietet, außer Zweifel, sie machen das, was die praktische Regel allgemeiner ausdrückt, anschaulich, können aber niemals berechtigen, ihr wahres Original, das in der Vernunft liegt, bei Seite zu setzen und sich nach Beispielen zu richten.
Wenn es denn keinen ächten obersten Grundsatz der Sittlichkeit giebt, der nicht unabhängig von aller Erfahrung bloß auf reiner Vernunft beruhen müßte, so glaube ich, es sei nicht nöthig, auch nur zu fragen, ob es gut sei, diese Begriffe, so wie sie sammt den ihnen zugehörigen Principien a priori feststehen, im Allgemeinen (in abstracto) vorzutragen, wofern das Erkenntniß sich vom gemeinen unterscheiden und philosophisch heißen soll. Aber in unsern Zeiten möchte dieses wohl nöthig sein. Denn wenn man Stimmen sammelte, ob reine von allem Empirischen abgesonderte Vernunfterkenntniß, mithin Metaphysik der Sitten, oder populäre praktische Philosophie vorzuziehen sei, so erräth man bald, auf welche Seite das Übergewicht fallen werde.
Diese Herablassung zu Volksbegriffen ist allerdings sehr rühmlich, wenn die Erhebung zu den Principien der reinen Vernunft zuvor geschehen und zur völligen Befriedigung erreicht ist, und das würde heißen, die Lehre der Sitten zuvor auf Metaphysik gründen, ihr aber, wenn sie fest steht, nachher durch Popularität Eingang verschaffen. Es ist aber äußerst ungereimt, dieser in der ersten Untersuchung, worauf alle Richtigkeit der Grundsätze ankommt, schon willfahren zu wollen. Nicht allein daß dieses Verfahren auf das höchst seltene Verdienst einer wahren philosophischen Popularität niemals Anspruch machen kann, indem es gar keine Kunst ist, gemeinverständlich zu sein, wenn man dabei auf alle gründliche Einsicht Verzicht thut, so bringt es einen ekelhaften Mischmasch von zusammengestoppelten Beobachtungen und halbvernünftelnden Principien zum Vorschein, daran sich schale Köpfe laben, weil es doch etwas gar Brauchbares fürs alltägliche Geschwätz ist, wo Einsehende aber Verwirrung fühlen und unzufrieden, ohne sich doch helfen zu können, ihre Augen wegwenden, obgleich Philosophen, die das Blendwerk ganz wohl durchschauen, wenig Gehör finden, wenn sie auf einige Zeit von der vorgeblichen
410 Popularität abrufen, um nur allererst nach erworbener bestimmter Einsicht mit Recht populär sein zu dürfen.
Man darf nur die Versuche über die Sittlichkeit in jenem beliebten Geschmacke ansehen, so wird man bald die besondere Bestimmung der menschlichen Natur (mitunter aber auch die Idee von einer vernünftigen Natur überhaupt), bald Vollkommenheit, bald Glückseligkeit, hier moralisches Gefühl, dort Gottesfurcht, von diesem etwas, von jenem auch etwas in wunderbarem Gemische antreffen, ohne daß man sich einfallen läßt zu fragen, ob auch überall in der Kenntniß der menschlichen Natur (die wir doch nur von der Erfahrung herhaben können) die Principien der Sittlichkeit zu suchen seien, und, wenn dieses nicht ist, wenn die letztere völlig a priori, frei von allem Empirischen, schlechterdings in reinen Vernunftbegriffen und nirgend anders auch nicht dem mindesten Theile nach anzutreffen sind, den Anschlag zu fassen, diese Untersuchung als reine praktische Weltweisheit, oder (wenn man einen so verschrienen Namen nennen darf) als Metaphysik*) der Sitten lieber ganz abzusondern, sie für sich allein zu ihrer ganzen Vollständigkeit zu bringen und das Publicum, das Popularität verlangt, bis zum Ausgange dieses Unternehmens zu vertrösten.
Es ist aber eine solche völlig isolirte Metaphysik der Sitten, die mit keiner Anthropologie, mit keiner Theologie, mit keiner Physik oder Hyperphysik, noch weniger mit verborgenen Qualitäten (die man hypophysisch nennen könnte) vermischt ist, nicht allein ein unentbehrliches Substrat aller theoretischen, sicher bestimmten Erkenntniß der Pflichten, sondern zugleich ein Desiderat von der höchsten Wichtigkeit zur wirklichen Vollziehung ihrer Vorschriften. Denn die reine und mit keinem fremden Zusatze von empirischen Anreizen vermischte Vorstellung der Pflicht und überhaupt des sittlichen Gesetzes hat auf das menschliche Herz durch den Weg der Vernunft allein (die hiebei zuerst inne wird, daß sie für sich selbst auch praktisch sein kann) einen so viel mächtigern Einfluß, als alle andere Triebfedern*),
*) Man kann, wenn man will, (so wie die reine Mathematik von der angewandten, die reine Logik von der angewandten unterschieden wird, also) die reine Philosophie der Sitten (Metaphysik) von der angewandten (nämlich auf die menschliche Natur) unterscheiden. Durch diese Benennung wird man auch sofort erinnert, daß die sittlichen Principien nicht auf die Eigenheiten der menschlichen Natur gegründet, sondern für sich a priori bestehend sein müssen, aus solchen aber, wie für jede vernünftige Natur, also auch für die menschliche praktische Regeln müssen abgeleitet werden können.
411 die man aus dem empirischen Felde aufbieten mag, daß sie im Bewußtsein ihrer Würde die letzteren verachtet und nach und nach ihr Meister werden kann; an dessen Statt eine vermischte Sittenlehre, die aus Triebfedern von Gefühlen und Neigungen und zugleich aus Vernunftbegriffen zusammengesetzt ist, das Gemüth zwischen Bewegursachen, die sich unter kein Princip bringen lassen, die nur sehr zufällig zum Guten, öfters aber auch zum Bösen leiten können, schwankend machen muß.
Aus dem Angeführten erhellt: daß alle sittliche Begriffe völlig a priori in der Vernunft ihren Sitz und Ursprung haben und dieses zwar in der gemeinsten Menschenvernunft eben sowohl, als der im höchsten Maße speculativen; daß sie von keinem empirischen und darum bloß zufälligen Erkenntnisse abstrahirt werden können; daß in dieser Reinigkeit ihres Ursprungs eben ihre Würde liege, um uns zu obersten praktischen Principien zu dienen; daß man jedesmal so viel, als man Empirisches hinzu thut, so viel auch ihrem ächten Einflusse und dem uneingeschränkten Werthe der Handlungen entziehe; daß es nicht allein die größte Nothwendigkeit in theoretischer Absicht, wenn es bloß auf Speculation ankommt, erfordere, sondern auch von der größten praktischen Wichtigkeit sei, ihre Begriffe und Gesetze aus reiner Vernunft zu schöpfen, rein und unvermengt vorzutragen, ja den Umfang dieses ganzen praktischen oder reinen Vernunfterkenntnisses, d. i. das ganze Vermögen der reinen praktischen Vernunft, zu bestimmen, hierin aber nicht, wie es wohl die speculative Philosophie erlaubt, ja gar bisweilen nothwendig findet, die Principien von der besondern
*) Ich habe einen Brief vom sel. vortrefflichen Sulzer, worin er mich fragt: was doch die Ursache sein möge, warum die Lehren der Tugend, so viel Überzeugendes sie auch für die Vernunft haben, doch so wenig ausrichten. Meine Antwort wurde durch die Zurüstung dazu, um sie vollständig zu geben, verspätet. Allein es ist keine andere, als daß die Lehrer selbst ihre Begriffe nicht ins Reine gebracht haben, und indem sie es zu gut machen wollen, dadurch, daß sie allerwärts Bewegursachen zum Sittlichguten auftreiben, um die Arznei recht kräftig zu machen, sie verderben. Denn die gemeinste Beobachtung zeigt, daß, wenn man eine Handlung der Rechtschaffenheit vorstellt, wie sie von aller Absicht auf irgend einen Vortheil in dieser oder einer andern Welt abgesondert selbst unter den größten Versuchungen der Noth oder der Anlockung mit standhafter Seele ausgeübt worden, sie jede ähnliche Handlung, die nur im mindesten durch eine fremde Triebfeder afficirt war, weit hinter sich lasse und verdunkle, die Seele erhebe und den Wunsch errege, auch so handeln zu können. Selbst Kinder von mittlerem Alter fühlen diesen Eindruck, und ihnen sollte man Pflichten auch niemals anders vorstellen.
412 Natur der menschlichen Vernunft abhängig zu machen, sondern darum, weil moralische Gesetze für jedes vernünftige Wesen überhaupt gelten sollen, sie schon aus dem allgemeinen Begriffe eines vernünftigen Wesens überhaupt abzuleiten und auf solche Weise alle Moral, die zu ihrer Anwendung auf Menschen der Anthropologie bedarf, zuerst unabhängig von dieser als reine Philosophie, d. i. als Metaphysik, vollständig (welches sich in dieser Art ganz abgesonderter Erkenntnisse wohl thun läßt) vorzutragen, wohl bewußt, daß es, ohne im Besitze derselben zu sein, vergeblich sei, ich will nicht sagen, das Moralische der Pflicht in allem, was pflichtmäßig ist, genau für die speculative Beurtheilung zu bestimmen, sondern sogar im bloß gemeinen und praktischen Gebrauche, vornehmlich der moralischen Unterweisung, unmöglich sei, die Sitten auf ihre ächte Principien zu gründen und dadurch reine moralische Gesinnungen zu bewirken und zum höchsten Weltbesten den Gemüthern einzupfropfen.
Um aber in dieser Bearbeitung nicht bloß von der gemeinen sittlichen Beurtheilung (die hier sehr achtungswürdig ist) zur philosophischen, wie sonst geschehen ist, sondern von einer populären Philosophie, die nicht weiter geht, als sie durch Tappen vermittelst der Beispiele kommen kann, bis zur Metaphysik (die sich durch nichts Empirisches weiter zurückhalten läßt und, indem sie den ganzen Inbegriff der Vernunfterkenntniß dieser Art ausmessen muß, allenfalls bis zu Ideen geht, wo selbst die Beispiele uns verlassen) durch die natürlichen Stufen fortzuschreiten, müssen wir das praktische Vernunftvermögen von seinen allgemeinen Bestimmungsregeln an bis dahin, wo aus ihm der Begriff der Pflicht entspringt, verfolgen und deutlich darstellen.
Ein jedes Ding der Natur wirkt nach Gesetzen. Nur ein vernünftiges Wesen hat das Vermögen, nach der Vorstellung der Gesetze, d. i. nach Principien, zu handeln, oder einen Willen. Da zur Ableitung der Handlungen von Gesetzen Vernunft erfordert wird, so ist der Wille nichts anders als praktische Vernunft. Wenn die Vernunft den Willen unausbleiblich bestimmt, so sind die Handlungen eines solchen Wesens, die als objectiv nothwendig erkannt werden, auch subjectiv nothwendig, d. i. der Wille ist ein Vermögen, nur dasjenige zu wählen, was die Vernunft unabhängig von der Neigung als praktisch nothwendig, d. i. als gut, erkennt. Bestimmt aber die Vernunft für sich allein den Willen nicht hinlänglich, ist dieser noch subjectiven Bedingungen (gewissen Triebfedern) unterworfen, die nicht immer mit den objectiven übereinstimmen; mit
413 einem Worte, ist der Wille nicht an sich völlig der Vernunft gemäß (wie es bei Menschen wirklich ist): so sind die Handlungen, die objectiv als nothwendig erkannt werden, subjectiv zufällig, und die Bestimmung eines solchen Willens objectiven Gesetzen gemäß ist Nöthigung; d. i. das Verhältniß der objectiven Gesetze zu einem nicht durchaus guten Willen wird vorgestellt als die Bestimmung des Willens eines vernünftigen Wesens zwar durch Gründe der Vernunft, denen aber dieser Wille seiner Natur nach nicht nothwendig folgsam ist.
Die Vorstellung eines objectiven Princips, sofern es für einen Willen nöthigend ist, heißt ein Gebot (der Vernunft), und die Formel des Gebots heißt Imperativ.
Alle Imperativen werden durch ein Sollen ausgedrückt und zeigen dadurch das Verhältniß eines objectiven Gesetzes der Vernunft zu einem Willen an, der seiner subjectiven Beschaffenheit nach dadurch nicht nothwendig bestimmt wird (eine Nöthigung). Sie sagen, daß etwas zu thun oder zu unterlassen gut sein würde, allein sie sagen es einem Willen, der nicht immer darum etwas thut, weil ihm vorgestellt wird, daß es zu thun gut sei. Praktisch gut ist aber, was vermittelst der Vorstellungen der Vernunft, mithin nicht aus subjectiven Ursachen, sondern objectiv, d. i. aus Gründen, die für jedes vernünftige Wesen als ein solches gültig sind, den Willen bestimmt. Es wird vom Angenehmen unterschieden als demjenigen, was nur vermittelst der Empfindung aus bloß subjectiven Ursachen, die nur für dieses oder jenes seinen Sinn gelten, und nicht als Princip der Vernunft, das für jedermann gilt, auf den Willen Einfluß hat*).
*) Die Abhängigkeit des Begehrungsvermögens von Empfindungen heißt Neigung, und diese beweiset also jederzeit ein Bedürfniß. Die Abhängigkeit eines zufällig bestimmbaren Willens aber von Principien der Vernunft heißt ein Interesse. Dieses findet also nur bei einem abhängigen Willen statt, der nicht von selbst jederzeit der Vernunft gemäß ist; beim göttlichen Willen kann man sich kein Interesse gedenken. Aber auch der menschliche Wille kann woran ein Interesse nehmen, ohne darum aus Interesse zu handeln. Das erste bedeutet das praktische Interesse an der Handlung, das zweite das pathologische Interesse am Gegenstande der Handlung. Das erste zeigt nur Abhängigkeit des Willens von Principien der Vernunft an sich selbst, das zweite von den Principien derselben zum Behuf der Neigung an, da nämlich die Vernunft nur die praktische Regel angiebt, wie dem Bedürfnisse der Neigung abgeholfen werde. Im ersten Falle interessirt mich die Handlung, im zweiten der Gegenstand der Handlung (so fern er mir angenehm ist). Wir haben im ersten Abschnitte gesehen: daß bei einer Handlung aus Pflicht nicht auf das Interesse am Gegenstande, sondern bloß an der Handlung selbst und ihrem Princip in der Vernunft (dem Gesetz) gesehen werden müsse.
414 Ein vollkommen guter Wille würde also eben sowohl unter objectiven Gesetzen (des Guten) stehen, aber nicht dadurch als zu gesetzmäßigen Handlungen genöthigt vorgestellt werden können, weil er von selbst nach seiner subjectiven Beschaffenheit nur durch die Vorstellung des Guten bestimmt werden kann. Daher gelten für den göttlichen und überhaupt für einen heiligen Willen keine Imperativen; das Sollen ist hier am unrechten Orte, weil das Wollen schon von selbst mit dem Gesetz nothwendig einstimmig ist. Daher sind Imperativen nur Formeln, das Verhältniß objectiver Gesetze des Wollens überhaupt zu der subjectiven Unvollkommenheit des Willens dieses oder jenes vernünftigen Wesens, z. B. des menschlichen Willens, auszudrücken.
Alle Imperativen nun gebieten entweder hypothetisch, oder kategorisch. Jene stellen die praktische Nothwendigkeit einer möglichen Handlung als Mittel zu etwas anderem, was man will (oder doch möglich ist, daß man es wolle), zu gelangen vor. Der kategorische Imperativ würde der sein, welcher eine Handlung als für sich selbst, ohne Beziehung auf einen andern Zweck, als objectiv-nothwendig vorstellte.
Weil jedes praktische Gesetz eine mögliche Handlung als gut und darum für ein durch Vernunft praktisch bestimmbares Subject als nothwendig vorstellt, so sind alle Imperativen Formeln der Bestimmung der Handlung, die nach dem Princip eines in irgend einer Art guten Willens nothwendig ist. Wenn nun die Handlung bloß wozu anders als Mittel gut sein würde, so ist der Imperativ hypothetisch; wird sie als an sich gut vorgestellt, mithin als nothwendig in einem an sich der Vernunft gemäßen Willen, als Princip desselben, so ist er kategorisch.
Der Imperativ sagt also, welche durch mich mögliche Handlung gut wäre, und stellt die praktische Regel in Verhältniß auf einen Willen vor, der darum nicht sofort eine Handlung thut, weil sie gut ist, theils weil das Subject nicht immer weiß, daß sie gut sei, theils weil, wenn es dieses auch wüßte, die Maximen desselben doch den objectiven Principien einer praktischen Vernunft zuwider sein könnten.
Der hypothetische Imperativ sagt also nur, daß die Handlung zu irgend einer möglichen oder wirklichen Absicht gut sei. Im erstern
415 Falle ist er ein problematisch-, im zweiten assertorisch-praktisches Princip. Der kategorische Imperativ, der die Handlung ohne Beziehung auf irgend eine Absicht, d. i. auch ohne irgend einen andern Zweck, für sich als objectiv nothwendig erklärt, gilt als ein apodiktisch-praktisches Princip.
Man kann sich das, was nur durch Kräfte irgend eines vernünftigen Wesens möglich ist, auch für irgend einen Willen als mögliche Absicht denken, und daher sind der Principien der Handlung, so fern diese als nothwendig vorgestellt wird, um irgend eine dadurch zu bewirkende mögliche Absicht zu erreichen, in der That unendlich viel. Alle Wissenschaften haben irgend einen praktischen Theil, der aus Aufgaben besteht, daß irgend ein Zweck für uns möglich sei, und aus Imperativen, wie er erreicht werden könne. Diese können daher überhaupt Imperativen der Geschicklichkeit heißen. Ob der Zweck vernünftig und gut sei, davon ist hier gar nicht die Frage, sondern nur was man thun müsse, um ihn zu erreichen. Die Vorschriften für den Arzt, um seinen Mann auf gründliche Art gesund zu machen, und für einen Giftmischer, um ihn sicher zu tödten, sind in so fern von gleichem Werth, als eine jede dazu dient, ihre Absicht vollkommen zu bewirken. Weil man in der frühen Jugend nicht weiß, welche Zwecke uns im Leben aufstoßen dürften, so suchen Eltern vornehmlich ihre Kinder recht vielerlei lernen zu lassen und sorgen für die Geschicklichkeit im Gebrauch der Mittel zu allerlei beliebigen Zwecken, von deren keinem sie bestimmen können, ob er etwa wirklich künftig eine Absicht ihres Zöglings werden könne, wovon es indessen doch möglich ist, daß er sie einmal haben möchte, und diese Sorgfalt ist so groß, daß sie darüber gemeiniglich verabsäumen, ihnen das Urtheil über den Werth der Dinge, die sie sich etwa zu Zwecken machen möchten, zu bilden und zu berichtigen.
Es ist gleichwohl ein Zweck, den man bei allen vernünftigen Wesen (so fern Imperative auf sie, nämlich als abhängige Wesen, passen) als wirklich voraussetzen kann, und also eine Absicht, die sie nicht etwa bloß haben können, sondern von der man sicher voraussetzen kann, daß sie solche insgesammt nach einer Naturnothwendigkeit haben, und das ist die Absicht auf Glückseligkeit. Der hypothetische Imperativ, der die praktische Nothwendigkeit der Handlung als Mittel zur Beförderung der Glückseligkeit vorstellt, ist assertorisch. Man darf ihn nicht bloß als nothwendig zu einer ungewissen, bloß möglichen Absicht vortragen, sondern zu einer Absicht, die man sicher und a priori bei jedem Menschen voraussetzen kann,
416 weil sie zu seinem Wesen gehört. Nun kann man die Geschicklichkeit in der Wahl der Mittel zu seinem eigenen größten Wohlsein Klugheit *) im engsten Verstande nennen. Also ist der Imperativ, der sich auf die Wahl der Mittel zur eigenen Glückseligkeit bezieht, d. i. die Vorschrift der Klugheit, noch immer hypothetisch; die Handlung wird nicht schlechthin, sondern nur als Mittel zu einer andern Absicht geboten.
Endlich giebt es einen Imperativ, der, ohne irgend eine andere durch ein gewisses Verhalten zu erreichende Absicht als Bedingung zum Grunde zu legen, dieses Verhalten unmittelbar gebietet. Dieser Imperativ ist kategorisch. Er betrifft nicht die Materie der Handlung und das, was aus ihr erfolgen soll, sondern die Form und das Princip, woraus sie selbst folgt, und das Wesentlich-Gute derselben besteht in der Gesinnung, der Erfolg mag sein, welcher er wolle. Dieser Imperativ mag der der Sittlichkeit heißen.
Das Wollen nach diesen dreierlei Principien wird auch durch die Ungleichheit der Nöthigung des Willens deutlich unterschieden. Um diese nun auch merklich zu machen, glaube ich, daß man sie in ihrer Ordnung am angemessensten so benennen würde, wenn man sagte: sie wären entweder Regeln der Geschicklichkeit, oder Rathschläge der Klugheit, oder Gebote (Gesetze) der Sittlichkeit. Denn nur das Gesetz führt den Begriff einer unbedingten und zwar objectiven und mithin allgemein gültigen Nothwendigkeit bei sich, und Gebote sind Gesetze, denen gehorcht, d. i. auch wider Neigung Folge geleistet, werden muß. Die Rathgebung enthält zwar Nothwendigkeit, die aber bloß unter subjectiver zufälliger Bedingung, ob dieser oder jener Mensch dieses oder jenes zu seiner Glückseligkeit zähle, gelten kann; dagegen der kategorische Imperativ durch keine Bedingung eingeschränkt wird und als absolut-, obgleich praktisch-nothwendig ganz eigentlich ein Gebot heißen kann. Man könnte die ersteren Imperative auch technisch (zur Kunst gehörig), die
*) Das Wort Klugheit wird in zwiefachem Sinn genommen, einmal kann es den Namen Weltklugheit, im zweiten den der Privatklugheit führen. Die erste ist die Geschicklichkeit eines Menschen, auf andere Einfluß zu haben, um sie zu seinen Absichten zu gebrauchen. Die zweite die Einsicht, alle diese Absichten zu seinem eigenen dauernden Vortheil zu vereinigen. Die letztere ist eigentlich diejenige, worauf selbst der Werth der erstern zurückgeführt wird, und wer in der erstern Art klug ist, nicht aber in der zweiten, von dem könnte man besser sagen: er ist gescheut und verschlagen, im Ganzen aber doch unklug.
417 zweiten pragmatisch *) (zur Wohlfahrt), die dritten moralisch (zum freien Verhalten überhaupt, d. i. zu den Sitten gehörig) nennen.
Nun entsteht die Frage: wie sind alle diese Imperative möglich? Diese Frage verlangt nicht zu wissen, wie die Vollziehung der Handlung, welche der Imperativ gebietet, sondern wie bloß die Nöthigung des Willens, die der Imperativ in der Aufgabe ausdrückt, gedacht werden könne. Wie ein Imperativ der Geschicklichkeit möglich sei, bedarf wohl keiner besondern Erörterung. Wer den Zweck will, will (so fern die Vernunft auf seine Handlungen entscheidenden Einfluß hat) auch das dazu unentbehrlich nothwendige Mittel, das in seiner Gewalt ist. Dieser Satz ist, was das Wollen betrifft, analytisch; denn in dem Wollen eines Objects als meiner Wirkung wird schon meine Causalität als handelnde Ursache, d. i. der Gebrauch der Mittel, gedacht, und der Imperativ zieht den Begriff nothwendiger Handlungen zu diesem Zwecke schon aus dem Begriff eines Wollens dieses Zwecks heraus (die Mittel selbst zu einer vorgesetzten Absicht zu bestimmen, dazu gehören allerdings synthetische Sätze, die aber nicht den Grund betreffen, den Actus des Willens, sondern das Object wirklich zu machen). Daß, um eine Linie nach einem sichern Princip in zwei gleiche Theile zu theilen, ich aus den Enden derselben zwei Kreuzbogen machen müsse, das lehrt die Mathematik freilich nur durch synthetische Sätze; aber daß, wenn ich weiß, durch solche Handlung allein könne die gedachte Wirkung geschehen, ich, wenn ich die Wirkung vollständig will, auch die Handlung wolle, die dazu erforderlich ist, ist ein analytischer Satz; denn etwas als eine auf gewisse Art durch mich mögliche Wirkung und mich in Ansehung ihrer auf dieselbe Art handelnd vorstellen, ist ganz einerlei.
Die Imperativen der Klugheit würden, wenn es nur so leicht wäre, einen bestimmten Begriff von Glückseligkeit zu geben, mit denen der Geschicklichkeit ganz und gar übereinkommen und eben sowohl analytisch sein. Denn es würde eben sowohl hier als dort heißen: wer den Zweck will, will auch (der Vernunft gemäß nothwendig) die einzigen Mittel, die dazu in
*) Mich deucht, die eigentliche Bedeutung des Worts pragmatisch könne so am genauesten bestimmt werden. Denn pragmatisch werden die Sanctionen genannt, welche eigentlich nicht aus dem Rechte der Staaten als nothwendige Gesetze, sondern aus der Vorsorge für die allgemeine Wohlfahrt fließen. Pragmatisch ist eine Geschichte abgefaßt, wenn sie klug macht, d. i. die Welt belehrt, wie sie ihren Vortheil besser, oder wenigstens eben so gut als die Vorwelt besorgen könne.
418 seiner Gewalt sind. Allein es ist ein Unglück, daß der Begriff der Glückseligkeit ein so unbestimmter Begriff ist, daß, obgleich jeder Mensch zu dieser zu gelangen wünscht, er doch niemals bestimmt und mit sich selbst einstimmig sagen kann, was er eigentlich wünsche und wolle. Die Ursache davon ist: daß alle Elemente, die zum Begriff der Glückseligkeit gehören, insgesammt empirisch sind, d. i. aus der Erfahrung müssen entlehnt werden, daß gleichwohl zur Idee der Glückseligkeit ein absolutes Ganze, ein Maximum des Wohlbefindens, in meinem gegenwärtigen und jedem zukünftigen Zustande erforderlich ist. Nun ists unmöglich, daß das einsehendste und zugleich allervermögendste, aber doch endliche Wesen sich einen bestimmten Begriff von dem mache, was er hier eigentlich wolle. Will er Reichthum, wie viel Sorge, Neid und Nachstellung könnte er sich dadurch nicht auf den Hals ziehen! Will er viel Erkenntniß und Einsicht, vielleicht könnte das ein nur um desto schärferes Auge werden, um die Übel, die sich für ihn jetzt noch verbergen und doch nicht vermieden werden können, ihm nur um desto schrecklicher zu zeigen, oder seinen Begierden, die ihm schon genug zu schaffen machen, noch mehr Bedürfnisse aufbürden. Will er ein langes Leben, wer steht ihm dafür, daß es nicht ein langes Elend sein würde? Will er wenigstens Gesundheit, wie oft hat noch Ungemächlichkeit des Körpers von Ausschweifung abgehalten, darein unbeschränkte Gesundheit würde haben fallen lassen, u. s. w. Kurz, er ist nicht vermögend, nach irgend einem Grundsatze mit völliger Gewißheit zu bestimmen, was ihn wahrhaftig glücklich machen werde, darum weil hiezu Allwissenheit erforderlich sein würde. Man kann also nicht nach bestimmten Principien handeln, um glücklich zu sein, sondern nur nach empirischen Rathschlägen, z. B. der Diät, der Sparsamkeit, der Höflichkeit, der Zurückhaltung u. s. w., von welchen die Erfahrung lehrt, daß sie das Wohlbefinden im Durchschnitt am meisten befördern. Hieraus folgt, daß die Imperativen der Klugheit, genau zu reden, gar nicht gebieten, d. i. Handlungen objectiv als praktisch-nothwendig darstellen, können, daß sie eher für Anrathungen (consilia) als Gebote (praecepta) der Vernunft zu halten sind, daß die Aufgabe: sicher und allgemein zu bestimmen, welche Handlung die Glückseligkeit eines vernünftigen Wesens befördern werde, völlig unauflöslich, mithin kein Imperativ in Ansehung derselben möglich sei, der im strengen Verstande geböte, das zu thun, was glücklich macht, weil Glückseligkeit nicht ein Ideal der Vernunft, sondern der Einbildungskraft ist, was bloß auf empirischen Gründen beruht, von denen man vergeblich
419 erwartet, daß sie eine Handlung bestimmen sollten, dadurch die Totalität einer in der That unendlichen Reihe von Folgen erreicht würde. Dieser Imperativ der Klugheit würde indessen, wenn man annimmt, die Mittel zur Glückseligkeit ließen sich sicher angeben, ein analytisch-praktischer Satz sein; denn er ist von dem Imperativ der Geschicklichkeit nur darin unterschieden, daß bei diesem der Zweck bloß möglich, bei jenem aber gegeben ist; da beide aber bloß die Mittel zu demjenigen gebieten, von dem man voraussetzt, daß man es als Zweck wollte: so ist der Imperativ, der das Wollen der Mittel für den, der den Zweck will, gebietet, in beiden Fällen analytisch. Es ist also in Ansehung der Möglichkeit eines solchen Imperativs auch keine Schwierigkeit.
Dagegen, wie der Imperativ der Sittlichkeit möglich sei, ist ohne Zweifel die einzige einer Auflösung bedürftige Frage, da er gar nicht hypothetisch ist und also die objectiv-vorgestellte Nothwendigkeit sich auf keine Voraussetzung stützen kann, wie bei den hypothetischen Imperativen. Nur ist immer hiebei nicht aus der Acht zu lassen, daß es durch kein Beispiel, mithin empirisch, auszumachen sei, ob es überall irgend einen dergleichen Imperativ gebe, sondern zu besorgen, daß alle, die kategorisch scheinen, doch versteckter Weise hypothetisch sein mögen. Z. B. wenn es heißt: du sollt nichts betrüglich versprechen, und man nimmt an, daß die Nothwendigkeit dieser Unterlassung nicht etwa bloß Rathgebung zu Vermeidung irgend eines andern Übels sei, so daß es etwa hieße: du sollt nicht lügenhaft versprechen, damit du nicht, wenn es offenbar wird, dich um den Credit bringest; sondern eine Handlung dieser Art müßte für sich selbst als böse betrachtet werden, der Imperativ des Verbots sei also kategorisch: so kann man doch in keinem Beispiel mit Gewißheit darthun, daß der Wille hier ohne andere Triebfeder, bloß durchs Gesetz, bestimmt werde, ob es gleich so scheint; denn es ist immer möglich, daß ingeheim Furcht vor Beschämung, vielleicht auch dunkle Besorgniß anderer Gefahren Einfluß auf den Willen haben möge. Wer kann das Nichtsein einer Ursache durch Erfahrung beweisen, da diese nichts weiter lehrt, als daß wir jene nicht wahrnehmen? Auf solchen Fall aber würde der sogenannte moralische Imperativ, der als ein solcher kategorisch und unbedingt erscheint, in der That nur eine pragmatische Vorschrift sein, die uns auf unsern Vortheil aufmerksam macht und uns bloß lehrt, diesen in Acht zu nehmen.
Wir werden also die Möglichkeit eines kategorischen Imperativs gänzlich a priori zu untersuchen haben, da uns hier der Vortheil nicht zu
420 statten kommt, daß die Wirklichkeit desselben in der Erfahrung gegeben und also die Möglichkeit nicht zur Festsetzung, sondern bloß zur Erklärung nöthig wäre. So viel ist indessen vorläufig einzusehen: daß der kategorische Imperativ allein als ein praktisches Gesetz laute, die übrigen insgesammt zwar Principien des Willens, aber nicht Gesetze heißen können: weil, was bloß zur Erreichung einer beliebigen Absicht zu thun nothwendig ist, an sich als zufällig betrachtet werden kann, und wir von der Vorschrift jederzeit los sein können, wenn wir die Absicht aufgeben, dahingegen das unbedingte Gebot dem Willen kein Belieben in Ansehung des Gegentheils frei läßt, mithin allein diejenige Nothwendigkeit bei sich führt, welche wir zum Gesetze verlangen.
Zweitens ist bei diesem kategorischen Imperativ oder Gesetze der Sittlichkeit der Grund der Schwierigkeit (die Möglichkeit desselben einzusehen) auch sehr groß. Er ist ein synthetisch-praktischer Satz*) a priori, und da die Möglichkeit der Sätze dieser Art einzusehen so viel Schwierigkeit im theoretischen Erkenntnisse hat, so läßt sich leicht abnehmen, daß sie im praktischen nicht weniger haben werde.
Bei dieser Aufgabe wollen wir zuerst versuchen, ob nicht vielleicht der bloße Begriff eines kategorischen Imperativs auch die Formel desselben an die Hand gebe, die den Satz enthält, der allein ein kategorischer Imperativ sein kann; denn wie ein solches absolutes Gebot möglich sei, wenn wir auch gleich wissen, wie es lautet, wird noch besondere und schwere Bemühung erfordern, die wir aber zum letzten Abschnitte aussetzen.
Wenn ich mir einen hypothetischen Imperativ überhaupt denke, so weiß ich nicht zum voraus, was er enthalten werde: bis mir die Bedingung gegeben ist. Denke ich mir aber einen kategorischen Imperativ, so weiß ich sofort, was er enthalte. Denn da der Imperativ außer dem Gesetze nur die Nothwendigkeit der Maxime**) enthält, diesem Gesetze
*) Ich verknüpfe mit dem Willen ohne vorausgesetzte Bedingung aus irgend einer Neigung die That a priori, mithin nothwendig (obgleich nur objectiv, d. i. unter der Idee einer Vernunft, die über alle subjective Bewegungsgründe völlige Gewalt hätte). Dieses ist also ein praktischer Satz, der das Wollen einer Handlung nicht aus einem anderen schon vorausgesetzten analytisch ableitet (denn wir haben keinen so vollkommenen Willen), sondern mit dem Begriffe des Willens eines vernünftigen Wesens unmittelbar als etwas, das in ihm nicht enthalten ist, verknüpft.
**) Maxime ist das subjective Princip zu handeln und muß vom objectiven Princip, nämlich dem praktischen Gesetze, unterschieden werden. Jene enthält die praktische Regel, die die Vernunft den Bedingungen des Subjects gemäß (öfters der Unwissenheit oder auch den Neigungen desselben) bestimmt, und ist also der Grundsatz, nach welchem das Subject handelt; das Gesetz aber ist das objective Princip, gültig für jedes vernünftige Wesen, und der Grundsatz, nach dem es handeln soll, d. i. ein Imperativ.
421 gemäß zu sein, das Gesetz aber keine Bedingung enthält, auf die es eingeschränkt war, so bleibt nichts als die Allgemeinheit eines Gesetzes überhaupt übrig, welchem die Maxime der Handlung gemäß sein soll, und welche Gemäßheit allein der Imperativ eigentlich als nothwendig vorstellt.
Der kategorische Imperativ ist also nur ein einziger und zwar dieser: handle nur nach derjenigen Maxime, durch die du zugleich wollen kannst, daß sie ein allgemeines Gesetz werde.
Wenn nun aus diesem einigen Imperativ alle Imperativen der Pflicht als aus ihrem Princip abgeleitet werden können, so werden wir, ob wir es gleich unausgemacht lassen, ob nicht überhaupt das, was man Pflicht nennt, ein leerer Begriff sei, doch wenigstens anzeigen können, was wir dadurch denken und was dieser Begriff sagen wolle.
Weil die Allgemeinheit des Gesetzes, wornach Wirkungen geschehen, dasjenige ausmacht, was eigentlich Natur im allgemeinsten Verstande (der Form nach), d. i. das Dasein der Dinge, heißt, so fern es nach allgemeinen Gesetzen bestimmt ist, so könnte der allgemeine Imperativ der Pflicht auch so lauten: handle so, als ob die Maxime deiner Handlung durch deinen Willen zum allgemeinen Naturgesetze werden sollte.
Nun wollen wir einige Pflichten herzählen nach der gewöhnlichen Eintheilung derselben in Pflichten gegen uns selbst und gegen andere Menschen, in vollkommene und unvollkommene Pflichten.*)
1) Einer, der durch eine Reihe von Übeln, die bis zur Hoffnungslosigkeit angewachsen ist, einen Überdruß am Leben empfindet, ist noch
*) Man muß hier wohl merken, daß ich die Eintheilung der Pflichten für eine künftige Metaphysik der Sitten mir gänzlich vorbehalte, diese hier also nur als beliebig (um meine Beispiele zu ordnen) dastehe. Übrigens verstehe ich hier unter einer vollkommenen Pflicht diejenige, die keine Ausnahme zum Vortheil der Neigung verstattet, und da habe ich nicht bloß äußere, sondern auch innere vollkommene Pflichten, welches dem in Schulen angenommenen Wortgebrauch zuwider läuft, ich aber hier nicht zu verantworten gemeint bin, weil es zu meiner Absicht einerlei ist, ob man es mir einräumt, oder nicht.
422 so weit im Besitze seiner Vernunft, daß er sich selbst fragen kann, ob es auch nicht etwa der Pflicht gegen sich selbst zuwider sei, sich das Leben zu nehmen. Nun versucht er: ob die Maxime seiner Handlung wohl ein allgemeines Naturgesetz werden könne. Seine Maxime aber ist: ich mache es mir aus Selbstliebe zum Princip, wenn das Leben bei seiner längern Frist mehr Übel droht, als es Annehmlichkeit verspricht, es mir abzukürzen. Es frägt sich nur noch, ob dieses Princip der Selbstliebe ein allgemeines Naturgesetz werden könne. Da sieht man aber bald, daß eine Natur, deren Gesetz es wäre, durch dieselbe Empfindung, deren Bestimmung es ist, zur Beförderung des Lebens anzutreiben, das Leben selbst zu zerstören, ihr selbst widersprechen und also nicht als Natur bestehen würde, mithin jene Maxime unmöglich als allgemeines Naturgesetz stattfinden könne und folglich dem obersten Princip aller Pflicht gänzlich widerstreite.
2) Ein anderer sieht sich durch Noth gedrungen, Geld zu borgen. Er weiß wohl, daß er nicht wird bezahlen können, sieht aber auch, daß ihm nichts geliehen werden wird, wenn er nicht festiglich verspricht, es zu einer bestimmten Zeit zu bezahlen. Er hat Lust, ein solches Versprechen zu thun; noch aber hat er so viel Gewissen, sich zu fragen: ist es nicht unerlaubt und pflichtwidrig, sich auf solche Art aus Noth zu helfen? Gesetzt, er beschlösse es doch, so würde seine Maxime der Handlung so lauten: wenn ich mich in Geldnoth zu sein glaube, so will ich Geld borgen und versprechen es zu bezahlen, ob ich gleich weiß, es werde niemals geschehen. Nun ist dieses Princip der Selbstliebe oder der eigenen Zuträglichkeit mit meinem ganzen künftigen Wohlbefinden vielleicht wohl zu vereinigen, allein jetzt ist die Frage: ob es recht sei. Ich verwandle also die Zumuthung der Selbstliebe in ein allgemeines Gesetz und richte die Frage so ein: wie es denn stehen würde, wenn meine Maxime ein allgemeines Gesetz würde. Da sehe ich nun sogleich, daß sie niemals als allgemeines Naturgesetz gelten und mit sich selbst zusammenstimmen könne, sondern sich nothwendig widersprechen müsse. Denn die Allgemeinheit eines Gesetzes, daß jeder, nachdem er in Noth zu sein glaubt, versprechen könne, was ihm einfällt, mit dem Vorsatz, es nicht zu halten, würde das Versprechen und den Zweck, den man damit haben mag, selbst unmöglich machen, indem niemand glauben würde, daß ihm was versprochen sei, sondern über alle solche Äußerung als eitles Vorgeben lachen würde.
3) Ein dritter findet in sich ein Talent, welches vermittelst einiger
423 Cultur ihn zu einem in allerlei Absicht brauchbaren Menschen machen könnte. Er sieht sich aber in bequemen Umständen und zieht vor, lieber dem Vergnügen nachzuhängen, als sich mit Erweiterung und Verbesserung seiner glücklichen Naturanlagen zu bemühen. Noch frägt er aber: ob außer der Übereinstimmung, die seine Maxime der Verwahrlosung seiner Naturgaben mit seinem Hange zur Ergötzlichkeit an sich hat, sie auch mit dem, was man Pflicht nennt, übereinstimme. Da sieht er nun, daß zwar eine Natur nach einem solchen allgemeinen Gesetze immer noch bestehen könne, obgleich der Mensch (so wie die Südsee-Einwohner) sein Talent rosten ließe und sein Leben bloß auf Müßiggang, Ergötzlichkeit, Fortpflanzung, mit einem Wort auf Genuß zu verwenden bedacht wäre; allein er kann unmöglich wollen, daß dieses ein allgemeines Naturgesetz werde, oder als ein solches in uns durch Naturinstinct gelegt sei. Denn als ein vernünftiges Wesen will er nothwendig, daß alle Vermögen in ihm entwickelt werden, weil sie ihm doch zu allerlei möglichen Absichten dienlich und gegeben sind.
Noch denkt ein vierter, dem es wohl geht, indessen er sieht, daß andere mit großen Mühseligkeiten zu kämpfen haben (denen er auch wohl helfen könnte): was gehts mich an? mag doch ein jeder so glücklich sein, als der Himmel will, oder er sich selbst machen kann, ich werde ihm nichts entziehen, ja nicht einmal beneiden; nur zu seinem Wohlbefinden oder seinem Beistande in der Noth habe ich nicht Lust was beizutragen! Nun könnte allerdings, wenn eine solche Denkungsart ein allgemeines Naturgesetz würde, das menschliche Geschlecht gar wohl bestehen und ohne Zweifel noch besser, als wenn jedermann von Theilnehmung und Wohlwollen schwatzt, auch sich beeifert, gelegentlich dergleichen auszuüben, dagegen aber auch, wo er nur kann, betrügt, das Recht der Menschen verkauft, oder ihm sonst Abbruch thut. Aber obgleich es möglich ist, daß nach jener Maxime ein allgemeines Naturgesetz wohl bestehen könnte: so ist es doch unmöglich, zu wollen, daß ein solches Princip als Naturgesetz allenthalben gelte. Denn ein Wille, der dieses beschlösse, würde sich selbst widerstreiten, indem der Fälle sich doch manche eräugnen können, wo er anderer Liebe und Theilnehmung bedarf, und wo er durch ein solches aus seinem eigenen Willen entsprungenes Naturgesetz sich selbst alle Hoffnung des Beistandes, den er sich wünscht, rauben würde.
Dieses sind nun einige von den vielen wirklichen oder wenigstens von uns dafür gehaltenen Pflichten, deren Abtheilung aus dem einigen angeführten
424 Princip klar in die Augen fällt. Man muß wollen können, daß eine Maxime unserer Handlung ein allgemeines Gesetz werde: dies ist der Kanon der moralischen Beurtheilung derselben überhaupt. Einige Handlungen sind so beschaffen, daß ihre Maxime ohne Widerspruch nicht einmal als allgemeines Naturgesetz gedacht werden kann; weit gefehlt, daß man noch wollen könne, es sollte ein solches werden. Bei andern ist zwar jene innere Unmöglichkeit nicht anzutreffen, aber es ist doch unmöglich, zu wollen, daß ihre Maxime zur Allgemeinheit eines Naturgesetzes erhoben werde, weil ein solcher Wille sich selbst widersprechen würde. Man sieht leicht: daß die erstere der strengen oder engeren (unnachlaßlichen) Pflicht, die zweite nur der weiteren (verdienstlichen) Pflicht widerstreite, und so alle Pflichten, was die Art der Verbindlichkeit (nicht das Object ihrer Handlung) betrifft, durch diese Beispiele in ihrer Abhängigkeit von dem einigen Princip vollständig aufgestellt worden.
Wenn wir nun auf uns selbst bei jeder Übertretung einer Pflicht Acht haben, so finden wir, daß wir wirklich nicht wollen, es solle unsere Maxime ein allgemeines Gesetz werden, denn das ist uns unmöglich, sondern das Gegentheil derselben soll vielmehr allgemein ein Gesetz bleiben; nur nehmen wir uns die Freiheit, für uns oder (auch nur für diesesmal) zum Vortheil unserer Neigung davon eine Ausnahme zu machen. Folglich wenn wir alles aus einem und demselben Gesichtspunkte, nämlich der Vernunft, erwögen, so würden wir einen Widerspruch in unserm eigenen Willen antreffen, nämlich daß ein gewisses Princip objectiv als allgemeines Gesetz nothwendig sei und doch subjectiv nicht allgemein gelten, sondern Ausnahmen verstatten sollte. Da wir aber einmal unsere Handlung aus dem Gesichtspunkte eines ganz der Vernunft gemäßen, dann aber auch eben dieselbe Handlung aus dem Gesichtspunkte eines durch Neigung afficirten Willens betrachten, so ist wirklich hier kein Widerspruch, wohl aber ein Widerstand der Neigung gegen die Vorschrift der Vernunft (antagonismus), wodurch die Allgemeinheit des Princips (universalitas) in eine bloße Gemeingültigkeit (generalitas) verwandelt wird, dadurch das praktische Vernunftprincip mit der Maxime auf dem halben Wege zusammenkommen soll. Ob nun dieses gleich in unserm eigenen unparteiisch angestellten Urtheile nicht gerechtfertigt werden kann, so beweiset es doch, daß wir die Gültigkeit des kategorischen Imperativs wirklich anerkennen und uns (mit aller Achtung für denselben) nur einige, wie es uns scheint, unerhebliche und uns abgedrungene Ausnahmen erlauben.
425 Wir haben so viel also wenigstens dargethan, daß, wenn Pflicht ein Begriff ist, der Bedeutung und wirkliche Gesetzgebung für unsere Handlungen enthalten soll, diese nur in kategorischen Imperativen, keinesweges aber in hypothetischen ausgedrückt werden könne; imgleichen haben wir, welches schon viel ist, den Inhalt des kategorischen Imperativs, der das Princip aller Pflicht (wenn es überhaupt dergleichen gäbe) enthalten müßte, deutlich und zu jedem Gebrauche bestimmt dargestellt. Noch sind wir aber nicht so weit, a priori zu beweisen, daß dergleichen Imperativ wirklich stattfinde, daß es ein praktisches Gesetz gebe, welches schlechterdings und ohne alle Triebfedern für sich gebietet, und daß die Befolgung dieses Gesetzes Pflicht sei.
Bei der Absicht, dazu zu gelangen, ist es von der äußersten Wichtigkeit, sich dieses zur Warnung dienen zu lassen, daß man es sich ja nicht in den Sinn kommen lasse, die Realität dieses Princips aus der besondern Eigenschaft der menschlichen Natur ableiten zu wollen. Denn Pflicht soll praktisch-unbedingte Nothwendigkeit der Handlung sein; sie muß also für alle vernünftige Wesen (auf die nur überall ein Imperativ treffen kann) gelten und allein darum auch für allen menschlichen Willen ein Gesetz sein. Was dagegen aus der besondern Naturanlage der Menschheit, was aus gewissen Gefühlen und Hange, ja sogar womöglich aus einer besonderen Richtung, die der menschlichen Vernunft eigen wäre und nicht nothwendig für den Willen eines jeden vernünftigen Wesens gelten müßte, abgeleitet wird, das kann zwar eine Maxime für uns, aber kein Gesetz abgeben, ein subjectiv Princip, nach welchem wir handeln zu dürfen Hang und Neigung haben, aber nicht ein objectives, nach welchem wir angewiesen wären zu handeln, wenn gleich aller unser Hang, Neigung und Natureinrichtung dawider wäre, sogar, daß es um desto mehr die Erhabenheit und innere Würde des Gebots in einer Pflicht beweiset, je weniger die subjectiven Ursachen dafür, je mehr sie dagegen sind, ohne doch deswegen die Nöthigung durchs Gesetz nur im mindesten zu schwächen und seiner Gültigkeit etwas zu benehmen.
Hier sehen wir nun die Philosophie in der That auf einen mißlichen Standpunkt gestellt, der fest sein soll, unerachtet er weder im Himmel, noch auf der Erde an etwas gehängt oder woran gestützt wird. Hier soll sie ihre Lauterkeit beweisen als Selbsthalterin ihrer Gesetze, nicht als Herold derjenigen, welche ihr ein eingepflanzter Sinn, oder wer weiß welche vormundschaftliche Natur einflüstert, die insgesammt, sie mögen immer besser sein
426 als gar nichts, doch niemals Grundsätze abgeben können, die die Vernunft dictirt, und die durchaus völlig a priori ihren Quell und hiemit zugleich ihr gebietendes Ansehen haben müssen: nichts von der Neigung des Menschen, sondern alles von der Obergewalt des Gesetzes und der schuldigen Achtung für dasselbe zu erwarten, oder den Menschen widrigenfalls zur Selbstverachtung und innern Abscheu zu verurtheilen.
Alles also, was empirisch ist, ist als Zuthat zum Princip der Sittlichkeit nicht allein dazu ganz untauglich, sondern der Lauterkeit der Sitten selbst höchst nachtheilig, an welchen der eigentliche und über allen Preis erhabene Werth eines schlechterdings guten Willens eben darin besteht, daß das Princip der Handlung von allen Einflüssen zufälliger Gründe, die nur Erfahrung an die Hand geben kann, frei sei. Wider diese Nachlässigkeit oder gar niedrige Denkungsart in Aufsuchung des Princips unter empirischen Bewegursachen und Gesetzen kann man auch nicht zu viel und zu oft Warnungen ergehen lassen, indem die menschliche Vernunft in ihrer Ermüdung gern auf diesem Polster ausruht und in dem Traume süßer Vorspiegelungen (die sie doch statt der Juno eine Wolke umarmen lassen) der Sittlichkeit einen aus Gliedern ganz verschiedener Abstammung zusammengestoppelten Bastard unterschiebt, der allem ähnlich sieht, was man daran sehen will, nur der Tugend nicht für den, der sie einmal in ihrer wahren Gestalt erblickt hat.*)
Die Frage ist also diese: ist es ein nothwendiges Gesetz für alle vernünftige Wesen, ihre Handlungen jederzeit nach solchen Maximen zu beurtheilen, von denen sie selbst wollen können, daß sie zu allgemeinen Gesetzen dienen sollen? Wenn es ein solches ist, so muß es (völlig a priori) schon mit dem Begriffe des Willens eines vernünftigen Wesens überhaupt verbunden sein. Um aber diese Verknüpfung zu entdecken, muß man, so sehr man sich auch sträubt, einen Schritt hinaus thun, nämlich zur Metaphysik, obgleich in ein Gebiet derselben, welches von der speculativen Philosophie unterschieden ist, nämlich in die Metaphysik der Sitten.
*) Die Tugend in ihrer eigentlichen Gestalt erblicken, ist nichts anders als die Sittlichkeit von aller Beimischung des Sinnlichen und allem unächten Schmuck des Lohns oder der Selbstliebe entkleidet darstellen. Wie sehr sie alsdann alles übrige, was den Neigungen reizend erscheint, verdunkle, kann jeder vermittelst des mindesten Versuchs seiner nicht ganz für alle Abstraction verdorbenen Vernunft leicht inne werden.
427 In einer praktischen Philosophie, wo es uns nicht darum zu thun ist, Gründe anzunehmen von dem, was geschieht, sondern Gesetze von dem, was geschehen soll, ob es gleich niemals geschieht, d. i. objectiv-praktische Gesetze: da haben wir nicht nöthig, über die Gründe Untersuchung anzustellen, warum etwas gefällt oder mißfällt, wie das Vergnügen der bloßen Empfindung vom Geschmacke, und ob dieser von einem allgemeinen Wohlgefallen der Vernunft unterschieden sei; worauf Gefühl der Lust und Unlust beruhe, und wie hieraus Begierden und Neigungen, aus diesen aber durch Mitwirkung der Vernunft Maximen entspringen; denn das gehört alles zu einer empirischen Seelenlehre, welche den zweiten Theil der Naturlehre ausmachen würde, wenn man sie als Philosophie der Natur betrachtet, so fern sie auf empirischen Gesetzen gegründet ist. Hier aber ist vom objectiv-praktischen Gesetze die Rede, mithin von dem Verhältnisse eines Willens zu sich selbst, so fern er sich bloß durch Vernunft bestimmt, da denn alles, was aufs Empirische Beziehung hat, von selbst wegfällt: weil, wenn die Vernunft für sich allein das Verhalten bestimmt (wovon wir die Möglichkeit jetzt eben untersuchen wollen), sie dieses nothwendig a priori thun muß.
Der Wille wird als ein Vermögen gedacht, der Vorstellung gewisser Gesetze gemäß sich selbst zum Handeln zu bestimmen. Und ein solches Vermögen kann nur in vernünftigen Wesen anzutreffen sein. Nun ist das, was dem Willen zum objectiven Grunde seiner Selbstbestimmung dient, der Zweck, und dieser, wenn er durch bloße Vernunft gegeben wird, muß für alle vernünftige Wesen gleich gelten. Was dagegen bloß den Grund der Möglichkeit der Handlung enthält, deren Wirkung Zweck ist, heißt das Mittel. Der subjective Grund des Begehrens ist die Triebfeder, der objective des Wollens der Bewegungsgrund; daher der Unterschied zwischen subjectiven Zwecken, die auf Triebfedern beruhen, und objectiven, die auf Bewegungsgründe ankommen, welche für jedes vernünftige Wesen gelten. Praktische Principien sind formal, wenn sie von allen subjectiven Zwecken abstrahiren; sie sind aber material, wenn sie diese, mithin gewisse Triebfedern zum Grunde legen. Die Zwecke, die sich ein vernünftiges Wesen als Wirkungen seiner Handlung nach Belieben vorsetzt (materiale Zwecke) sind insgesammt nur relativ; denn nur bloß ihr Verhältniß auf ein besonders geartetes Begehrungsvermögen des Subjects giebt ihnen den Werth, der daher keine allgemeine für alle vernünftige Wesen und auch nicht für jedes Wollen gültige und nothwendige
428 Principien, d. i. praktische Gesetze, an die Hand geben kann. Daher sind alle diese relative Zwecke nur der Grund von hypothetischen Imperativen.
Gesetzt aber, es gäbe etwas, dessen Dasein an sich selbst einen absoluten Werth hat, was als Zweck an sich selbst ein Grund bestimmter Gesetze sein könnte, so würde in ihm und nur in ihm allein der Grund eines möglichen kategorischen Imperativs, d. i. praktischen Gesetzes, liegen.
Nun sage ich: der Mensch und überhaupt jedes vernünftige Wesen existirt als Zweck an sich selbst, nicht bloß als Mittel zum beliebigen Gebrauche für diesen oder jenen Willen, sondern muß in allen seinen sowohl auf sich selbst, als auch auf andere vernünftige Wesen gerichteten Handlungen jederzeit zugleich als Zweck betrachtet werden. Alle Gegenstände der Neigungen haben nur einen bedingten Werth; denn wenn die Neigungen und darauf gegründete Bedürfnisse nicht wären, so würde ihr Gegenstand ohne Werth sein. Die Neigungen selber aber als Quellen des Bedürfnisses haben so wenig einen absoluten Werth, um sie selbst zu wünschen, daß vielmehr, gänzlich davon frei zu sein, der allgemeine Wunsch eines jeden vernünftigen Wesens sein muß. Also ist der Werth aller durch unsere Handlung zu erwerbenden Gegenstände jederzeit bedingt. Die Wesen, deren Dasein zwar nicht auf unserm Willen, sondern der Natur beruht, haben dennoch, wenn sie vernunftlose Wesen sind, nur einen relativen Werth, als Mittel, und heißen daher Sachen, dagegen vernünftige Wesen Personen genannt werden, weil ihre Natur sie schon als Zwecke an sich selbst, d. i. als etwas, das nicht bloß als Mittel gebraucht werden darf, auszeichnet, mithin so fern alle Willkür einschränkt (und ein Gegenstand der Achtung ist). Dies sind also nicht bloß subjective Zwecke, deren Existenz als Wirkung unserer Handlung für uns einen Werth hat; sondern objective Zwecke, d. i. Dinge, deren Dasein an sich selbst Zweck ist und zwar ein solcher, an dessen Statt kein anderer Zweck gesetzt werden kann, dem sie bloß als Mittel zu Diensten stehen sollten, weil ohne dieses überall gar nichts von absolutem Werthe würde angetroffen werden; wenn aber aller Werth bedingt, mithin zufällig wäre, so könnte für die Vernunft überall kein oberstes praktisches Princip angetroffen werden.
Wenn es denn also ein oberstes praktisches Princip und in Ansehung des menschlichen Willens einen kategorischen Imperativ geben soll, so muß es ein solches sein, das aus der Vorstellung dessen, was nothwendig für jedermann Zweck ist, weil es Zweck an sich selbst ist, ein objectives
429 Princip des Willens ausmacht, mithin zum allgemeinen praktischen Gesetz dienen kann. Der Grund dieses Princips ist: die vernünftige Natur existirt als Zweck an sich selbst. So stellt sich nothwendig der Mensch sein eignes Dasein vor; so fern ist es also ein subjectives Princip menschlicher Handlungen. So stellt sich aber auch jedes andere vernünftige Wesen sein Dasein zufolge eben desselben Vernunftgrundes, der auch für mich gilt, vor*); also ist es zugleich ein objectives Princip, woraus als einem obersten praktischen Grunde alle Gesetze des Willens müssen abgeleitet werden können. Der praktische Imperativ wird also folgender sein: Handle so, daß du die Menschheit sowohl in deiner Person, als in der Person eines jeden andern jederzeit zugleich als Zweck, niemals bloß als Mittel brauchst. Wir wollen sehen, ob sich dieses bewerkstelligen lasse.
Um bei den vorigen Beispielen zu bleiben, so wird
Erstlich nach dem Begriffe der nothwendigen Pflicht gegen sich selbst derjenige, der mit Selbstmorde umgeht, sich fragen, ob seine Handlung mit der Idee der Menschheit als Zwecks an sich selbst zusammen bestehen könne. Wenn er, um einem beschwerlichen Zustande zu entfliehen, sich selbst zerstört, so bedient er sich einer Person bloß als eines Mittels zu Erhaltung eines erträglichen Zustandes bis zu Ende des Lebens. Der Mensch aber ist keine Sache, mithin nicht etwas, das bloß als Mittel gebraucht werden kann, sondern muß bei allen seinen Handlungen jederzeit als Zweck an sich selbst betrachtet werden. Also kann ich über den Menschen in meiner Person nichts disponiren, ihn zu verstümmeln, zu verderben, oder zu tödten. (Die nähere Bestimmung dieses Grundsatzes zur Vermeidung alles Mißverstandes, z. B. der Amputation der Glieder, um mich zu erhalten, der Gefahr, der ich mein Leben aussetze, um mein Leben zu erhalten etc., muß ich hier vorbeigehen; sie gehört zur eigentlichen Moral.)
Zweitens, was die nothwendige oder schuldige Pflicht gegen andere betrifft, so wird der, so ein lügenhaftes Versprechen gegen andere zu thun im Sinne hat, sofort einsehen, daß er sich eines andern Menschen bloß als Mittels bedienen will, ohne daß dieser zugleich den Zweck in sich enthalte. Denn der, den ich durch ein solches Versprechen zu meinen Absichten brauchen will, kann unmöglich in meine Art, gegen ihn zu verfahren,
*) Diesen Satz stelle ich hier als Postulat auf. Im letzten Abschnitte wird man die Gründe dazu finden.
430 einstimmen und also selbst den Zweck dieser Handlung enthalten. Deutlicher fällt dieser Widerstreit gegen das Princip anderer Menschen in die Augen, wenn man Beispiele von Angriffen auf Freiheit und Eigenthum anderer herbeizieht. Denn da leuchtet klar ein, daß der Übertreter der Rechte der Menschen, sich der Person anderer bloß als Mittel zu bedienen, gesonnen sei, ohne in Betracht zu ziehen, daß sie als vernünftige Wesen jederzeit zugleich als Zwecke, d. i. nur als solche, die von eben derselben Handlung auch in sich den Zweck müssen enthalten können, geschätzt werden sollen*).
Drittens, in Ansehung der zufälligen (verdienstlichen) Pflicht gegen sich selbst ists nicht genug, daß die Handlung nicht der Menschheit in unserer Person als Zweck an sich selbst widerstreite, sie muß auch dazu zusammenstimmen. Nun sind in der Menschheit Anlagen zu größerer Vollkommenheit, die zum Zwecke der Natur in Ansehung der Menschheit in unserem Subject gehören; diese zu vernachlässigen, würde allenfalls wohl mit der Erhaltung der Menschheit als Zwecks an sich selbst, aber nicht der Beförderung dieses Zwecks bestehen können.
Viertens, in Betreff der verdienstlichen Pflicht gegen andere ist der Naturzweck, den alle Menschen haben, ihre eigene Glückseligkeit. Nun würde zwar die Menschheit bestehen können, wenn niemand zu des andern Glückseligkeit was beitrüge, dabei aber ihr nichts vorsetzlich entzöge; allein es ist dieses doch nur eine negative und nicht positive Übereinstimmung zur Menschheit als Zweck an sich selbst, wenn jedermann auch nicht die Zwecke anderer, so viel an ihm ist, zu befördern trachtete. Denn das Subject, welches Zweck an sich selbst ist, dessen Zwecke müssen, wenn jene Vorstellung bei mir alle Wirkung thun soll, auch, so viel möglich, meine Zwecke sein.
Dieses Princip der Menschheit und jeder vernünftigen Natur überhaupt, als Zwecks an sich selbst, (welche die oberste einschränkende
*) Man denke ja nicht, daß hier das triviale: quod tibi non vis fieri etc. zur Richtschnur oder Princip dienen könne. Denn es ist, obzwar mit verschiedenen Einschränkungen, nur aus jenem abgeleitet; es kann kein allgemeines Gesetz sein, denn es enthält nicht den Grund der Pflichten gegen sich selbst, nicht der Liebespflichten gegen andere (denn mancher würde es gerne eingehen, daß andere ihm nicht wohlthun sollen, wenn er es nur überhoben sein dürfte, ihnen Wohlthat zu erzeigen), endlich nicht der schuldigen Pflichten gegen einander; denn der Verbrecher würde aus diesem Grunde gegen seine strafenden Richter argumentiren, u. s. w.
431 Bedingung der Freiheit der Handlungen eines jeden Menschen ist) ist nicht aus der Erfahrung entlehnt: erstlich wegen seiner Allgemeinheit, da es auf alle vernünftige Wesen überhaupt geht, worüber etwas zu bestimmen keine Erfahrung zureicht; zweitens weil darin die Menschheit nicht als Zweck der Menschen (subjectiv), d. i. als Gegenstand, den man sich von selbst wirklich zum Zwecke macht, sondern als objectiver Zweck, der, wir mögen Zwecke haben, welche wir wollen, als Gesetz die oberste einschränkende Bedingung aller subjectiven Zwecke ausmachen soll, vorgestellt wird, mithin es aus reiner Vernunft entspringen muß. Es liegt nämlich der Grund aller praktischen Gesetzgebung objectiv in der Regel und der Form der Allgemeinheit, die sie ein Gesetz (allenfalls Naturgesetz) zu sein fähig macht (nach dem ersten Princip), subjectiv aber im Zwecke; das Subject aller Zwecke aber ist jedes vernünftige Wesen, als Zweck an sich selbst (nach dem zweiten Princip): hieraus folgt nun das dritte praktische Princip des Willens, als oberste Bedingung der Zusammenstimmung desselben mit der allgemeinen praktischen Vernunft, die Idee des Willens jedes vernünftigen Wesens als eines allgemein gesetzgebenden Willens.
Alle Maximen werden nach diesem Princip verworfen, die mit der eigenen allgemeinen Gesetzgebung des Willens nicht zusammen bestehen können. Der Wille wird also nicht lediglich dem Gesetze unterworfen, sondern so unterworfen, daß er auch als selbstgesetzgebend und eben um deswillen allererst dem Gesetze (davon er selbst sich als Urheber betrachten kann) unterworfen angesehen werden muß.
Die Imperativen nach der vorigen Vorstellungsart, nämlich der allgemein einer Naturordnung ähnlichen Gesetzmäßigkeit der Handlungen, oder des allgemeinen Zwecksvorzuges vernünftiger Wesen an sich selbst, schlossen zwar von ihrem gebietenden Ansehen alle Beimischung irgend eines Interesse als Triebfeder aus, eben dadurch daß sie als kategorisch vorgestellt wurden; sie wurden aber nur als kategorisch angenommen, weil man dergleichen annehmen mußte, wenn man den Begriff von Pflicht erklären wollte. Daß es aber praktische Sätze gäbe, die kategorisch geböten, könnte für sich nicht bewiesen werden, so wenig wie es überhaupt in diesem Abschnitte auch hier noch nicht geschehen kann; allein eines hätte doch geschehen können, nämlich: daß die Lossagung von allem Interesse beim Wollen aus Pflicht, als das specifische Unterscheidungszeichen des kategorischen vom hypothetischen Imperativ, in dem Imperativ selbst durch
432 irgend eine Bestimmung, die er enthielte, mit angedeutet würde, und dieses geschieht in gegenwärtiger dritten Formel des Princips, nämlich der Idee des Willens eines jeden vernünftigen Wesens als allgemein-gesetzgebenden Willens.
Denn wenn wir einen solchen denken, so kann, obgleich ein Wille, der unter Gesetzen steht, noch vermittelst eines Interesse an dieses Gesetz gebunden sein mag, dennoch ein Wille, der selbst zu oberst gesetzgebend ist, unmöglich so fern von irgend einem Interesse abhängen; denn ein solcher abhängender Wille würde selbst noch eines andern Gesetzes bedürfen, welches das Interesse seiner Selbstliebe auf die Bedingung einer Gültigkeit zum allgemeinen Gesetz einschränkte.
Also würde das Princip eines jeden menschlichen Willens, als eines durch alle seine Maximen allgemein gesetzgebenden Willens *), wenn es sonst mit ihm nur seine Richtigkeit hätte, sich zum kategorischen Imperativ darin gar wohl schicken, daß es eben um der Idee der allgemeinen Gesetzgebung willen sich auf kein Interesse gründet und also unter allen möglichen Imperativen allein unbedingt sein kann; oder noch besser, indem wir den Satz umkehren: wenn es einen kategorischen Imperativ giebt (d. i. ein Gesetz für jeden Willen eines vernünftigen Wesens), so kann er nur gebieten, alles aus der Maxime seines Willens als eines solchen zu thun, der zugleich sich selbst als allgemein gesetzgebend zum Gegenstande haben könnte; denn alsdann nur ist das praktische Princip und der Imperativ, dem er gehorcht, unbedingt, weil er gar kein Interesse zum Grunde haben kann.
Es ist nun kein Wunder, wenn wir auf alle bisherige Bemühungen, die jemals unternommen worden, um das Princip der Sittlichkeit ausfindig zu machen, zurücksehen, warum sie insgesammt haben fehlschlagen müssen. Man sah den Menschen durch seine Pflicht an Gesetze gebunden, man ließ es sich aber nicht einfallen, daß er nur seiner eigenen und dennoch allgemeinen Gesetzgebung unterworfen sei, und daß er nur verbunden sei, seinem eigenen, dem Naturzwecke nach aber allgemein gesetzgebenden Willen gemäß zu handeln. Denn wenn man sich ihn nur als einem Gesetz (welches es auch sei) unterworfen dachte: so mußte dieses irgend
*) Ich kann hier, Beispiele zur Erläuterung dieses Princips anzuführen, überhoben sein, denn die, so zuerst den kategorischen Imperativ und seine Formel erläuterten, können hier alle zu eben dem Zwecke dienen.
433 ein Interesse als Reiz oder Zwang bei sich führen, weil es nicht als Gesetz aus seinem Willen entsprang, sondern dieser gesetzmäßig von etwas anderm genöthigt wurde, auf gewisse Weise zu handeln. Durch diese ganz nothwendige Folgerung aber war alle Arbeit einen obersten Grund der Pflicht zu finden unwiederbringlich verloren. Denn man bekam niemals Pflicht, sondern Nothwendigkeit der Handlung aus einem gewissen Interesse heraus. Dieses mochte nun ein eigenes oder fremdes Interesse sein. Aber alsdann mußte der Imperativ jederzeit bedingt ausfallen und konnte zum moralischen Gebote gar nicht taugen. Ich will also diesen Grundsatz das Princip der Autonomie des Willens im Gegensatz mit jedem andern, das ich deshalb zur Heteronomie zähle, nennen.
Der Begriff eines jeden vernünftigen Wesens, das sich durch alle Maximen seines Willens als allgemein gesetzgebend betrachten muß, um aus diesem Gesichtspunkte sich selbst und seine Handlungen zu beurtheilen, führt auf einen ihm anhängenden sehr fruchtbaren Begriff, nämlich den eines Reichs der Zwecke.
Ich verstehe aber unter einem Reiche die systematische Verbindung verschiedener vernünftiger Wesen durch gemeinschaftliche Gesetze. Weil nun Gesetze die Zwecke ihrer allgemeinen Gültigkeit nach bestimmen, so wird, wenn man von dem persönlichen Unterschiede vernünftiger Wesen, imgleichen allem Inhalte ihrer Privatzwecke abstrahirt, ein Ganzes aller Zwecke (sowohl der vernünftigen Wesen als Zwecke an sich, als auch der eigenen Zwecke, die ein jedes sich selbst setzen mag) in systematischer Verknüpfung, d. i. ein Reich der Zwecke, gedacht werden können, welches nach obigen Principien möglich ist.
Denn vernünftige Wesen stehen alle unter dem Gesetz, daß jedes derselben sich selbst und alle andere niemals bloß als Mittel, sondern jederzeit zugleich als Zweck an sich selbst behandeln solle. Hiedurch aber entspringt eine systematische Verbindung vernünftiger Wesen durch gemeinschaftliche objective Gesetze, d. i. ein Reich, welches, weil diese Gesetze eben die Beziehung dieser Wesen auf einander als Zwecke und Mittel zur Absicht haben, ein Reich der Zwecke (freilich nur ein Ideal) heißen kann.
Es gehört aber ein vernünftiges Wesen als Glied zum Reiche der Zwecke, wenn es darin zwar allgemein gesetzgebend, aber auch diesen Gesetzen selbst unterworfen ist. Es gehört dazu als Oberhaupt, wenn es als gesetzgebend keinem Willen eines andern unterworfen ist.
434 Das vernünftige Wesen muß sich jederzeit als gesetzgebend in einem durch Freiheit des Willens möglichen Reiche der Zwecke betrachten, es mag nun sein als Glied, oder als Oberhaupt. Den Platz des letztern kann es aber nicht bloß durch die Maxime seines Willens, sondern nur alsdann, wenn es ein völlig unabhängiges Wesen ohne Bedürfniß und Einschränkung seines dem Willen adäquaten Vermögens ist, behaupten.
Moralität besteht also in der Beziehung aller Handlung auf die Gesetzgebung, dadurch allein ein Reich der Zwecke möglich ist. Diese Gesetzgebung muß aber in jedem vernünftigen Wesen selbst angetroffen werden und aus seinem Willen entspringen können, dessen Princip also ist: keine Handlung nach einer andern Maxime zu thun, als so, daß es auch mit ihr bestehen könne, daß sie ein allgemeines Gesetz sei, und also nur so, daß der Wille durch seine Maxime sich selbst zugleich als allgemein gesetzgebend betrachten könne. Sind nun die Maximen mit diesem objectiven Princip der vernünftigen Wesen, als allgemein gesetzgebend, nicht durch ihre Natur schon nothwendig einstimmig, so heißt die Nothwendigkeit der Handlung nach jenem Princip praktische Nöthigung, d. i. Pflicht. Pflicht kommt nicht dem Oberhaupte im Reiche der Zwecke, wohl aber jedem Gliede und zwar allen in gleichem Maße zu.
Die praktische Nothwendigkeit nach diesem Princip zu handeln, d. i. die Pflicht, beruht gar nicht auf Gefühlen, Antrieben und Neigungen, sondern bloß auf dem Verhältnisse vernünftiger Wesen zu einander, in welchem der Wille eines vernünftigen Wesens jederzeit zugleich als gesetzgebend betrachtet werden muß, weil es sie sonst nicht als Zweck an sich selbst denken könnte. Die Vernunft bezieht also jede Maxime des Willens als allgemein gesetzgebend auf jeden anderen Willen und auch auf jede Handlung gegen sich selbst und dies zwar nicht um irgend eines andern praktischen Bewegungsgrundes oder künftigen Vortheils willen, sondern aus der Idee der Würde eines vernünftigen Wesens, das keinem Gesetze gehorcht als dem, das es zugleich selbst giebt.
Im Reiche der Zwecke hat alles entweder einen Preis, oder eine Würde. Was einen Preis hat, an dessen Stelle kann auch etwas anderes als Äquivalent gesetzt werden; was dagegen über allen Preis erhaben ist, mithin kein Äquivalent verstattet, das hat eine Würde.
Was sich auf die allgemeinen menschlichen Neigungen und Bedürfnisse bezieht, hat einen Marktpreis; das, was, auch ohne ein Bedürfniß vorauszusetzen, einem gewissen Geschmacke, d. i. einem Wohlgefallen am
435 bloßen zwecklosen Spiel unserer Gemüthskräfte, gemäß ist, einen Affectionspreis; das aber, was die Bedingung ausmacht, unter der allein etwas Zweck an sich selbst sein kann, hat nicht bloß einen relativen Werth, d. i. einen Preis, sondern einen innern Werth, d. i. Würde.
Nun ist Moralität die Bedingung, unter der allein ein vernünftiges Wesen Zweck an sich selbst sein kann, weil nur durch sie es möglich ist, ein gesetzgebend Glied im Reiche der Zwecke zu sein. Also ist Sittlichkeit und die Menschheit, so fern sie derselben fähig ist, dasjenige, was allein Würde hat. Geschicklichkeit und Fleiß im Arbeiten haben einen Marktpreis; Witz, lebhafte Einbildungskraft und Launen einen Affectionspreis; dagegen Treue in Versprechen, Wohlwollen aus Grundsätzen (nicht aus Instinct) haben einen innern Werth. Die Natur sowohl als Kunst enthalten nichts, was sie in Ermangelung derselben an ihre Stelle setzen könnten; denn ihr Werth besteht nicht in den Wirkungen, die daraus entspringen, in Vortheil und Nutzen, den sie schaffen, sondern in den Gesinnungen, d. i. den Maximen des Willens, die sich auf diese Art in Handlungen zu offenbaren bereit sind, obgleich auch der Erfolg sie nicht begünstigte. Diese Handlungen bedürfen auch keiner Empfehlung von irgend einer subjectiven Disposition oder Geschmack, sie mit unmittelbarer Gunst und Wohlgefallen anzusehen, keines unmittelbaren Hanges oder Gefühles für dieselbe: sie stellen den Willen, der sie ausübt, als Gegenstand einer unmittelbaren Achtung dar, dazu nichts als Vernunft gefordert wird, um sie dem Willen aufzuerlegen, nicht von ihm zu erschmeicheln, welches letztere bei Pflichten ohnedem ein Widerspruch wäre. Diese Schätzung giebt also den Werth einer solchen Denkungsart als Würde zu erkennen und setzt sie über allen Preis unendlich weg, mit dem sie gar nicht in Anschlag und Vergleichung gebracht werden kann, ohne sich gleichsam an der Heiligkeit derselben zu vergreifen.
Und was ist es denn nun, was die sittlich gute Gesinnung oder die Tugend berechtigt, so hohe Ansprüche zu machen? Es ist nichts Geringeres als der Antheil, den sie dem vernünftigen Wesen an der allgemeinen Gesetzgebung verschafft und es hiedurch zum Gliede in einem möglichen Reiche der Zwecke tauglich macht, wozu es durch seine eigene Natur schon bestimmt war, als Zweck an sich selbst und eben darum als gesetzgebend im Reiche der Zwecke, in Ansehung aller Naturgesetze als frei, nur denjenigen allein gehorchend, die es selbst giebt und nach welchen seine Maximen zu einer allgemeinen Gesetzgebung (der es sich zugleich selbst
436 unterwirft) gehören können. Denn es hat nichts einen Werth als den, welchen ihm das Gesetz bestimmt. Die Gesetzgebung selbst aber, die allen Werth bestimmt, muß eben darum eine Würde, d. i. unbedingten, unvergleichbaren Werth, haben, für welchen das Wort Achtung allein den geziemenden Ausdruck der Schätzung abgiebt, die ein vernünftiges Wesen über sie anzustellen hat. Autonomie ist also der Grund der Würde der menschlichen und jeder vernünftigen Natur.
Die angeführten drei Arten, das Princip der Sittlichkeit vorzustellen, sind aber im Grunde nur so viele Formeln eben desselben Gesetzes, deren die eine die anderen zwei von selbst in sich vereinigt. Indessen ist doch eine Verschiedenheit in ihnen, die zwar eher subjectiv als objectiv-praktisch ist, nämlich um eine Idee der Vernunft der Anschauung (nach einer gewissen Analogie) und dadurch dem Gefühle näher zu bringen. Alle Maximen haben nämlich
1) eine Form, welche in der Allgemeinheit besteht, und da ist die Formel des sittlichen Imperativs so ausgedrückt: daß die Maximen so müssen gewählt werden, als ob sie wie allgemeine Naturgesetze gelten sollten;
2) eine Materie, nämlich einen Zweck, und da sagt die Formel: daß das vernünftige Wesen als Zweck seiner Natur nach, mithin als Zweck an sich selbst jeder Maxime zur einschränkenden Bedingung aller bloß relativen und willkürlichen Zwecke dienen müsse;
3) eine vollständige Bestimmung aller Maximen durch jene Formel, nämlich: daß alle Maximen aus eigener Gesetzgebung zu einem möglichen Reiche der Zwecke, als einem Reiche der Natur*), zusammenstimmen sollen. Der Fortgang geschieht hier wie durch die Kategorien der Einheit der Form des Willens (der Allgemeinheit desselben), der Vielheit der Materie (der Objecte, d. i. der Zwecke) und der Allheit oder Totalität des Systems derselben. Man thut aber besser, wenn man in der sittlichen Beurtheilung immer nach der strengen Methode verfährt und die allgemeine Formel des kategorischen Imperativs zum Grunde legt: handle nach der Maxime, die sich selbst zugleich zum allgemeinen Gesetze
*) Die Teleologie erwägt die Natur als ein Reich der Zwecke, die Moral ein mögliches Reich der Zwecke als ein Reich der Natur. Dort ist das Reich der Zwecke eine theoretische Idee zu Erklärung dessen, was da ist. Hier ist es eine praktische Idee, um das, was nicht da ist, aber durch unser Thun und Lassen wirklich werden kann, und zwar eben dieser Idee gemäß zu Stande zu bringen.
437 machen kann. Will man aber dem sittlichen Gesetze zugleich Eingang verschaffen: so ist sehr nützlich, ein und eben dieselbe Handlung durch benannte drei Begriffe zu führen und sie dadurch, so viel sich thun läßt, der Anschauung zu nähern.
Wir können nunmehr da endigen, von wo wir im Anfange ausgingen, nämlich dem Begriffe eines unbedingt guten Willens. Der Wille ist schlechterdings gut, der nicht böse sein, mithin dessen Maxime, wenn sie zu einem allgemeinen Gesetze gemacht wird, sich selbst niemals widerstreiten kann. Dieses Princip ist also auch sein oberstes Gesetz: handle jederzeit nach derjenigen Maxime, deren Allgemeinheit als Gesetzes du zugleich wollen kannst; dieses ist die einzige Bedingung, unter der ein Wille niemals mit sich selbst im Widerstreite sein kann, und ein solcher Imperativ ist kategorisch. Weil die Gültigkeit des Willens als eines allgemeinen Gesetzes für mögliche Handlungen mit der allgemeinen Verknüpfung des Daseins der Dinge nach allgemeinen Gesetzen, die das Formale der Natur überhaupt ist, Analogie hat, so kann der kategorische Imperativ auch so ausgedrückt werden: Handle nach Maximen, die sich selbst zugleich als allgemeine Naturgesetze zum Gegenstande haben können. So ist also die Formel eines schlechterdings guten Willens beschaffen.
Die vernünftige Natur nimmt sich dadurch vor den übrigen aus, daß sie ihr selbst einen Zweck setzt. Dieser würde die Materie eines jeden guten Willens sein. Da aber in der Idee eines ohne einschränkende Bedingung (der Erreichung dieses oder jenes Zwecks) schlechterdings guten Willens durchaus von allem zu bewirkenden Zwecke abstrahirt werden muß (als der jeden Willen nur relativ gut machen müßte), so wird der Zweck hier nicht als ein zu bewirkender, sondern selbstständiger Zweck, mithin nur negativ gedacht werden müssen, d. i. dem niemals zuwider gehandelt, der also niemals bloß als Mittel, sondern jederzeit zugleich als Zweck in jedem Wollen geschätzt werden muß. Dieser kann nun nichts anders als das Subject aller möglichen Zwecke selbst sein, weil dieses zugleich das Subject eines möglichen schlechterdings guten Willens ist; denn dieser kann ohne Widerspruch keinem andern Gegenstande nachgesetzt werden. Das Princip: handle in Beziehung auf ein jedes vernünftige Wesen (auf dich selbst und andere) so, daß es in deiner Maxime zugleich als Zweck an sich selbst gelte, ist demnach mit dem Grundsatze: handle nach einer Maxime, die ihre eigene allgemeine Gültigkeit für jedes vernünftige Wesen
438 zugleich in sich enthält, im Grunde einerlei. Denn daß ich meine Maxime im Gebrauche der Mittel zu jedem Zwecke auf die Bedingung ihrer Allgemeingültigkeit als eines Gesetzes für jedes Subject einschränken soll, sagt eben so viel, als: das Subject der Zwecke, d. i. das vernünftige Wesen selbst, muß niemals bloß als Mittel, sondern als oberste einschränkende Bedingung im Gebrauche aller Mittel, d. i. jederzeit zugleich als Zweck, allen Maximen der Handlungen zum Grunde gelegt werden.
Nun folgt hieraus unstreitig: daß jedes vernünftige Wesen als Zweck an sich selbst sich in Ansehung aller Gesetze, denen es nur immer unterworfen sein mag, zugleich als allgemein gesetzgebend müsse ansehen können, weil eben diese Schicklichkeit seiner Maximen zur allgemeinen Gesetzgebung es als Zweck an sich selbst auszeichnet, imgleichen daß dieses seine Würde (Prärogativ) vor allen bloßen Naturwesen es mit sich bringe, seine Maximen jederzeit aus dem Gesichtspunkte seiner selbst, zugleich aber auch jedes andern vernünftigen als gesetzgebenden Wesens (die darum auch Personen heißen) nehmen zu müssen. Nun ist auf solche Weise eine Welt vernünftiger Wesen (mundus intelligibilis) als ein Reich der Zwecke möglich und zwar durch die eigene Gesetzgebung aller Personen als Glieder. Demnach muß ein jedes vernünftige Wesen so handeln, als ob es durch seine Maximen jederzeit ein gesetzgebendes Glied im allgemeinen Reiche der Zwecke wäre. Das formale Princip dieser Maximen ist: handle so, als ob deine Maxime zugleich zum allgemeinen Gesetze (aller vernünftigen Wesen) dienen sollte. Ein Reich der Zwecke ist also nur möglich nach der Analogie mit einem Reiche der Natur, jenes aber nur nach Maximen, d. i. sich selbst auferlegten Regeln, diese nur nach Gesetzen äußerlich genöthigter wirkenden Ursachen. Dem unerachtet giebt man doch auch dem Naturganzen, ob es schon als Maschine angesehen wird, dennoch, so fern es auf vernünftige Wesen als seine Zwecke Beziehung hat, aus diesem Grunde den Namen eines Reichs der Natur. Ein solches Reich der Zwecke würde nun durch Maximen, deren Regel der kategorische Imperativ allen vernünftigen Wesen vorschreibt, wirklich zu Stande kommen, wenn sie allgemein befolgt würden. Allein obgleich das vernünftige Wesen darauf nicht rechnen kann, daß, wenn es auch gleich diese Maxime selbst pünktlich befolgte, darum jedes andere eben derselben treu sein würde, imgleichen daß das Reich der Natur und die zweckmäßige Anordnung desselben mit ihm, als einem schicklichen Gliede, zu einem durch es selbst möglichen Reiche der Zwecke zusammenstimmen, d. i. seine Erwartung der Glückseligkeit
439 begünstigen werde, so bleibt doch jenes Gesetz: handle nach Maximen eines allgemein gesetzgebenden Gliedes zu einem bloß möglichen Reiche der Zwecke, in seiner vollen Kraft, weil es kategorisch gebietend ist. Und hierin liegt eben das Paradoxon: daß bloß die Würde der Menschheit als vernünftiger Natur ohne irgend einen andern dadurch zu erreichenden Zweck oder Vortheil, mithin die Achtung für eine bloße Idee dennoch zur unnachlaßlichen Vorschrift des Willens dienen sollte, und daß gerade in dieser Unabhängigkeit der Maxime von allen solchen Triebfedern die Erhabenheit derselben bestehe und die Würdigkeit eines jeden vernünftigen Subjects, ein gesetzgebendes Glied im Reiche der Zwecke zu sein; denn sonst würde es nur als dem Naturgesetze seiner Bedürfnisse unterworfen vorgestellt werden müssen. Obgleich auch das Naturreich sowohl, als das Reich der Zwecke als unter einem Oberhaupte vereinigt gedacht würde, und dadurch das letztere nicht mehr bloße Idee bliebe, sondern wahre Realität erhielte, so würde hiedurch zwar jener der Zuwachs einer starken Triebfeder, niemals aber Vermehrung ihres innern Werths zu statten kommen; denn diesem ungeachtet müßte doch selbst dieser alleinige unumschränkte Gesetzgeber immer so vorgestellt werden, wie er den Werth der vernünftigen Wesen nur nach ihrem uneigennützigen, bloß aus jener Idee ihnen selbst vorgeschriebenen Verhalten beurtheilte. Das Wesen der Dinge ändert sich durch ihre äußere Verhältnisse nicht, und was, ohne an das letztere zu denken, den absoluten Werth des Menschen allein ausmacht, darnach muß er auch, von wem es auch sei, selbst vom höchsten Wesen beurtheilt werden. Moralität ist also das Verhältniß der Handlungen zur Autonomie des Willens, das ist zur möglichen allgemeinen Gesetzgebung durch die Maximen desselben. Die Handlung, die mit der Autonomie des Willens zusammen bestehen kann, ist erlaubt; die nicht damit stimmt, ist unerlaubt. Der Wille, dessen Maximen nothwendig mit den Gesetzen der Autonomie zusammenstimmen, ist ein heiliger, schlechterdings guter Wille. Die Abhängigkeit eines nicht schlechterdings guten Willens vom Princip der Autonomie (die moralische Nöthigung) ist Verbindlichkeit. Diese kann also auf ein heiliges Wesen nicht gezogen werden. Die objective Nothwendigkeit einer Handlung aus Verbindlichkeit heißt Pflicht.
Man kann aus dem kurz vorhergehenden sich es jetzt leicht erklären, wie es zugehe: daß, ob wir gleich unter dem Begriffe von Pflicht uns eine Unterwürfigkeit unter dem Gesetze denken, wir uns dadurch doch zugleich
440 eine gewisse Erhabenheit und Würde an derjenigen Person vorstellen, die alle ihre Pflichten erfüllt. Denn so fern ist zwar keine Erhabenheit an ihr, als sie dem moralischen Gesetze unterworfen ist, wohl aber so fern sie in Ansehung eben desselben zugleich gesetzgebend und nur darum ihm untergeordnet ist. Auch haben wir oben gezeigt, wie weder Furcht, noch Neigung, sondern lediglich Achtung fürs Gesetz diejenige Triebfeder sei, die der Handlung einen moralischen Werth geben kann. Unser eigener Wille, so fern er nur unter der Bedingung einer durch seine Maximen möglichen allgemeinen Gesetzgebung handeln würde, dieser uns mögliche Wille in der Idee ist der eigentliche Gegenstand der Achtung, und die Würde der Menschheit besteht eben in dieser Fähigkeit, allgemein gesetzgebend, obgleich mit dem Beding, eben dieser Gesetzgebung zugleich selbst unterworfen zu sein.
Die Autonomie des Willens
als oberstes Princip der Sittlichkeit.
Autonomie des Willens ist die Beschaffenheit des Willens, dadurch derselbe ihm selbst (unabhängig von aller Beschaffenheit der Gegenstände des Wollens) ein Gesetz ist. Das Princip der Autonomie ist also: nicht anders zu wählen als so, daß die Maximen seiner Wahl in demselben Wollen zugleich als allgemeines Gesetz mit begriffen seien. Daß diese praktische Regel ein Imperativ sei, d. i. der Wille jedes vernünftigen Wesens an sie als Bedingung nothwendig gebunden sei, kann durch bloße Zergliederung der in ihm vorkommenden Begriffe nicht bewiesen werden, weil es ein synthetischer Satz ist; man müßte über die Erkenntniß der Objecte und zu einer Kritik des Subjects, d. i. der reinen praktischen Vernunft, hinausgehen, denn völlig a priori muß dieser synthetische Satz, der apodiktisch gebietet, erkannt werden können, dieses Geschäft aber gehört nicht in gegenwärtigen Abschnitt. Allein daß gedachtes Princip der Autonomie das alleinige Princip der Moral sei, läßt sich durch bloße Zergliederung der Begriffe der Sittlichkeit gar wohl darthun. Denn dadurch findet sich, daß ihr Princip ein kategorischer Imperativ sein müsse, dieser aber nichts mehr oder weniger als gerade diese Autonomie gebiete.
441 Die Heteronomie des Willens
als der Quell aller unächten Principien der Sittlichkeit.
Wenn der Wille irgend worin anders, als in der Tauglichkeit seiner Maximen zu seiner eigenen allgemeinen Gesetzgebung, mithin, wenn er, indem er über sich selbst hinausgeht, in der Beschaffenheit irgend eines seiner Objecte das Gesetz sucht, das ihn bestimmen soll, so kommt jederzeit Heteronomie heraus. Der Wille giebt alsdann sich nicht selbst, sondern das Object durch sein Verhältniß zum Willen giebt diesem das Gesetz. Dies Verhältniß, es beruhe nun auf der Neigung, oder auf Vorstellungen der Vernunft, läßt nur hypothetische Imperativen möglich werden: ich soll etwas thun darum, weil ich etwas anderes will. Dagegen sagt der moralische, mithin kategorische Imperativ: ich soll so oder so handeln, ob ich gleich nichts anderes wollte. Z. E. jener sagt: ich soll nicht lügen, wenn ich bei Ehren bleiben will; dieser aber: ich soll nicht lügen, ob es mir gleich nicht die mindeste Schande zuzöge. Der letztere muß also von allem Gegenstande so fern abstrahiren, daß dieser gar keinen Einfluß auf den Willen habe, damit praktische Vernunft (Wille) nicht fremdes Interesse bloß administrire, sondern bloß ihr eigenes gebietendes Ansehen als oberste Gesetzgebung beweise. So soll ich z. B. fremde Glückseligkeit zu befördern suchen, nicht als wenn mir an deren Existenz was gelegen wäre (es sei durch unmittelbare Neigung, oder irgend ein Wohlgefallen indirect durch Vernunft), sondern bloß deswegen, weil die Maxime, die sie ausschließt, nicht in einem und demselben Wollen, als allgemeinen Gesetz, begriffen werden kann.
Eintheilung
aller möglichen Principien der Sittlichkeit aus dem angenommenen Grundbegriffe der Heteronomie.
Die menschliche Vernunft hat hier, wie allerwärts in ihrem reinen Gebrauche, so lange es ihr an Kritik fehlt, vorher alle mögliche unrechte Wege versucht, ehe es ihr gelingt, den einzigen wahren zu treffen.
Alle Principien, die man aus diesem Gesichtspunkte nehmen mag, sind entweder empirisch oder rational. Die ersteren, aus dem Princip
442 der Glückseligkeit, sind aufs physische oder moralische Gefühl, die zweiten, aus dem Princip der Vollkommenheit, entweder auf den Vernunftbegriff derselben als möglicher Wirkung, oder auf den Begriff einer selbstständigen Vollkommenheit (den Willen Gottes) als bestimmende Ursache unseres Willens gebauet.
Empirische Principien taugen überall nicht dazu, um moralische Gesetze darauf zu gründen. Denn die Allgemeinheit, mit der sie für alle vernünftige Wesen ohne Unterschied gelten sollen, die unbedingte praktische Nothwendigkeit, die ihnen dadurch auferlegt wird, fällt weg, wenn der Grund derselben von der besonderen Einrichtung der menschlichen Natur, oder den zufälligen Umständen hergenommen wird, darin sie gesetzt ist. Doch ist das Princip der eigenen Glückseligkeit am meisten verwerflich, nicht bloß deswegen weil es falsch ist, und die Erfahrung dem Vorgeben, als ob das Wohlbefinden sich jederzeit nach dem Wohlverhalten richte, widerspricht, auch nicht bloß weil es gar nichts zur Gründung der Sittlichkeit beiträgt, indem es ganz was anderes ist, einen glücklichen, als einen guten Menschen, und diesen klug und auf seinen Vortheil abgewitzt, als ihn tugendhaft zu machen: sondern weil es der Sittlichkeit Triebfedern unterlegt, die sie eher untergraben und ihre ganze Erhabenheit zernichten, indem sie die Bewegursachen zur Tugend mit denen zum Laster in eine Classe stellen und nur den Calcul besser ziehen lehren, den specifischen Unterschied beider aber ganz und gar auslöschen; dagegen das moralische Gefühl, dieser vermeintliche besondere Sinn*), (so seicht auch die Berufung auf selbigen ist, indem diejenigen, die nicht denken können, selbst in dem, was bloß auf allgemeine Gesetze ankommt, sich durchs Fühlen auszuhelfen glauben, so wenig auch Gefühle, die dem Grade nach von Natur unendlich von einander unterschieden sind, einen gleichen Maßstab des Guten und Bösen abgeben, auch einer durch sein Gefühl für andere gar nicht gültig urtheilen kann) dennoch der Sittlichkeit und ihrer Würde dadurch näher bleibt, daß er der Tugend die Ehre beweist, das Wohlgefallen und die Hochschätzung für sie ihr unmittelbar zuzuschreiben, und ihr nicht gleichsam
*) Ich rechne das Princip des moralischen Gefühls zu dem der Glückseligkeit, weil ein jedes empirische Interesse durch die Annehmlichkeit, die etwas nur gewährt, es mag nun unmittelbar und ohne Absicht auf Vortheile, oder in Rücksicht auf dieselbe geschehen, einen Beitrag zum Wohlbefinden verspricht. Imgleichen muß man das Princip der Theilnehmung an anderer Glückseligkeit mit Hutcheson zu demselben von ihm angenommenen moralischen Sinne rechnen.
443 ins Gesicht sagt, daß es nicht ihre Schönheit, sondern nur der Vortheil sei, der uns an sie knüpfe.
Unter den rationalen oder Vernunftgründen der Sittlichkeit ist doch der ontologische Begriff der Vollkommenheit (so leer, so unbestimmt, mithin unbrauchbar er auch ist, um in dem unermeßlichen Felde möglicher Realität die für uns schickliche größte Summe auszufinden; so sehr er auch, um die Realität, von der hier die Rede ist, specifisch von jeder anderen zu unterscheiden, einen unvermeidlichen Hang hat, sich im Cirkel zu drehen, und die Sittlichkeit, die er erklären soll, ingeheim vorauszusetzen, nicht vermeiden kann) dennoch besser als der theologische Begriff, sie von einem göttlichen, allervollkommensten Willen abzuleiten, nicht bloß deswegen weil wir seine Vollkommenheit doch nicht anschauen, sondern sie von unseren Begriffen, unter denen der der Sittlichkeit der vornehmste ist, allein ableiten können, sondern weil, wenn wir dieses nicht thun (wie es denn, wenn es geschähe, ein grober Cirkel im Erklären sein würde), der uns noch übrige Begriff seines Willens aus den Eigenschaften der Ehr- und Herrschbegierde, mit den furchtbaren Vorstellungen der Macht und des Racheifers verbunden, zu einem System der Sitten, welches der Moralität gerade entgegen gesetzt wäre, die Grundlage machen müßte.
Wenn ich aber zwischen dem Begriff des moralischen Sinnes und dem der Vollkommenheit überhaupt (die beide der Sittlichkeit wenigstens nicht Abbruch thun, ob sie gleich dazu gar nichts taugen, sie als Grundlagen zu unterstützen) wählen müßte: so würde ich mich für den letzteren bestimmen, weil er, da er wenigstens die Entscheidung der Frage von der Sinnlichkeit ab und an den Gerichtshof der reinen Vernunft zieht, ob er gleich auch hier nichts entscheidet, dennoch die unbestimmte Idee (eines an sich guten Willens) zur näheren Bestimmung unverfälscht aufbehält.
Übrigens glaube ich einer weitläuftigen Widerlegung aller dieser Lehrbegriffe überhoben sein zu können. Sie ist so leicht, sie ist von denen selbst, deren Amt es erfordert, sich doch für eine dieser Theorien zu erklären (weil Zuhörer den Aufschub des Urtheils nicht wohl leiden mögen), selbst vermuthlich so wohl eingesehen, daß dadurch nur überflüssige Arbeit geschehen würde. Was uns aber hier mehr interessirt, ist, zu wissen: daß diese Principien überall nichts als Heteronomie des Willens zum ersten Grunde der Sittlichkeit aufstellen und eben darum nothwendig ihres Zwecks verfehlen müssen.
444 Allenthalben, wo ein Object des Willens zum Grunde gelegt werden muß, um diesem die Regel vorzuschreiben, die ihn bestimme, da ist die Regel nichts als Heteronomie; der Imperativ ist bedingt, nämlich: wenn oder weil man dieses Object will, soll man so oder so handeln; mithin kann er niemals moralisch, d. i. kategorisch, gebieten. Es mag nun das Object vermittelst der Neigung, wie beim Princip der eigenen Glückseligkeit, oder vermittelst der auf Gegenstände unseres möglichen Wollens überhaupt gerichteten Vernunft, im Princip der Vollkommenheit, den Willen bestimmen, so bestimmt sich der Wille niemals unmittelbar selbst durch die Vorstellung der Handlung, sondern nur durch die Triebfeder, welche die vorausgesehene Wirkung der Handlung auf den Willen hat; ich soll etwas thun, darum weil ich etwas anderes will, und hier muß noch ein anderes Gesetz in meinem Subject zum Grunde gelegt werden, nach welchem ich dieses Andere nothwendig will, welches Gesetz wiederum eines Imperativs bedarf, der diese Maxime einschränke. Denn weil der Antrieb, den die Vorstellung eines durch unsere Kräfte möglichen Objects nach der Naturbeschaffenheit des Subjects auf seinen Willen ausüben soll, zur Natur des Subjects gehört, es sei der Sinnlichkeit (der Neigung und des Geschmacks) oder des Verstandes und der Vernunft, die nach der besonderen Einrichtung ihrer Natur an einem Objecte sich mit Wohlgefallen üben, so gäbe eigentlich die Natur das Gesetz, welches als ein solches nicht allein durch Erfahrung erkannt und bewiesen werden muß, mithin an sich zufällig ist und zur apodiktischen praktischen Regel, dergleichen die moralische sein muß, dadurch untauglich wird, sondern es ist immer nur Heteronomie des Willens, der Wille giebt sich nicht selbst, sondern ein fremder Antrieb giebt ihm vermittelst einer auf die Empfänglichkeit desselben gestimmten Natur des Subjects das Gesetz.
Der schlechterdings gute Wille, dessen Princip ein kategorischer Imperativ sein muß, wird also, in Ansehung aller Objecte unbestimmt, bloß die Form des Wollens überhaupt enthalten und zwar als Autonomie, d. i. die Tauglichkeit der Maxime eines jeden guten Willens, sich selbst zum allgemeinen Gesetze zu machen, ist selbst das alleinige Gesetz, das sich der Wille eines jeden vernünftigen Wesens selbst auferlegt, ohne irgend eine Triebfeder und Interesse derselben als Grund unterzulegen.
Wie ein solcher synthetischer praktischer Satz a priori möglich und warum er nothwendig sei, ist eine Aufgabe, deren Auflösung nicht mehr binnen den Grenzen der Metaphysik der Sitten liegt, auch haben wir
445 seine Wahrheit hier nicht behauptet, viel weniger vorgegeben, einen Beweis derselben in unserer Gewalt zu haben. Wir zeigten nur durch Entwickelung des einmal allgemein im Schwange gehenden Begriffs der Sittlichkeit: daß eine Autonomie des Willens demselben unvermeidlicher Weise anhänge, oder vielmehr zum Grunde liege. Wer also Sittlichkeit für Etwas und nicht für eine chimärische Idee ohne Wahrheit hält, muß das angeführte Princip derselben zugleich einräumen. Dieser Abschnitt war also eben so, wie der erste bloß analytisch. Daß nun Sittlichkeit kein Hirngespinst sei, welches alsdann folgt, wenn der kategorische Imperativ und mit ihm die Autonomie des Willens wahr und als ein Princip a priori schlechterdings nothwendig ist, erfordert einen möglichen synthetischen Gebrauch der reinen praktischen Vernunft, den wir aber nicht wagen dürfen, ohne eine Kritik dieses Vernunftvermögens selbst vorauszuschicken, von welcher wir in dem letzten Abschnitte die zu unserer Absicht hinlängliche Hauptzüge darzustellen haben.
Musean translation
Mouseia’s complete machine-assisted Musean translation, made directly from the German of Akademie-Ausgabe IV 385–463, with Kant’s preface, three sections, page references and author’s notes. The German transcription was corrected against the 1911 page images.
406 Second Section.
Transition from popular moral philosophy to the metaphysics of morals.
Although we have drawn our concept of duty so far from the ordinary use of our practical reason, it must by no means be inferred that we have treated it as a concept of experience. On the contrary, if we attend to experience of what people do and leave undone, we encounter frequent and, as we ourselves admit, justified complaints: no certain examples can be cited of a disposition to act from pure duty. Although much may happen in accordance with what duty commands, it always remains doubtful whether it actually happens from duty and thus has moral worth. Hence there have always been philosophers who have flatly denied the reality of this disposition in human actions, attributing everything to self-love of greater or lesser refinement. Yet they did not therefore question the correctness of the concept of morality. Rather, with heartfelt regret they spoke of the frailty and impurity of human nature, noble enough to take so worthy an idea as its prescription, but at the same time too weak to follow it, using reason, which should serve it in giving laws, only to attend to the interests of inclinations, either individually or, at best, in their greatest mutual compatibility.
407 In fact, it is absolutely impossible through experience to establish with complete certainty a single case in which the maxim of an action otherwise in accordance with duty rested solely on moral grounds and on the representation of one's duty. It does sometimes happen that, on the strictest self-examination, we find nothing besides the moral ground of duty that could have been powerful enough to move us to this or that good action and so great a sacrifice. Yet we cannot safely conclude from this that no secret impulse of self-love, under the mere pretense of that idea, was the real determining cause of the will. We gladly flatter ourselves with a nobler motive falsely claimed as our own, but in fact, even through the most strenuous examination, we can never fully get behind our hidden incentives. For when moral worth is at issue, what matters is not the actions we see, but their inner principles, which we do not see.
We could do no more welcome service to those who deride all morality as a mere fantasy of a human imagination overreaching itself through conceit than to concede that concepts of duty must be drawn solely from experience, just as, for convenience, we also like to persuade ourselves that this is the case with all other concepts. For then we prepare them a certain triumph. Out of love for humanity, I am willing to concede that most of our actions still accord with duty. But if we look more closely at people's thoughts and endeavors, we everywhere come upon the dear self, which is always prominent and on which their purpose rests, rather than on the strict command of duty, which would often require self-denial. Nor need one be an enemy of virtue, but merely a cool observer who does not immediately take the liveliest wish for the good as its reality, to become doubtful at certain moments—especially with advancing years and a judgment partly made shrewder by experience, partly sharpened for observation—whether any true virtue is actually found in the world. Here nothing can save us from wholly abandoning our ideas of duty and preserve in our souls a well-grounded respect for its law except the clear conviction that, even if no actions had ever arisen from such pure sources,
408 the question here is not at all whether this or that happens, but that reason, by itself and independently of all appearances, commands what ought to happen. Thus actions of which the world may so far have given no example, and whose feasibility someone who grounds everything on experience might greatly doubt, are nevertheless relentlessly commanded by reason. Pure honesty in friendship, for example, can be demanded no less of everyone even if there has never yet been an honest friend, because this duty, as duty as such, lies prior to all experience in the idea of a reason that determines the will through a priori grounds.
Add to this that, unless we wish to deny the concept of morality all truth and relation to any possible object, we cannot dispute that its law is so comprehensive in meaning that it must hold not merely for human beings but for all rational beings as such, not merely under contingent conditions and with exceptions but absolutely necessarily. It is then clear that no experience could furnish occasion to infer even the possibility of such apodictic laws. For by what right can we bring what perhaps holds only under the contingent conditions of humanity into unrestricted respect as a universal prescription for every rational nature? And how are laws determining our will to be held as laws determining the will of a rational being as such, and only as such also our own, if they were merely empirical and did not originate entirely a priori from pure but practical reason?
Nor could we give morality worse advice than to try to borrow it from examples. For every example presented to me must itself first be judged by principles of morality to determine whether it is worthy to serve as an original example, that is, as a model. It can by no means provide the supreme source of the concept of morality. Even the Holy One of the Gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before he is recognized as such. He himself also says: “Why do you call me (whom you see) good? No one is good (the archetype of the good) except the one God (whom you do not see).” But from where do we have the concept of God
409 as the highest good? Solely from the idea of moral perfection that reason forms a priori and inseparably connects with the concept of a free will. Imitation has no place at all in morality. Examples serve only for encouragement: they put beyond doubt the feasibility of what the law commands and make perceptible what the practical rule expresses more universally. But they can never justify setting aside its true original, which lies in reason, and taking examples as our guide.
If, then, every genuine supreme principle of morality must rest solely on pure reason, independently of all experience, I believe there is no need even to ask whether it is good to present these concepts universally, in the abstract, just as they stand a priori together with their principles, if this cognition is to be distinguished from ordinary cognition and called philosophical. But in our time this question may well be necessary. For if votes were gathered on whether pure rational cognition, separated from everything empirical, and therefore a metaphysics of morals, or popular practical philosophy were preferable, one could soon guess which side would carry the greater weight.
This descent to popular concepts is certainly praiseworthy when the ascent to the principles of pure reason has first been made and brought to full satisfaction. That would mean first grounding moral teaching in metaphysics and then, once it stands firm, giving it entrance through popularity. But to try to accommodate popularity already in the first investigation, on which the entire correctness of the principles depends, is utterly absurd. Not only can this procedure never claim the extremely rare merit of true philosophical popularity, since there is no art in being generally understandable when one renounces every thorough insight; it also produces a disgusting jumble of patched-together observations and half-reasoned principles. Shallow minds feast on it because it is useful enough for everyday chatter, while discerning people feel confused and turn away dissatisfied without being able to help themselves. Philosophers who see through the illusion clearly, however, gain little hearing when they call for a temporary withdrawal from this pretended
410 popularity, so that only after definite insight has been gained may one rightly be popular.
One need only look at attempts to treat morality in this favored taste. One soon encounters the particular constitution of human nature, sometimes also the idea of rational nature as such; now perfection, now happiness; here moral feeling, there fear of God; something from this and something from that in a wondrous mixture. Yet no one thinks to ask whether the principles of morality are to be sought in knowledge of human nature at all, which we can acquire only from experience. And if not—if these principles are to be found wholly a priori, free from everything empirical, solely in pure concepts of reason, and nowhere else in even the smallest part—no one resolves instead to separate this investigation entirely as pure practical philosophy or, if one may use so discredited a name, as a metaphysics *) of morals, bring it by itself to full completeness, and ask the public that demands popularity to wait until this undertaking is finished.
Yet such a wholly isolated metaphysics of morals, mixed with no anthropology, theology, physics, or hyperphysics, still less with hidden qualities that might be called hypophysical, is not only an indispensable basis for all theoretical, securely determined cognition of duties. It is also something of the highest importance, urgently needed for the actual fulfillment of their prescriptions. For the pure representation of duty, and of the moral law as such, unmixed with any foreign addition of empirical inducements, has through reason alone—which here first becomes aware that it can also be practical by itself—so much more powerful an influence on the human heart than all other incentives, *)
*) If one wishes, one can distinguish the pure philosophy of morals, or metaphysics, from its application, namely to human nature, just as pure mathematics is distinguished from applied mathematics, pure logic from applied logic. This designation also immediately reminds us that moral principles must not be grounded on the peculiarities of human nature, but must stand by themselves a priori. From them, however, practical rules must be derivable for human nature as for every rational nature.
411 however many may be summoned from the empirical field, that in the consciousness of its dignity it disdains them and can gradually become their master. By contrast, a mixed moral teaching, composed of incentives from feelings and inclinations together with concepts of reason, must make the mind waver between motives that cannot be brought under any principle and can lead only very contingently to good, but often also to evil.
What has been said makes clear that all moral concepts have their seat and origin entirely a priori in reason, in the most ordinary human reason just as in reason that is speculative to the highest degree. They cannot be abstracted from any empirical and therefore merely contingent cognition. Their dignity, enabling them to serve us as supreme practical principles, lies precisely in this purity of their origin. Every empirical addition takes just as much away from their genuine influence and from the unrestricted worth of actions. To draw their concepts and laws from pure reason, present them pure and unmixed, and indeed determine the scope of this entire practical or pure rational cognition—that is, the whole faculty of pure practical reason—is demanded not only by the greatest necessity in a theoretical respect, when speculation alone is at issue, but is also of the greatest practical importance. Yet here we must not do what speculative philosophy permits, and sometimes even finds necessary: make the principles dependent on the particular
*) I have a letter from the late, excellent Sulzer in which he asks me what the cause might be that the teachings of virtue, however convincing they are to reason, nevertheless accomplish so little. My answer was delayed by the preparations needed to give it completely. But the answer is simply that the teachers themselves have not clarified their concepts. In wishing to do too much good by seeking motives for moral goodness everywhere, to make the medicine really potent, they spoil it. For the most ordinary observation shows that when an action of integrity is presented as performed with a steadfast soul, apart from every purpose of gaining advantage in this or another world, even under the greatest temptations of distress or enticement, it leaves far behind and eclipses every similar action affected in the least by a foreign incentive. It elevates the soul and awakens the wish to be able to act in the same way. Even children of middle years feel this impression, and duties should never be presented to them otherwise.
412 nature of human reason. Rather, because moral laws are to hold for every rational being as such, we must derive them from the universal concept of a rational being as such. In this way we must first present all morality, which needs anthropology for its application to human beings, independently of anthropology, completely as pure philosophy, that is, as metaphysics. This can readily be done in this kind of wholly separate cognition. We must be well aware that without possessing such a metaphysics, it would be futile not merely to determine precisely, for speculative judgment, what is moral in duty in everything that accords with duty; even in ordinary practical use, and especially in moral instruction, it would be impossible to ground morals on their genuine principles and thereby produce pure moral dispositions, implanting them in minds for the greatest good of the world.
But in this treatment we are to advance by natural stages, not merely from ordinary moral judgment, which here deserves great respect, to philosophical judgment, as was done before, but from a popular philosophy that can go no further than it can grope by means of examples, to metaphysics. Metaphysics lets nothing empirical hold it back, and since it must measure out the whole compass of rational cognition of this kind, it goes if necessary as far as ideas, where even examples forsake us. To make this advance, we must follow the practical faculty of reason from its universal rules of determination to the point where the concept of duty arises from it, and present it clearly.
Everything in nature works according to laws. Only a rational being has the capacity to act according to the representation of laws, that is, according to principles, or has a will. Since reason is required to derive actions from laws, the will is nothing other than practical reason. If reason unfailingly determines the will, the actions of such a being, recognized as objectively necessary, are also subjectively necessary. That is, the will is a capacity to choose only what reason, independently of inclination, recognizes as practically necessary, that is, as good. But if reason by itself does not sufficiently determine the will, and the will is still subject to subjective conditions, certain incentives, that do not always agree with the objective ones; in
413 a word, if the will is not in itself wholly in conformity with reason, as is actually the case in human beings, then actions recognized as objectively necessary are subjectively contingent. The determination of such a will in conformity with objective laws is necessitation: the relation of objective laws to a will that is not thoroughly good is represented as the determination of the will of a rational being by grounds of reason, to which, however, this will is not by its nature necessarily obedient.
The representation of an objective principle, insofar as it necessitates a will, is called a command of reason, and the formula of the command is called an imperative.
All imperatives are expressed through an ought, thereby indicating the relation of an objective law of reason to a will that, because of its subjective constitution, is not necessarily determined by that law: a necessitation. They say that doing or refraining from something would be good, but they say it to a will that does not always do something merely because it is represented to it as good to do. What is practically good, however, determines the will through representations of reason, thus not from subjective causes but objectively, from grounds valid for every rational being as such. It is distinguished from the pleasant: that which influences the will only through sensation, from merely subjective causes valid only for this or that person's sense, not as a principle of reason that holds for everyone. *)
*) The dependence of the faculty of desire on sensations is called inclination, and this therefore always indicates a need. But the dependence of a contingently determinable will on principles of reason is called an interest. Interest thus occurs only in a dependent will, which is not of itself always in conformity with reason; in the divine will no interest can be conceived. Yet even the human will can take an interest in something without thereby acting from interest. The first signifies a practical interest in the action; the second, a pathological interest in the action's object. The first indicates only the will's dependence on principles of reason in themselves; the second, its dependence on those principles for the sake of inclination, where reason merely supplies the practical rule for satisfying the need of inclination. In the first case the action interests me; in the second, the action's object insofar as it is pleasant to me. We saw in the first section that in an action from duty we must attend not to interest in the object, but solely to the action itself and its principle in reason, the law.
414 A perfectly good will would likewise stand under objective laws of the good, but could not be represented as necessitated by them to act in conformity with law, since of itself, by its subjective constitution, it can be determined only through the representation of the good. Thus no imperatives hold for the divine will or, in general, for a holy will. Ought is out of place here, because willing is already of itself necessarily in accord with the law. Imperatives are therefore only formulas expressing the relation of objective laws of willing as such to the subjective imperfection of the will of this or that rational being, for example, the human will.
Now all imperatives command either hypothetically or categorically. The former represent the practical necessity of a possible action as a means to attain something else that one wills, or at least could possibly will. The categorical imperative would be one that represents an action as objectively necessary in itself, without relation to another end.
Since every practical law represents a possible action as good, and therefore as necessary for a subject capable of being practically determined by reason, all imperatives are formulas determining an action that is necessary according to the principle of a will good in some way. If the action would be good merely as a means to something else, the imperative is hypothetical. If it is represented as good in itself, thus as necessary in a will in itself conforming to reason, as its principle, the imperative is categorical.
The imperative therefore says which action possible through me would be good, and presents the practical rule in relation to a will that does not immediately act merely because the action is good. This is partly because the subject does not always know that it is good, partly because, even if it did know, its maxims might still oppose the objective principles of a practical reason.
The hypothetical imperative thus says only that the action is good for some possible or actual purpose. In the former
415 case it is a problematic, in the second an assertoric-practical principle. The categorical imperative, which declares the action objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any purpose, and thus without any other end, holds as an apodictic-practical principle.
Anything possible through the powers of some rational being can also be conceived as a possible purpose for some will. There are therefore infinitely many principles of action insofar as the action is represented as necessary to attain some possible purpose to be brought about through it. All sciences have some practical part consisting of problems that some end is possible for us, and of imperatives stating how it can be attained. These may therefore be called imperatives of skill as such. Whether the end is rational and good is not at issue here, but only what one must do to attain it. The prescriptions a physician follows to make his patient thoroughly healthy, and those a poisoner follows to kill him with certainty, are of equal worth insofar as each serves to bring about its purpose perfectly. Because in early youth we do not know what ends may arise for us in life, parents chiefly seek to have their children learn many different things and provide for their skill in using means to all sorts of discretionary ends. They cannot determine whether any of these will actually become a purpose of their pupil in the future, though it is possible that he may one day have it. This care is so great that they commonly neglect, on that account, to form and correct their children's judgment about the worth of the things they might choose as ends.
There is nevertheless one end that can be presupposed as actual in all rational beings to whom imperatives apply, namely as dependent beings. It is thus a purpose they not merely can have, but one we can safely presuppose that they all have by a natural necessity: the purpose of happiness. The hypothetical imperative that represents the practical necessity of an action as a means to promote happiness is assertoric. We must not present it merely as necessary for an uncertain, merely possible purpose, but for a purpose that can be presupposed with certainty and a priori in every human being,
416 because it belongs to his being. Now skill in choosing the means to one's own greatest well-being may be called prudence *) in the narrowest sense. Thus the imperative relating to the choice of means to one's own happiness, that is, the prescription of prudence, is still hypothetical. The action is not commanded absolutely, but only as a means to another purpose.
Finally, there is an imperative that commands this conduct immediately, without making some other purpose to be attained through a certain conduct its underlying condition. This imperative is categorical. It concerns not the matter of the action and what is to result from it, but the form and the principle from which the action itself follows. What is essentially good in it consists in the disposition, whatever the result may be. This imperative may be called the imperative of morality.
Willing according to these three kinds of principles is also clearly distinguished by the inequality of the necessitation of the will. To make this difference noticeable, I think the most appropriate names, in their order, would be rules of skill, counsels of prudence, and commands, or laws, of morality. For only law carries the concept of an unconditional, objective, and therefore universally valid necessity. Commands are laws that must be obeyed, that is, followed even against inclination. Counsel does contain necessity, but a necessity that can hold only under a subjective, contingent condition: whether this or that person counts this or that as part of his happiness. The categorical imperative, by contrast, is limited by no condition and, as absolutely though practically necessary, can properly be called a command. The first imperatives might also be called technical, belonging to art; the
*) The word prudence is taken in a twofold sense: in one it may be called worldly prudence, in the other private prudence. The first is a person's skill in influencing others in order to use them for his purposes. The second is the insight to unite all these purposes to his own lasting advantage. The latter is properly that to which the worth even of the former is referred. Of someone prudent in the first way but not in the second, it would be better to say that he is clever and cunning, but on the whole imprudent.
417 second pragmatic, *) concerned with welfare; the third moral, concerned with free conduct as such, that is, with morals.
The question now arises: how are all these imperatives possible? This question asks not how the action commanded by the imperative can be carried out, but how we can conceive the mere necessitation of the will that the imperative expresses in the task it sets. How an imperative of skill is possible scarcely needs special discussion. Whoever wills the end also wills, insofar as reason has decisive influence on his actions, the means indispensably necessary to it that lie within his power. As regards willing, this proposition is analytic. For in willing an object as my effect, my causality as an acting cause, that is, the use of means, is already thought; and the imperative draws the concept of actions necessary to this end from the very concept of willing this end. Determining the means themselves for a proposed purpose does, of course, require synthetic propositions, but these concern the ground of making not the act of will, but the object, actual. Mathematics teaches only through synthetic propositions that, to divide a line into two equal parts according to a sure principle, I must draw two intersecting arcs from its ends. But if I know that the intended effect can occur only through such an action, then, if I fully will the effect, I also will the action required for it: this is an analytic proposition. For to represent something as an effect possible through me in a certain way, and to represent myself as acting in that same way in relation to it, are entirely one and the same.
The imperatives of prudence would agree entirely with those of skill, and would likewise be analytic, if only it were so easy to give a definite concept of happiness. For here as there it would mean: whoever wills the end also wills, necessarily in accordance with reason, the only means to it that lie in
*) It seems to me that the proper meaning of the word pragmatic can be determined most precisely in this way. For enactments are called pragmatic when they flow not properly from the right of states as necessary laws, but from provision for general welfare. A history is written pragmatically when it makes people prudent, that is, teaches the world how to attend to its advantage better, or at least as well as the world of former times.
418 his power. Unfortunately, however, the concept of happiness is so indeterminate that, although everyone wishes to attain it, no one can ever say definitely and in agreement with himself what he actually wishes and wills. The reason is that all the elements belonging to the concept of happiness are empirical: they must be borrowed from experience. Yet the idea of happiness requires an absolute whole, a maximum of well-being in my present and every future condition. Now it is impossible for even the most discerning and powerful, yet finite, being to form a definite concept of what he actually wills here. If he wills wealth, how much worry, envy, and harassment might he not bring upon himself through it! If he wills much knowledge and insight, this might perhaps become only a sharper eye, showing him still more terribly the evils that are now hidden from him but cannot be avoided, or burdening his desires, which already trouble him enough, with still more needs. If he wills a long life, who guarantees that it would not be a long misery? If he wills at least health, how often bodily discomfort has kept him from excess into which unrestricted health would have let him fall, and so forth! In short, he cannot determine with complete certainty, according to any principle, what will make him truly happy, because this would require omniscience. Thus one cannot act according to determinate principles in order to be happy, but only according to empirical counsels, for example, of diet, thrift, politeness, restraint, and so forth, which experience teaches promote well-being most on average. It follows that the imperatives of prudence, strictly speaking, cannot command at all, that is, represent actions as objectively practically necessary. They are to be regarded as recommendations, consilia, rather than commands, praecepta, of reason. The problem of determining securely and universally which action will promote a rational being's happiness is wholly insoluble. Thus no imperative concerning it is possible that would command in the strict sense that we do what makes us happy. For happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination, resting merely on empirical grounds, from which it is futile to
419 expect a determination of an action through which the totality of an actually infinite series of consequences would be attained. This imperative of prudence would nonetheless be an analytic-practical proposition if we assumed that the means to happiness could be given with certainty. For it differs from the imperative of skill only in that the end is merely possible in the latter, but given in the former. Since both command only the means to what we presuppose to be willed as an end, the imperative commanding the willing of the means for someone who wills the end is analytic in both cases. There is therefore no difficulty concerning the possibility of such an imperative.
By contrast, how the imperative of morality is possible is undoubtedly the only question that needs a solution. It is not hypothetical at all, so the necessity represented objectively cannot rest on any presupposition, as with hypothetical imperatives. Yet we must never overlook that no example, and therefore nothing empirical, can establish whether there is any such imperative at all. We must rather fear that all those which seem categorical may in a concealed way be hypothetical. For example, suppose it is said, “You shall make no deceitful promise,” and we assume that the necessity of refraining from it is not merely counsel to avoid some other evil, as if it meant, “You shall not make a lying promise, lest, if it comes to light, you lose your credit.” Instead, an action of this kind must be regarded as evil in itself, and the imperative of prohibition is therefore categorical. Still, no example can demonstrate with certainty that here the will is determined without any other incentive, merely by the law, although it seems so. For it is always possible that fear of disgrace, perhaps also an obscure concern about other dangers, secretly influences the will. Who can prove through experience that a cause does not exist, when experience teaches only that we do not perceive it? In such a case the so-called moral imperative, which appears as categorical and unconditional, would in fact be merely a pragmatic prescription, drawing our attention to our advantage and teaching us only to take care of it.
We shall therefore have to investigate the possibility of a categorical imperative wholly a priori, since here we lack the advantage that
420 its actuality is given in experience, so that its possibility would be needed not to establish it, but merely to explain it. This much, however, can be seen provisionally: the categorical imperative alone speaks as a practical law. All the others may indeed be called principles of the will, but not laws. For what is necessary to do merely to attain a discretionary purpose can be regarded as contingent in itself, and we can always be released from the prescription if we abandon the purpose. The unconditional command, by contrast, leaves the will no freedom to choose the opposite, and thus alone carries the necessity we demand of a law.
Second, the ground of the difficulty in understanding the possibility of this categorical imperative, or law of morality, is also very great. It is an a priori synthetic-practical proposition. *) Since understanding the possibility of propositions of this kind presents so much difficulty in theoretical cognition, we can readily infer that it will present no less in practical cognition.
In this problem we shall first try whether the mere concept of a categorical imperative may perhaps also provide its formula, containing the proposition that alone can be a categorical imperative. For how such an absolute command is possible, even if we know what it says, will still require a special and difficult effort, which we postpone to the final section.
When I think of a hypothetical imperative as such, I do not know in advance what it will contain until its condition is given to me. But when I think of a categorical imperative, I know at once what it contains. For besides the law, the imperative contains only the necessity that the maxim **) conform to this law,
*) Without a presupposed condition from any inclination, I connect the deed with the will a priori, hence necessarily, though only objectively: under the idea of a reason that had complete authority over all subjective motives. This is therefore a practical proposition that does not analytically derive the willing of an action from some other willing already presupposed, for we have no such perfect will. Rather, it connects the action immediately with the concept of the will of a rational being as something not contained in that concept.
**) A maxim is the subjective principle of acting and must be distinguished from the objective principle, namely the practical law. The former contains the practical rule that reason determines in accordance with the subject's conditions, often its ignorance or its inclinations, and is thus the principle according to which the subject acts. The law, however, is the objective principle valid for every rational being, and the principle according to which the subject ought to act, that is, an imperative.
421 and since the law contains no condition limiting it, nothing remains but the universality of a law as such, to which the maxim of the action ought to conform. It is this conformity alone that the imperative properly represents as necessary.
There is therefore only one categorical imperative, and it is this: act only according to the maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.
If all imperatives of duty can be derived from this single imperative as their principle, we shall at least be able to indicate what we think by the concept of duty and what it means, even if we leave unsettled whether what is called duty might be an empty concept altogether.
Since the universality of the law according to which effects occur constitutes what is properly called nature in the most general sense, as to form—that is, the existence of things insofar as it is determined by universal laws—the universal imperative of duty could also read: act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.
We shall now enumerate some duties according to their customary division into duties toward ourselves and toward other human beings, and into perfect and imperfect duties. *)
1) Someone who, through a series of evils grown to hopelessness, feels weary of life still
*) It must be noted here that I reserve the division of duties entirely for a future metaphysics of morals. The division here is therefore merely discretionary, to arrange my examples. Further, by a perfect duty I here understand one that permits no exception to the advantage of inclination. Thus I have not merely external but also internal perfect duties. This conflicts with the accepted usage of the schools, but I do not intend to justify it here, since for my purpose it makes no difference whether this is conceded to me or not.
422 retains enough reason to ask himself whether taking his life might conflict with his duty toward himself. He now tests whether the maxim of his action could become a universal law of nature. His maxim is this: from self-love I make it my principle to shorten my life when its longer duration threatens more evil than it promises pleasure. The question remains only whether this principle of self-love could become a universal law of nature. But one soon sees that a nature whose law was to destroy life through the very feeling whose vocation is to impel the promotion of life would contradict itself, and therefore could not subsist as nature. Thus that maxim cannot possibly hold as a universal law of nature and consequently conflicts entirely with the supreme principle of all duty.
2) Another person finds himself driven by need to borrow money. He knows well that he will not be able to repay it, but also sees that nothing will be lent to him unless he firmly promises to repay it at a definite time. He feels inclined to make such a promise; yet he still has enough conscience to ask himself: is it not forbidden and contrary to duty to extricate myself from need in this way? Suppose he nonetheless resolved to do it. His maxim of action would read: when I believe myself in financial need, I will borrow money and promise to repay it, although I know it will never happen. Now this principle of self-love or personal advantage may perhaps agree quite well with my entire future well-being, but the present question is whether it is right. I therefore transform self-love's demand into a universal law and frame the question thus: what would happen if my maxim became a universal law? I see immediately that it could never hold as a universal law of nature and be consistent with itself, but must necessarily contradict itself. For the universality of a law allowing everyone, whenever he believes himself in need, to promise whatever occurs to him with the intention of not keeping it would make promising itself, and whatever end one might have in it, impossible. No one would believe that anything had been promised to him, but would laugh at every such utterance as an empty pretense.
3) A third person finds in himself a talent that, through some
423 cultivation, could make him useful in many respects. But he finds himself in comfortable circumstances and prefers to indulge in pleasure rather than trouble himself to extend and improve his fortunate natural capacities. Yet he still asks whether his maxim of neglecting his natural gifts, besides agreeing in itself with his tendency toward amusement, also agrees with what is called duty. He now sees that a nature according to such a universal law could indeed still subsist, even if a human being, like the South Sea islanders, let his talent rust and intended to spend his life merely in idleness, amusement, propagation—in a word, in enjoyment. But he cannot possibly will this to become a universal law of nature, or to be implanted in us as such by natural instinct. For as a rational being he necessarily wills that all his capacities be developed, since they are given to him and serve him for all sorts of possible purposes.
A fourth person, who prospers while seeing others struggle with great hardships, whom he could well help, thinks: “What does it matter to me? Let everyone be as happy as heaven wills or as he can make himself. I will take nothing from him, nor even envy him; only I have no wish to contribute anything to his well-being or to help him in need!” Now if such a way of thinking became a universal law of nature, the human race could certainly subsist, and undoubtedly even better than if everyone prattles about sympathy and goodwill, even eagerly practices them on occasion, but also cheats wherever he can, sells out people's rights, or otherwise impairs them. Yet although a universal law of nature could subsist according to that maxim, it is impossible to will that such a principle hold everywhere as a law of nature. For a will that resolved on this would conflict with itself, since many cases can arise in which it needs the love and sympathy of others, and in which, through such a law of nature arising from its own will, it would rob itself of all hope of the assistance it desires.
These are some of the many actual duties, or at least duties we hold to be such, whose division is clearly evident from the single principle
424 just stated. We must be able to will a maxim of our action to become a universal law: this is the canon of moral judgment of action as such. Some actions are so constituted that their maxim cannot even be thought without contradiction as a universal law of nature, much less could one will that it should become such a law. In others this inner impossibility is not present, yet it is still impossible to will that their maxim be raised to the universality of a law of nature, because such a will would contradict itself. We can readily see that the first conflicts with strict or narrower, unremitting duty; the second only with wider, meritorious duty. Thus all duties, as regards the kind of obligation, not the object of their action, have through these examples been set out completely in their dependence on the single principle.
If we attend to ourselves whenever we transgress a duty, we find that we do not actually will our maxim to become a universal law, since this is impossible for us. Rather, its opposite is to remain a law universally. We merely take the liberty of making an exception from it for ourselves, or only for this occasion, to the advantage of our inclination. Consequently, if we weighed everything from one and the same standpoint, that of reason, we would find a contradiction in our own will: a certain principle is objectively necessary as a universal law, yet subjectively it ought not to hold universally, but should permit exceptions. But since at one moment we consider our action from the standpoint of a will wholly conforming to reason, and then consider that same action from the standpoint of a will affected by inclination, there is really no contradiction here, but rather a resistance of inclination to reason's prescription, antagonismus. Through this, the universality of the principle, universalitas, is transformed into mere generality, generalitas, so that the practical principle of reason is to meet the maxim halfway. Although this cannot be justified in our own impartial judgment, it nevertheless proves that we actually acknowledge the validity of the categorical imperative and, with all respect for it, permit ourselves only a few exceptions that seem to us insignificant and forced upon us.
425 We have thus established at least this much: if duty is a concept that is to contain meaning and actual legislation for our actions, this legislation can be expressed only in categorical imperatives, never in hypothetical ones. We have likewise presented clearly, and with a precision suited to every application, the content of the categorical imperative that would have to contain the principle of all duty—if there is any such thing at all. This is already a considerable achievement. Yet we have not advanced far enough to prove a priori that such an imperative actually holds, that there is a practical law which commands absolutely and of itself, without any incentives, and that following this law is duty.
In seeking to reach this point, it is of the utmost importance to take this warning to heart: we must never entertain the thought of deriving the reality of this principle from the distinctive character of human nature. For duty is to be the practically unconditional necessity of action; it must therefore hold for all rational beings to whom an imperative can apply at all, and for that reason alone also be a law for every human will. By contrast, anything derived from humanity’s particular natural constitution, from certain feelings and propensities, or even, if possible, from a particular direction peculiar to human reason, which need not hold for the will of every rational being, can indeed furnish a maxim for us, but not a law. It can furnish a subjective principle according to which we have a propensity and inclination to be permitted to act, but not an objective principle according to which we would be required to act even if all our propensities, inclinations, and natural constitution opposed it. Indeed, the fewer the subjective causes in its favor and the more there are against it, the more this proves the sublimity and inner dignity of the command in a duty, without thereby weakening in the least the constraint imposed by the law or detracting at all from its validity.
Here we see philosophy placed, in fact, in a precarious position: it is to stand firm although there is nothing in heaven or on earth from which it hangs or on which it rests. Here it must prove its purity as the guardian of its own laws, not as the herald of those whispered to it by an implanted sense or by who knows what tutelary nature. All such laws, however much better they may be
426 than nothing at all, can never furnish principles dictated by reason, which must have their source entirely a priori, and with it their commanding authority: to expect nothing from human inclination, but everything from the supreme power of the law and the respect owed to it, or otherwise to condemn the human being to self-contempt and inward abhorrence.
Everything empirical, then, is not only wholly unfit as an addition to the principle of morality; it is also highly detrimental to the purity of morals themselves. For in this purity the distinctive worth of an absolutely good will, a worth exalted above all price, consists precisely in the principle of action being free from every influence of contingent grounds that experience alone can supply. Warnings against this negligence, or indeed this base manner of thinking, which seeks the principle among empirical motives and laws, cannot be given too often or too urgently. For human reason, when weary, gladly rests on this cushion, and in a dream of sweet illusions—which nevertheless have it embrace a cloud instead of Juno—substitutes for morality a bastard patched together from limbs of wholly different descent. It resembles everything one might wish to see in it, except virtue, for anyone who has once beheld virtue in its true form.*)
The question, then, is this: is it a necessary law for all rational beings always to judge their actions by maxims that they themselves can will to serve as universal laws? If there is such a law, it must already be connected, wholly a priori, with the concept of the will of a rational being as such. But to discover this connection, however much we may resist, we must take a step beyond, namely into metaphysics—though into a region distinct from speculative philosophy: the metaphysics of morals.
*) To behold virtue in its true form is nothing other than to present morality stripped of every admixture of the sensible and every spurious ornament of reward or self-love. How greatly it then eclipses everything else that appears alluring to the inclinations can readily be recognized by anyone through the slightest exercise of a reason not wholly spoiled for all abstraction.
427 In a practical philosophy, where our concern is not to assume grounds for what happens, but laws for what ought to happen, even if it never does—that is, objectively practical laws—we have no need to investigate why something pleases or displeases; how the pleasure of mere sensation differs from taste, and whether taste differs from a universal satisfaction of reason; on what the feeling of pleasure and displeasure rests; or how desires and inclinations arise from it, and from these, through the cooperation of reason, maxims. For all this belongs to an empirical psychology, which would constitute the second part of the doctrine of nature if we consider it as a philosophy of nature insofar as it is founded on empirical laws. Here, however, we are concerned with the objectively practical law, and thus with the relation of a will to itself insofar as it determines itself solely through reason. Everything that relates to the empirical therefore falls away of itself: for if reason by itself alone determines conduct—the possibility of which is precisely what we now wish to investigate—it must necessarily do so a priori.
The will is conceived as a capacity to determine itself to act in accordance with the representation of certain laws. And such a capacity can be found only in rational beings. Now, what serves the will as the objective ground of its self-determination is the end; and this, if given by reason alone, must hold equally for all rational beings. What, by contrast, contains merely the ground of the possibility of an action whose effect is an end is called the means. The subjective ground of desire is the incentive, the objective ground of willing the motive. Hence the distinction between subjective ends, which rest on incentives, and objective ends, which depend on motives valid for every rational being. Practical principles are formal when they abstract from all subjective ends; they are material when they take these, and thus certain incentives, as their basis. The ends that a rational being chooses to set before itself as effects of its action—material ends—are all merely relative. For only their relation to a subject’s faculty of desire, with its particular constitution, gives them their worth; this worth can therefore furnish no universal and necessary principles valid for all rational beings and for every act of willing,
428 principles, that is, practical laws. Hence all these relative ends are only the ground of hypothetical imperatives.
Suppose, however, that there were something whose existence in itself has an absolute worth, something that, as an end in itself, could be a ground of determinate laws: then in it, and in it alone, would lie the ground of a possible categorical imperative, that is, of a practical law.
Now I say that the human being, and every rational being in general, exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means for the arbitrary use of this or that will, but must in all his actions, whether directed toward himself or toward other rational beings, always be regarded at the same time as an end. All objects of the inclinations have only a conditional worth; for if the inclinations, and the needs grounded on them, did not exist, their object would be without worth. But the inclinations themselves, as sources of need, have so little absolute worth that they could be wished for their own sake; rather, to be wholly free of them must be the universal wish of every rational being. Thus the worth of all objects to be acquired through our action is always conditional. The beings whose existence rests not on our will but on nature have, to be sure, if they are nonrational beings, only a relative worth as means, and are therefore called things; rational beings, by contrast, are called persons, because their nature already marks them out as ends in themselves, that is, as something that may not be used merely as a means, and hence so far limits all caprice (and is an object of respect). These are therefore not merely subjective ends, whose existence as an effect of our action has a worth for us; they are objective ends, that is, things whose existence is in itself an end, and indeed an end such that no other end can be set in its place, to which they should serve merely as means; for without this nothing at all of absolute worth would anywhere be encountered, and if all worth were conditional and hence contingent, no supreme practical principle could anywhere be found for reason.
If, then, there is to be a supreme practical principle, and with respect to the human will a categorical imperative, it must be one that, from the representation of that which is necessarily an end for everyone because it is an end in itself, makes this an objective
429 principle of the will, and thus can serve as a universal practical law. The ground of this principle is: rational nature exists as an end in itself. The human being necessarily represents his own existence in this way; so far, then, it is a subjective principle of human actions. But every other rational being also represents his existence in this way, on the same rational ground that holds for me*); thus it is at the same time an objective principle, from which, as a supreme practical ground, all laws of the will must be capable of being derived. The practical imperative will therefore be the following: So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means. We shall see whether this can be accomplished.
To stay with the previous examples: first, in accordance with the concept of a necessary duty toward oneself, a man who is thinking of suicide will ask whether his action can consist with the idea of humanity as an end in itself. If he destroys himself in order to escape from a burdensome condition, he uses a person merely as a means to preserve a tolerable condition until the end of life. But a human being is not a thing, hence not something that may be used merely as a means; rather, in all his actions he must always be regarded as an end in himself. Thus I cannot dispose of a human being in my own person, to maim him, to ruin him, or to kill him. (The closer determination of this principle, to avoid every misunderstanding—for example, amputation of limbs in order to preserve myself, or the danger to which I expose my life in order to preserve it, and so on—I must here pass over; it belongs to morals proper.)
Secondly, as concerns the necessary or obligatory duty toward others, a man who intends to make a deceitful promise to others will immediately see that he wants to use another human being merely as a means, without this other at the same time containing the end in himself. For the person whom I want to use for my purposes by such a promise cannot possibly agree with my way of proceeding toward him,
*) This proposition I set up here as a postulate; in the last section the grounds for it will be found.
430 and so himself contain the end of this action. This conflict with the principle of other human beings is more plainly seen when examples of attacks on the freedom and property of others are brought in. For there it shines clear that a violator of the rights of human beings is minded to use the persons of others merely as means, without considering that they, as rational beings, are to be valued always at the same time as ends, that is, only as beings who must be able to contain in themselves the very same end of the same action*).
Thirdly, with regard to the contingent (meritorious) duty toward oneself, it is not enough that the action not conflict with humanity in our person as an end in itself; it must also harmonize with it. Now there lie in humanity predispositions to a greater perfection, which belong to the end of nature with respect to humanity in our subject; to neglect these could perhaps consist with the preservation of humanity as an end in itself, but not with the furthering of this end.
Fourthly, as regards the meritorious duty toward others, the natural end that all human beings have is their own happiness. Now humanity could indeed subsist if no one contributed anything to the happiness of others, so long as nothing were thereby intentionally taken from it; but this is only a negative and not a positive agreement with humanity as an end in itself, if everyone does not also strive, as far as in him lies, to further the ends of others. For the subject who is an end in itself must have the ends of others, as far as possible, also as my ends, if that representation is to have all its effect in me.
This principle of humanity and of every rational nature in general, as an end in itself, which is the supreme limiting
*) Let no one think that the trivial rule, quod tibi non vis fieri etc., can here serve as the standard or principle. For it is, though with various restrictions, only derived from that principle; it cannot be a universal law, for it does not contain the ground of duties toward oneself, nor of duties of love toward others (for many would gladly agree that others should do them no good, if only they might be spared showing kindness to them), and finally not of the duties owed to one another; for on this ground the criminal would argue against his punishing judges, and so forth.
431 condition of the freedom of the actions of every human being, is not borrowed from experience: first, because of its universality, since it extends to all rational beings in general, about which experience is not sufficient to determine anything; second, because in it humanity is represented not as the end of human beings (subjectively), that is, as an object that one of oneself actually makes one's end, but as an objective end which, whatever ends we may have, is to constitute as law the supreme limiting condition of all subjective ends, and hence it must spring from pure reason. For the ground of all practical legislation lies objectively in the rule and the form of universality that makes it capable of being a law (if need be, a law of nature) (according to the first principle), but subjectively in the end; the subject of all ends, however, is every rational being, as an end in itself (according to the second principle): from this there now follows the third practical principle of the will, as the supreme condition of its harmony with universal practical reason, the idea of the will of every rational being as a universally legislating will.
All maxims are rejected according to this principle that cannot consist with the will's own universal legislation. The will is thus not merely subject to the law, but is so subject that it must also be regarded as self-legislating and just by that means first subject to the law (of which it can consider itself the author).
The imperatives according to the previous way of representing it—namely according to the lawfulness of actions that is similar to a natural order, or according to the universal preference of ends proper to rational beings in themselves—did indeed exclude from their commanding authority all admixture of interest as an incentive, just because they were represented as categorical; but they were only assumed as categorical because one had to assume such imperatives if one wanted to explain the concept of duty. That there were practical propositions that command categorically could not be proved by itself, as indeed it cannot here still be done in this section either; but one thing could at least have been done, namely that the renunciation of all interest in willing from duty, as the specific distinguishing mark of the categorical from the hypothetical imperative, is contained in the imperative itself through
432 some determination that it contained would be hinted at; and this happens in the present third formula of the principle, namely in the idea of the will of every rational being as a universally legislating will.
For if we think such a will, then although a will that stands under laws may still be bound to this law by means of an interest, a will that is itself the supreme legislator cannot possibly depend any further on any interest; for such a dependent will would itself still need another law, which restricted the interest of its self-love to the condition of its being valid as a universal law.
Thus the principle of every human will, as a will that through all its maxims legislates universally *), would—provided only that as to its correctness this held good of it—quite well comport itself with the categorical imperative in this, that for the sake of the idea of universal legislation it rests on no interest, and thus among all possible imperatives alone can be unconditional; or better still, by inverting the proposition: if there is a categorical imperative (that is, a law for the will of every rational being), it can command nothing other than to do everything from the maxim of a will that could at the same time have itself as universally legislating for its object; for only then is the practical principle, and the imperative it obeys, unconditional, because it can have no interest at all at its ground.
It is no wonder, then, that when we look back at all the endeavors that have ever been undertaken to discover the principle of morality, they must all have failed. One saw the human being bound to laws by his duty, but it did not occur to one that he is subject only to his own, and yet universal, legislation, and that he is bound only to act in accordance with his own will, which is, however, universally legislating in accordance with nature's purpose. For if one thought of him only as subject to a law (whatever it might be), then this law had to contain
*) I may here be spared the trouble of citing examples to illustrate this principle, for all those that first illustrated the categorical imperative and its formula can serve here for exactly the same purpose.
433 an interest in itself as a lure or compulsion, because it did not spring as a law from his will, but this will was constrained by something else to act in a certain way, in conformity with law. By this wholly necessary inference, however, all labor of finding a supreme ground of duty was irrecoverably lost. For one never obtained duty, but only the necessity of an action out of some interest or other. This might now be one's own interest or another's. But in that case the imperative had always to come out conditional and could not at all serve as a moral command. I therefore want to call this principle the principle of the autonomy of the will, in contrast with every other, which I accordingly count under heteronomy.
The concept of every rational being that must regard itself, through all the maxims of its will, as universally legislating, so as to judge itself and its actions from this standpoint, leads to a very fruitful concept attaching to it, namely that of a realm of ends.
By a realm, however, I understand the systematic union of different rational beings through common laws. Now since laws determine ends as regards their universal validity, if one abstracts from the personal differences of rational beings, as also from all content of their private ends, a whole of all ends (both of rational beings as ends in themselves and of the own ends that each may set himself) in systematic connection, that is, a realm of ends, can be thought as possible according to the above principles.
For all rational beings stand under the law that each of them should treat itself and all others never merely as a means, but always at the same time as an end in itself. Hereby, however, there arises a systematic union of rational beings through common objective laws, that is, a realm; and because these laws have as their aim precisely the relation of these beings to one another as ends and means, it can be called a realm of ends (though only an ideal).
A rational being belongs as a member to the realm of ends when it is indeed universally legislating in it, but also itself subject to these laws. It belongs to it as head when, as legislating, it is subject to no will of another.
434 The rational being must always regard itself as legislating in a realm of ends possible through the freedom of the will, whether as a member or as a head. It cannot, however, maintain the place of the latter merely through the maxim of its will, but only if it is a completely independent being, without need and without limitation of a capacity adequate to the will.
Morality consists, then, in the reference of all action to the legislation through which alone a realm of ends is possible. But this legislation must be encountered in every rational being itself and must be capable of springing from its will, whose principle is therefore: to do no action according to any other maxim than one such that it could also consist with it that this maxim should be a universal law, and thus only in such a way that the will through its maxim could at the same time regard itself as universally legislating. But if the maxims are not already necessarily in agreement with this objective principle of rational beings as universally legislating by their nature, the necessity of acting on that principle is called practical necessitation, that is, duty. Duty does not belong to the head in the realm of ends, but to every member, and indeed to all in equal measure.
The practical necessity of acting according to this principle, that is, duty, rests not at all on feelings, impulses and inclinations, but solely on the relation of rational beings to one another, in which the will of a rational being must always at the same time be regarded as legislating, because otherwise it could not think of that being as an end in itself. Reason thus relates every maxim of the will, as universally legislating, to every other will and also to every action toward oneself, and indeed not for the sake of any other practical motive or future advantage, but from the idea of the dignity of a rational being that obeys no law other than one that it at the same time gives itself.
In the realm of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what, on the other hand, is elevated above all price, and hence admits no equivalent, has a dignity.
What refers to the general human inclinations and needs has a market price; what, even without presupposing a need, corresponds to a certain taste, that is, to a satisfaction in
435 the mere purposeless play of our mental powers, an affective price; but what constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself has not merely a relative worth, that is, a price, but an inner worth, that is, dignity.
Now morality is the condition under which alone a rational being can be an end in itself, because only through it is it possible to be a legislating member in the realm of ends. Thus morality, and humanity insofar as it is capable of it, is that which alone has dignity. Skill and diligence in work have a market price; wit, lively imagination and moods have an affective price; fidelity in promises and benevolence from principles (not from instinct), by contrast, have an inner worth. Neither nature nor art contains anything that could be set in their place in default of them; for their worth consists not in the effects that spring from them, in the advantage and use they bring about, but in the dispositions, that is, in the maxims of the will that are ready to reveal themselves in actions in this way, even if the outcome did not favor them. These actions also need no recommendation from any subjective disposition or taste, to be regarded with immediate favor and satisfaction, no immediate inclination or feeling for them: they present the will that exercises them as an object of immediate respect, for which nothing but reason is required in order to impose them on the will, not to coax them from it, which latter in the case of duties would anyway be a contradiction. This estimation therefore reveals the worth of such a way of thinking as dignity and sets it infinitely above all price, with which it cannot at all be brought into reckoning and comparison without, as it were, violating its holiness.
And what is it, then, that entitles the morally good disposition, or virtue, to make such high claims? It is nothing less than the share that it procures for the rational being in universal legislation, and thereby makes it fit to be a member in a possible realm of ends, to which its own nature had already destined it, as an end in itself and precisely for that reason as legislating in the realm of ends, free in regard to all laws of nature, obeying only those which it gives itself and according to which its maxims can belong to a universal legislation (to which it at the same time
436 subjects itself). For nothing has a worth except the worth that the law determines for it. But the legislation itself, which determines all worth, must precisely for that reason have a dignity, that is, an unconditional, incomparable worth, for which the word respect alone furnishes the fitting expression of the estimation that a rational being has to undertake regarding it. Autonomy is thus the ground of the dignity of human and of every rational nature.
The three ways cited of presenting the principle of morality are, however, at bottom only so many formulas of one and the same law, of which each one of itself unites the other two within itself. Yet there is a difference among them that is indeed rather subjective than objective-practical, namely in order to bring an idea of reason nearer to intuition (by a certain analogy) and thereby nearer to feeling. All maxims have
1) a form, which consists in universality, and there the formula of the moral imperative is expressed as follows: that maxims must be chosen as if they were to hold as universal laws of nature;
2) a matter, namely an end, and there the formula says: that the rational being, as an end by its nature, hence as an end in itself, must serve every maxim as the limiting condition of all merely relative and arbitrary ends;
3) a complete determination of all maxims by that formula, namely: that all maxims should harmonize, out of their own legislation, into a possible realm of ends, as into a realm of nature*). The progression here takes place, as it were, through the categories of the unity of the form of the will (of its universality), of the plurality of the matter (of the objects, that is, of the ends) and of the allness or totality of the system of them. But one does better if in moral judgment one always proceeds by the strict method and takes the universal formula of the categorical imperative as the basis: act according to the maxim that could also
*) Teleology considers nature as a realm of ends, morality a possible realm of ends as a realm of nature. There the realm of ends is a theoretical idea for explaining what is. Here it is a practical idea, in order to bring about what is not, but can become real through our doing and omitting, and indeed in accordance with this very idea.
437 be a universal law. But if one wants at the same time to win entry for the moral law, it is very useful to lead one and the same action through the three named concepts and thereby, as much as can be done, to bring it nearer to intuition.
We can now end where we began at the outset, namely with the concept of a will that is good without qualification. The will is absolutely good that cannot be evil, and whose maxim, when it is made into a universal law, can therefore never conflict with itself. This principle is thus also its supreme law: act always according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will; this is the sole condition under which a will can never be in conflict with itself, and such an imperative is categorical. Because the validity of the will as a universal law for possible actions has an analogy with the universal connection of the existence of things under universal laws, which is the formal element of nature in general, the categorical imperative can also be expressed thus: Act according to maxims that can at the same time have themselves as universal laws of nature for their object. Such, then, is the formula of an absolutely good will.
Rational nature distinguishes itself from the rest in that it sets an end for itself. This would be the matter of every good will. But since in the idea of a will that is absolutely good without any limiting condition (of the attainment of this or that end) one must abstract entirely from every end to be brought about (as that would make every will only relatively good), the end here must be thought not as one to be brought about, but as a self-subsistent end, hence only negatively, that is, as an end that is never to be acted against, and that therefore must never be valued merely as a means, but always at the same time as an end, in every act of willing. This can now be nothing other than the subject of all possible ends itself, because this is at the same time the subject of a possible absolutely good will; for that will cannot without contradiction be subordinated to any other object. The principle: act in relation to every rational being (to yourself and others) in such a way that it counts in your maxim at the same time as an end in itself, is therefore at bottom identical with the fundamental principle: act according to a maxim that contains its own universal validity for every rational being
438 at the same time within itself, is at bottom one and the same. For that I should limit my maxim in the use of means to every end to the condition of its universal validity as a law for every subject says just as much as: the subject of ends, that is, the rational being itself, must never be laid at the ground of all maxims of action merely as a means, but as the supreme limiting condition in the use of all means, that is, always at the same time as an end.
Now it follows from this beyond dispute that every rational being, as an end in itself, must be able to regard itself, in regard to all laws to which it may ever be subject, at the same time as universally legislating, because precisely this fitness of its maxims for universal legislation marks it out as an end in itself; and likewise that this, its dignity (prerogative) above all merely natural beings, brings with it that it must always take its maxims from the standpoint of itself, but at the same time also of every other rational being as legislating (which are therefore also called persons). Now in this way a world of rational beings (mundus intelligibilis) is possible as a realm of ends, namely through the own legislation of all persons as members. Accordingly every rational being must act as if it were always through its maxims a legislating member in the universal realm of ends. The formal principle of these maxims is: act as if your maxim should at the same time serve as a universal law (of all rational beings). A realm of ends is thus possible only by analogy with a realm of nature, the former only through maxims, that is, rules imposed on itself, the latter only through laws of externally necessitated efficient causes. Nevertheless, one still gives the whole of nature, even though it is regarded as a machine, the name of a realm of nature, insofar as it has relation to rational beings as its ends. Such a realm of ends would now actually come about through maxims whose rule the categorical imperative prescribes to all rational beings, if they were universally followed. But although the rational being cannot count on it that, even if it itself followed this maxim punctiliously, every other would therefore be faithful to the same maxim, and likewise that the realm of nature and its purposive arrangement would harmonize with it, as a fit member, into a realm of ends possible through it itself, that is, that his expectation of happiness
439 will favor this, that law nevertheless remains in full force, because it commands categorically: act according to maxims of a universally legislating member of a merely possible realm of ends. And herein lies precisely the paradox: that merely the dignity of humanity as rational nature, without any other end or advantage to be attained thereby, hence respect for a mere idea, should nevertheless serve as the unremitting precept of the will, and that precisely in this independence of the maxim from all such incentives consists its sublimity, and the worthiness of every rational subject to be a legislating member in the realm of ends; for otherwise it would have to be represented as merely subject to the law of nature of its needs. Even if the realm of nature as well as the realm of ends were thought as united under one head, and the latter thereby no longer remained a mere idea but received true reality, this would indeed procure for that realm the addition of a strong incentive, but never an increase of its inner worth; for notwithstanding this, even that sole unlimited legislator would still always have to be represented as judging the worth of rational beings only according to their unselfish conduct, prescribed to themselves solely from that idea. The essence of things does not change through their external relations, and that which, without thinking of the latter, alone constitutes the absolute worth of the human being, that must also be the standard by which he is judged, by whoever it may be, even by the highest being. Morality is therefore the relation of actions to the autonomy of the will, that is, to the possible universal legislation through the maxims of the will. The action that can consist with the autonomy of the will is permitted; the one that does not agree with it is not permitted. The will whose maxims necessarily harmonize with the laws of autonomy is a holy, absolutely good will. The dependence of a will that is not absolutely good on the principle of autonomy (the moral necessitation) is obligation. This therefore cannot be extended to a holy being. The objective necessity of an action from obligation is called duty.
From the immediately preceding it is now easy to explain to oneself how it comes about that, although under the concept of duty we think a subjection under the law, we nevertheless thereby at the same time
440 a certain sublimity and dignity in that person who fulfills all his duties. For so far there is indeed no sublimity in him, insofar as he is subject to the moral law, but certainly insofar as he is in regard to that same law at the same time legislating, and only for that reason subordinate to it. We have also shown above how neither fear nor inclination, but solely respect for the law, is the incentive that can give an action moral worth. Our own will, insofar as it would act only under the condition of a universal legislation possible through its maxims—this will of ours that is possible in the idea—is the proper object of respect, and the dignity of humanity consists precisely in this capacity to legislate universally, although with the condition of being at the same time itself subject to precisely this legislation.
The autonomy of the will
as the supreme principle of morality.
Autonomy of the will is the constitution of the will by which it is a law to itself (independently of any constitution of the objects of willing). The principle of autonomy is therefore: to choose in no other way than so that the maxims of the choice are comprehended in the same act of willing at the same time as universal law. That this practical rule is an imperative, that is, that the will of every rational being is necessarily bound to it as a condition, cannot be proved by mere analysis of the concepts occurring in it, because it is a synthetic proposition; one would have to go beyond the cognition of objects and to a critique of the subject, that is, of pure practical reason, for this synthetic proposition, which commands apodictically, must be capable of being known entirely a priori—but this business does not belong in the present section. That, however, the autonomy of the will just mentioned is the sole principle of morality can very well be demonstrated by mere analysis of the concepts of morality. For thereby it is found that its principle must be a categorical imperative, and that this commands nothing more or less than precisely this autonomy.
441 The heteronomy of the will
as the source of all spurious principles of morality.
If the will seeks the law that is to determine it anywhere else than in the fitness of its maxims for its own universal legislation—if, going beyond itself, it seeks this law in the constitution of any one of its objects—then what always comes out is heteronomy. The will then does not give itself the law; instead the object gives the law to the will through its relation to the will. Whether this relation rests on inclination or on representations of reason, it allows only hypothetical imperatives to become possible: I ought to do something because I will something else. The moral, and hence categorical, imperative, by contrast, says: I ought to act thus or so, even if I willed nothing else. For example, the former says: I ought not to lie, if I want to keep my honor; the latter says: I ought not to lie, even if it brought me not the least disgrace. The latter must therefore abstract from every object so far that this object has no influence at all on the will, so that practical reason (the will) does not merely administer a foreign interest, but proves only its own commanding authority as supreme legislation. Thus, for example, I ought to seek to further the happiness of others, not as if I cared whether that happiness existed (whether through immediate inclination, or through some indirect satisfaction by means of reason), but solely because the maxim that excludes it cannot be comprehended in one and the same act of willing as a universal law.
Division
of all possible principles of morality arising from the assumed basic concept of heteronomy.
Here human reason, as everywhere in its pure use, as long as it lacks critique, has first tried all possible wrong paths before it succeeds in hitting the only true one.
All principles that one may take from this standpoint are either empirical or rational. The former, taken from the principle
442 of happiness, are built on physical or moral feeling; the second, taken from the principle of perfection, are built either on the rational concept of perfection as a possible effect, or on the concept of a self-subsistent perfection (the will of God) as the determining cause of our will.
Empirical principles are altogether unfit to ground moral laws on them. For the universality with which they are to hold for all rational beings without distinction, and the unconditional practical necessity thereby imposed on them, fall away when the ground of them is taken from the particular constitution of human nature or from the contingent circumstances in which it is set. Yet the principle of one's own happiness is the most objectionable of all, not merely because it is false and experience contradicts the pretense that well-being always follows well-doing, and not merely because it contributes nothing at all to the grounding of morality, since it is something wholly different to make a happy man and to make a good man, and to make this man clever and sharp-witted for his own advantage rather than virtuous; but because it lays under morality incentives that rather undermine it and destroy its whole sublimity, since it places the motives to virtue and to vice in one class and only teaches one to draw up the calculation better, while wholly extinguishing the specific difference between the two. By contrast, moral feeling, this supposed special sense*), (however shallow the appeal to it is, since those who cannot think believe they can help themselves by feeling, even in what depends merely on universal laws; and however little feelings, which are by nature infinitely different in degree from one another, can furnish an equal standard of good and evil, and however little one person can validly judge for another by his own feeling) nevertheless stays closer to morality and its dignity in that it pays virtue the honor of ascribing the satisfaction and high esteem for it to it immediately, and does not, as it were,
*) I count the principle of moral feeling under that of happiness, because every empirical interest promises a contribution to well-being through the agreeableness that something merely affords, whether this happens immediately and without regard to advantages, or with a view to them. Likewise, the principle of taking part in the happiness of others must, with Hutcheson, be counted under the same moral sense assumed by him.
443 to say to its face that it is not its beauty but only the advantage that binds us to it.
Among the rational or reason-based grounds of morality, the ontological concept of perfection—however empty, however indeterminate, and hence however unusable it is for finding, in the immeasurable field of possible reality, the greatest sum suited to us; however much it also has an unavoidable tendency to turn in a circle in order to distinguish specifically the reality here in question from every other, and cannot avoid covertly presupposing the morality it is supposed to explain—is nevertheless better than the theological concept, which derives morality from a divine, all-perfect will; not merely because we cannot after all intuit his perfection, but can derive it only from our concepts, among which that of morality is the foremost; but because, if we do not do this (which, if it were done, would be a gross circle in explaining), the concept of his will still left to us, made up from the properties of the desire for honor and dominion joined with the fearful representations of power and vengeful zeal, would have to be made the foundation of a system of morals directly opposed to morality.
But if I had to choose between the concept of the moral sense and that of perfection in general (neither of which at least detracts from morality, though both are wholly unfit to support it as a foundation), I would decide for the latter, because it withdraws the decision of the question from sensibility and brings it before the court of pure reason; and though it decides nothing there either, it nevertheless preserves undefiled the indeterminate idea (of a will good in itself) for closer determination.
For the rest, I believe I may be spared a lengthy refutation of all these doctrinal systems. It is so easy, and those whose office it is to declare themselves for one of these theories (since audiences do not readily endure the suspension of judgment) have presumably themselves seen it so well that it would be mere superfluous labor. What interests us more here is to know that these principles everywhere set up nothing but heteronomy of the will as the first ground of morality, and precisely for that reason must necessarily miss their aim.
444 Everywhere, where an object of the will has to be laid at the ground in order to prescribe the rule that is to determine the will, there the rule is nothing but heteronomy; the imperative is conditioned, namely: if or because one wills this object, one ought to act thus or so; hence it can never command morally, that is, categorically. Whether the object determines the will by means of inclination, as in the principle of one's own happiness, or by means of reason directed to objects of our possible willing in general, as in the principle of perfection, the will never determines itself immediately by the representation of the action, but only by the incentive that the foreseen effect of the action has on the will: I ought to do something because I will something else; and here yet another law would have to be laid at the ground in my subject, according to which I necessarily will this something else—a law that in turn needs an imperative to limit this maxim. For since the impulse that the representation of an object possible through our powers is to exert on the will, according to the natural constitution of the subject, belongs to the nature of the subject, whether of sensibility (of inclination and taste) or of understanding and reason, which, according to the particular constitution of their nature, exercise themselves with satisfaction on an object, it would really be nature that gives the law; and as such it must not only be known and proved by experience, and hence is in itself contingent and thereby unfit to be an apodictic practical rule, such as the moral rule must be, but it is always only heteronomy of the will: the will does not give itself the law, but a foreign impulse gives it the law by means of a nature of the subject attuned to its receptivity.
The absolutely good will, whose principle must be a categorical imperative, will therefore, indeterminate in regard to all objects, contain merely the form of willing in general; and indeed as autonomy, that is, the fitness of the maxim of every good will to make itself into a universal law, is itself the sole law that the will of every rational being imposes on itself, without laying under it any incentive or interest whatsoever as its ground.
How such a synthetic practical proposition is possible a priori and why it is necessary is a problem whose solution no longer lies within the bounds of the metaphysics of morals, nor have we
445 asserted its truth here, still less pretended to have a proof of it in our power. We showed only, by developing the concept of morality that is once generally current, that an autonomy of the will unavoidably attaches to it, or rather lies at its ground. Whoever therefore holds morality to be something, and not a chimerical idea without truth, must at the same time concede the principle of it that has been cited. This section was thus, just like the first, merely analytic. That morality is no figment—which then follows if the categorical imperative, and with it the autonomy of the will, is true and as an a priori principle absolutely necessary—requires a possible synthetic use of pure practical reason, which we may not venture upon, however, without first prefixing a critique of this faculty of reason itself, whose main features, sufficient for our purpose, we have to present in the last section.
Plain English translation
Mouseia’s complete machine-assisted Plain English translation, made independently and directly from the same German, with every section, page reference and author’s note.
406 Second Section
Moving from popular moral philosophy to the metaphysics of morals
We have drawn our concept of duty so far from the ordinary use of our practical reason. But this certainly does not mean that we have treated it as a concept drawn from experience. In fact, when we look at what people do and fail to do, we often hear complaints that we ourselves admit are justified. No reliable examples can be given of a disposition to act purely from duty. Much may happen in line with what duty commands. But it always remains doubtful whether it really happens from duty, and so has moral worth. That is why there have always been philosophers who flatly denied that this disposition exists in human actions. They attributed everything to more or less refined self-love. Yet they did not question the validity of the concept of morality. Instead, they spoke with deep regret about the weakness and impurity of human nature. It is noble enough to make such a worthy idea its rule, but also too weak to follow it. It uses reason, which should give it laws, only to serve the interests of its inclinations, either one at a time or, at best, in the greatest possible harmony with one another.
407 In fact, experience cannot establish even one case with complete certainty in which the maxim of an action in line with duty rested solely on moral grounds and on the thought of one's duty. Sometimes, even after the closest self-examination, we find nothing besides the moral ground of duty that could have been powerful enough to move us to some good action and such great sacrifice. But this gives us no reliable basis for concluding that no hidden impulse of self-love was the real cause determining the will, with that idea serving as a mere disguise. We like to flatter ourselves by falsely claiming a nobler motive. In fact, even the most strenuous examination never lets us fully uncover our secret incentives. For moral worth does not depend on the actions we can see, but on their inner principles, which we cannot see.
Some people laugh at all morality as a mere fantasy of the human imagination, which overreaches itself through conceit. We could do them no greater favor than to concede that concepts of duty must be drawn only from experience. For convenience, we also like to persuade ourselves that the same holds for all other concepts. But this concession would guarantee those people a triumph. Out of love for humanity, I am willing to admit that most of our actions are in line with duty. But look more closely at people's thoughts and aims, and everywhere you meet the dear self, always pushing to the front. Their purpose rests on this, not on the strict command of duty, which would often require self-denial. You do not have to be an enemy of virtue to doubt at certain moments whether any true virtue is actually found in the world. You only need to be a calm observer who does not immediately mistake the strongest wish for goodness for its actual existence. This is especially so as you grow older and experience makes your judgment both wiser and sharper at observing. At this point, only one thing can keep us from abandoning our ideas of duty altogether and preserve a well-grounded respect for its law in our souls: the clear conviction that even if there had never been actions arising from such pure sources,
408 that is not the issue here at all. The issue is not whether this or that happens. Rather, reason, by itself and independently of all appearances, commands what ought to happen. So reason still unrelentingly commands actions of which the world may never yet have supplied an example, and whose very possibility someone who bases everything on experience might seriously doubt. For example, we can demand pure honesty in friendship from everyone just as firmly even if there has never yet been an honest friend. For this duty, as duty in general, lies before all experience in the idea of a reason that determines the will on grounds independent of experience.
There is a further point. Unless we want to deny the concept of morality any truth or any relation to a possible object at all, we cannot deny that its law must have a very broad scope. It must hold not just for human beings, but for all rational beings in general, and not just under contingent conditions and with exceptions, but with absolute necessity. Clearly, no experience can give us grounds to infer even the possibility of such unconditionally necessary laws. What right have we to demand unlimited respect from every rational nature for something that may be valid only under the contingent conditions of being human? And how could laws determining our will count as laws determining the will of a rational being in general, and only as such also count for ours, if they were merely based on experience? They must originate entirely independently of experience in pure but practical reason.
Nor could we give morality worse advice than to try to borrow it from examples. Every example of morality presented to me must itself first be judged by moral principles. We must determine whether it deserves to serve as an original example, that is, a model. It can never be the primary source of the concept of morality. Even the Holy One of the Gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before we recognize him as such. He also says of himself: “Why do you call me (whom you see) good? No one is good (the original model of goodness) except the one God (whom you do not see).” But where do we get the concept of God
409 as the highest good? Only from the idea of moral perfection that reason forms independently of experience and links inseparably with the concept of a free will. Imitation has no place at all in morality. Examples serve only to encourage us. That is, they remove doubt about whether we can do what the law commands. They show concretely what the practical rule expresses in more general terms. But they can never justify setting aside the true original, which lies in reason, and letting examples guide us instead.
There can be no genuine supreme principle of morality unless it rests on pure reason alone, independently of all experience. So I think we need not even ask whether it is good to present these concepts in general terms (in the abstract), as they and their associated principles stand established independently of experience. We must do this if our knowledge is to differ from ordinary knowledge and deserve the name philosophical. Yet in our time it may well be necessary to ask. Suppose we collected votes on whether to prefer pure rational knowledge, separated from everything based on experience—and so a metaphysics of morals—or popular practical philosophy. We can easily guess which side would win.
Bringing the subject down to popular concepts certainly deserves praise, provided we have first risen to the principles of pure reason and reached them with complete success. That would mean first grounding moral teaching in metaphysics, and then, once it is secure, making it popular so it can gain acceptance. But it is utterly unreasonable to try to satisfy this demand for popularity in the first investigation, on which the soundness of all the principles depends. This procedure can never claim the extremely rare achievement of true philosophical popularity. There is no skill in being understandable to everyone if you give up all thorough insight in the process. Worse, it produces a repulsive jumble of patched-together observations and half-reasoned principles. Shallow minds enjoy this, since it is very useful for everyday chatter. But people with insight feel confused and turn their eyes away, dissatisfied yet unable to help themselves. Meanwhile, philosophers who see perfectly well through the illusion find few listeners when they ask people to turn away for a while from this supposed
410 popularity. First we must gain definite insight; only then can we rightly make the subject popular.
Just look at attempts to discuss morality in this fashionable style. You soon find a strange mixture: here the special purpose of human nature (but sometimes also the idea of a rational nature in general), there perfection or happiness; here moral feeling, there fear of God; a little of this and a little of that. No one thinks to ask whether principles of morality should be sought in knowledge of human nature at all, since that knowledge can come to us only from experience. Suppose they should not. Suppose these principles are found entirely independently of experience, free of everything empirical, in pure concepts of reason alone, and nowhere else—not even in the smallest part. Then we should decide to separate this investigation completely, as pure practical philosophy or, if we may use such a discredited name, as a metaphysics*) of morals. We should bring it to full completion on its own, and ask the public that demands popularity to wait until this undertaking is finished.
Such a completely isolated metaphysics of morals must be mixed with no anthropology, theology, physics, or hyperphysics, and still less with hidden qualities, which one might call hypophysical. It is not only an indispensable basis for all theoretical, clearly established knowledge of duties. It is also something of the highest importance if their rules are actually to be carried out. For the pure thought of duty, and of the moral law in general, without any foreign addition of incentives from experience, has a far more powerful influence on the human heart through reason alone (which here first becomes aware that it can also be practical on its own) than all other incentives*) that
*) If we wish, we can distinguish pure moral philosophy (metaphysics) from applied moral philosophy (applied, that is, to human nature), just as we distinguish pure from applied mathematics and pure from applied logic. This name also immediately reminds us that moral principles must not be based on the special features of human nature. They must stand on their own, independently of experience. But from them we must be able to derive practical rules for human nature, just as for every rational nature.
411 we might muster from the field of experience. This influence is so powerful that reason, conscious of its dignity, can scorn those other incentives and gradually master them. By contrast, a mixed moral teaching, made up of incentives from feelings and inclinations as well as concepts of reason, must leave the mind wavering between motives that cannot be brought under any single principle. They can lead to good only by chance, and often lead to evil as well.
What we have said makes the following clear. All moral concepts have their place and origin entirely in reason, independently of experience. This holds for the most ordinary human reason just as much as for the most highly theoretical reason. These concepts cannot be abstracted from any knowledge based on experience, which for that very reason is merely contingent. Their dignity, which makes them fit to serve us as supreme practical principles, lies precisely in this purity of their origin. Every addition of something empirical takes away just as much from their genuine influence and from the unconditional worth of actions. Drawing their concepts and laws from pure reason, and presenting them pure and unmixed, is not just an absolute necessity for theoretical purposes, when only abstract inquiry is at issue. It is also of the greatest practical importance. We must even determine the scope of this whole body of practical or pure rational knowledge—that is, the whole capacity of pure practical reason. In doing so, however, we must not—as theoretical philosophy permits and sometimes even finds necessary—make its principles depend on the particular
*) I have a letter from the late, excellent Sulzer, in which he asks me what the reason might be that teachings about virtue achieve so little, despite all their power to convince reason. My preparations to give him a complete answer delayed my reply. But the answer is simply that the teachers themselves have not made their concepts pure. They want to do too much. They hunt everywhere for motives to moral goodness to make the medicine really strong, and so spoil it. The most ordinary observation shows this. Present an honest action performed with a steadfast spirit, even under the greatest temptations of hardship or enticement, and separated from every thought of advantage in this world or another. It leaves far behind and outshines every similar action affected even slightly by a foreign incentive. It lifts the soul and awakens the wish to be able to act that way too. Even children in their middle years feel this impression, and duties should never be presented to them in any other way.
412 nature of human reason. Moral laws are supposed to hold for every rational being in general. We must therefore derive them from the general concept of a rational being as such. In this way we must first present morality completely, independently of anthropology, as pure philosophy—that is, as metaphysics—even though morality needs anthropology for its application to human beings. A complete presentation is quite possible in this kind of wholly separate knowledge. We must be fully aware that without possessing this metaphysics, we cannot accurately determine, for theoretical judgment, what makes duty moral in everything that conforms to duty. More than that: even in ordinary practical use, especially in moral instruction, it is impossible to ground morals on their genuine principles without it. We cannot thereby produce pure moral dispositions and plant them in people's minds for the greatest good of the world.
In this treatment, however, we want to advance through the natural stages beyond what we did before. We are not simply moving from ordinary moral judgment—which here deserves great respect—to philosophical judgment. We are moving from a popular philosophy, which can go no farther than it can grope its way by means of examples, all the way to metaphysics. Metaphysics lets nothing empirical hold it back. Since it must measure out the whole range of rational knowledge of this kind, it may go as far as ideas where even examples abandon us. To make this advance, we must trace and clearly present the practical power of reason, from its general rules for determining action to the point where the concept of duty arises from it.
Everything in nature works according to laws. Only a rational being can act according to the thought of laws—that is, according to principles—or has a will. Since deriving actions from laws requires reason, the will is nothing other than practical reason. If reason invariably determines the will, the actions of such a being that are recognized as objectively necessary are also subjectively necessary. That is, the will is a capacity to choose only what reason, independently of inclination, recognizes as practically necessary, or good. But suppose reason alone does not sufficiently determine the will. Suppose it is still subject to subjective conditions—certain incentives—that do not always agree with the objective ones. In
413 short, suppose the will is not in itself fully in line with reason, as is actually the case with human beings. Then actions recognized as objectively necessary are subjectively contingent. Determining such a will according to objective laws is constraint. That is, the relation of objective laws to a will that is not thoroughly good is thought of as determining the will of a rational being through reasons, although this will does not, by its nature, necessarily follow those reasons.
The thought of an objective principle, insofar as it constrains a will, is called a command of reason. The formula of the command is called an imperative.
All imperatives are expressed with an ought. In this way they indicate the relation of an objective law of reason to a will that is not necessarily determined by it because of its subjective makeup—a constraint. They say that doing or not doing something would be good. But they say this to a will that does not always do something simply because it is presented as good to do. What is practically good determines the will through the ideas of reason. It does so not through subjective causes, but objectively: through reasons valid for every rational being as such. It differs from what is pleasant. The pleasant influences the will only through sensation, from merely subjective causes that hold only for this or that person's senses, not as a principle of reason valid for everyone.*)
*) The dependence of the capacity for desire on sensations is called inclination, and so inclination always indicates a need. The dependence on principles of reason of a will that can be contingently determined is called an interest. Interest therefore exists only in a dependent will, which does not always conform to reason of its own accord. We cannot think of the divine will as having an interest. But even the human will can take an interest in something without acting from interest. The first means a practical interest in the action; the second, an interest based on feeling in the object of the action. The first indicates only the will's dependence on principles of reason in themselves. The second indicates its dependence on those principles in the service of inclination: reason merely supplies the practical rule for meeting the need of inclination. In the first case, the action interests me; in the second, the object of the action does, insofar as it is pleasant to me. In the first section we saw that an action from duty must be considered in terms not of interest in its object, but only of interest in the action itself and its principle in reason, the law.
414 A perfectly good will would therefore also be subject to objective laws of the good. But we could not think of it as constrained by them to act in accordance with law. By its own subjective makeup, it can be determined only by the thought of the good. So no imperatives hold for the divine will, or for any holy will. Ought is out of place here, because willing already necessarily agrees with the law of its own accord. Imperatives are therefore only formulas expressing the relation between objective laws of willing in general and the subjective imperfection of the will of this or that rational being—for example, the human will.
All imperatives command either hypothetically or categorically. Hypothetical imperatives present a possible action as practically necessary as a means of reaching something else that we will, or at least might will. A categorical imperative would present an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other end.
Every practical law presents a possible action as good, and therefore as necessary for a subject whose actions can be determined by reason. So all imperatives are formulas for determining the action that is necessary according to the principle of a will that is good in some way. If the action would be good only as a means to something else, the imperative is hypothetical. If the action is presented as good in itself, and therefore as necessary in a will that in itself conforms to reason, as that will's principle, the imperative is categorical.
The imperative thus says which action within my power would be good. It presents the practical rule in relation to a will that does not immediately act simply because the action is good. This is partly because the subject does not always know that it is good. It is also partly because, even if the subject did know this, the subject's maxims might still conflict with the objective principles of practical reason.
The hypothetical imperative therefore says only that the action is good for some possible or actual aim. In the first
415 case it is a practical principle for a possible goal; in the second, a practical principle for an actual goal. The categorical imperative declares the action objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any aim or any other end. It counts as an unconditionally necessary practical principle.
Whatever is possible through the powers of any rational being can also be thought of as a possible aim for some will. So there are infinitely many principles of action that present an action as necessary for achieving a possible aim it can bring about. All sciences have some practical part. It consists of problems involving an end that is possible for us, and imperatives stating how to reach it. These can therefore be called imperatives of skill in general. Here the question is not at all whether the end is rational and good, but only what we must do to reach it. A doctor's instructions for making a person thoroughly healthy and a poisoner's instructions for killing that person reliably have equal worth in this respect: each serves to achieve its aim completely. In early youth we do not know what ends we may encounter in life. So parents mainly try to have their children learn many different things. They take care to develop their children's skill in using means for all sorts of freely chosen ends. They cannot tell whether any one of these will actually become their child's aim in the future, though the child might have it someday. This concern is so great that they generally neglect to develop and correct their children's judgment about the worth of the things they might choose as ends.
Still, there is one end that we can assume is actual for all rational beings insofar as imperatives apply to them—that is, as dependent beings. This is an aim that they do not merely possibly have. We can safely assume that they all have it by a natural necessity: the aim of happiness. The hypothetical imperative that presents an action as practically necessary as a means to promote happiness concerns an actual goal. It must be presented as necessary not just for an uncertain, merely possible aim, but for an aim we can safely assume in every human being independently of experience,
416 because it belongs to human nature. Now skill in choosing the means to one's own greatest well-being can be called prudence *) in the narrowest sense. So the imperative that concerns choosing means to one's own happiness—that is, the rule of prudence—is still hypothetical. It commands the action not without qualification, but only as a means to another aim.
Finally, there is an imperative that commands a kind of conduct directly, without making any other aim achievable through that conduct its underlying condition. This imperative is categorical. It concerns not the content of the action and what is to result from it, but the form and the principle from which the action itself follows. What is essentially good in the action lies in the disposition, whatever the outcome may be. We may call this the imperative of morality.
Willing according to these three kinds of principles is also clearly distinguished by the differences in how the will is constrained. To make this difference noticeable too, I think the most suitable names, in their order, would be rules of skill, advice of prudence, and commands (laws) of morality. Only a law carries the concept of an unconditional necessity that is objective and therefore universally valid. Commands are laws that must be obeyed—that is, followed even against inclination. Advice does involve necessity, but a necessity that can hold only under a subjective, contingent condition: whether this or that person counts this or that as part of their happiness. By contrast, no condition limits the categorical imperative. As absolutely necessary, although practically so, it can quite properly be called a command. We could also call the first kind of imperative technical (belonging to an art), the
*) The word prudence is used in two senses. In the first it may be called worldly prudence; in the second, personal prudence. The first is the skill of influencing other people so as to use them for one's own aims. The second is the insight needed to unite all these aims for one's own lasting advantage. The second is really what gives even the first its value. Someone who is prudent in the first way but not in the second might better be called clever and crafty, but still imprudent overall.
417 second pragmatic *) (concerning well-being), and the third moral (belonging to free conduct in general, that is, to morals).
The question now arises: how are all these imperatives possible? This does not ask how the action commanded by the imperative can be carried out. It asks only how we can think of the constraint on the will that the imperative expresses in setting the task. How an imperative of skill is possible hardly needs a separate discussion. Whoever wills the end also wills the indispensably necessary means to it that are within their power, insofar as reason has a decisive influence on their actions. As far as willing is concerned, this statement is analytic. For when I will an object as an effect of my action, I already think of my causality as an acting cause—that is, my use of means. The imperative draws the concept of the actions necessary for this end out of the very concept of willing this end. Determining the means themselves for an intended aim does require synthetic statements. But these do not concern the basis for making the act of will actual; they concern making its object actual. For example, to divide a line into two equal parts by a reliable principle, I must draw two intersecting arcs from its endpoints. Mathematics teaches this only through synthetic statements. But suppose I know that only this action can bring about the intended effect. Then, if I fully will the effect, I also will the action required for it. This is an analytic statement. For thinking of something as an effect I can bring about in a certain way is exactly the same as thinking of myself as acting in that way to bring it about.
If it were only easy to give a definite concept of happiness, imperatives of prudence would agree entirely with those of skill and would be just as analytic. Here as there, we would say: whoever wills the end also wills—necessarily, in accordance with reason—the only means to it within
*) It seems to me that this is the most precise way to define the proper meaning of the word pragmatic. For sanctions are called pragmatic when they arise not strictly from the rights of states as necessary laws, but from concern for the general welfare. A history is written pragmatically when it makes people prudent, that is, teaches the world how to look after its advantage better than earlier generations did, or at least just as well.
418 their power. Unfortunately, though, the concept of happiness is so indefinite that everyone wishes to reach it, yet no one can ever say definitely and consistently what they really wish and will. The reason is this: all the elements that belong to the concept of happiness come from experience. Yet the idea of happiness requires an absolute whole, a maximum of well-being in my present condition and every future condition. Now even the most insightful and powerful being, if still finite, cannot form a definite concept of what it really wills here. Does someone will wealth? How much worry, envy, and persecution this might bring down on them! Do they will extensive knowledge and insight? Perhaps this would only sharpen their sight, showing them all the more terribly the evils that are still hidden from them and yet cannot be avoided. Or it might burden their desires, which already give them enough trouble, with still more needs. Do they will a long life? Who can guarantee that it would not be a long misery? Do they will at least health? How often bodily discomfort has kept someone from excesses that unlimited health would have let them fall into, and so on. In short, no one can use any principle to determine with complete certainty what will make them truly happy. That would require knowing everything. So we cannot act on definite principles in order to be happy. We can act only on advice drawn from experience—for example, about diet, thrift, courtesy, restraint, and so on—which experience teaches generally does the most to promote well-being. It follows that, strictly speaking, imperatives of prudence cannot command at all. They cannot present actions objectively as practically necessary. They should be seen as recommendations (consilia) rather than commands (praecepta) of reason. The task of determining reliably and universally which action will promote a rational being's happiness is completely unsolvable. So no imperative about happiness is possible that commands, in the strict sense, doing what makes us happy. Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of the imagination. It rests only on grounds drawn from experience, from which it is hopeless
419 to expect a determination of an action that would achieve the whole of what is actually an infinite series of consequences. Still, if we assume that the means to happiness could be reliably specified, this imperative of prudence would be an analytic practical statement. It differs from the imperative of skill only in this: for skill the end is merely possible, while for prudence it is given. Both command only the means to something that we assume we will as an end. So in both cases, the imperative that commands someone who wills the end to will the means is analytic. Thus there is also no difficulty about the possibility of such an imperative.
By contrast, how the imperative of morality is possible is undoubtedly the only question that needs solving. It is not hypothetical at all. So the necessity it presents as objective cannot rest on any presupposition, as it can with hypothetical imperatives. Here, however, we must always keep one thing in mind. No example, and therefore no experience, can establish whether any such imperative exists at all. We must worry that all those that seem categorical may secretly be hypothetical. For example, take the command: “You ought not to make deceitful promises.” Suppose we assume that the necessity of refraining from this is not just advice for avoiding some other evil. It does not mean, for instance: “You ought not to make lying promises, so that you do not lose your credit when the lie comes to light.” Instead, an action of this kind must be regarded as bad in itself, and so the imperative forbidding it is categorical. Still, no example can show with certainty that the will is determined here solely by the law, without any other incentive, even if that is how it seems. Fear of disgrace, or perhaps a vague worry about other dangers, may always secretly influence the will. Who can prove through experience that a cause does not exist, when experience teaches us nothing more than that we do not perceive it? In such a case, the so-called moral imperative, which as such appears categorical and unconditional, would in fact be only a pragmatic rule. It would draw our attention to our advantage and teach us only to look after it.
So we must investigate the possibility of a categorical imperative entirely independently of experience. Here we do not have the advantage
420 of having its actual existence given in experience. If we did, we would need to consider its possibility only to explain it, not to establish it. For now, though, we can see this much: only the categorical imperative has the force of a practical law. All the others can be called principles of the will, but not laws. What is necessary to do merely to reach an end of our choice can be regarded as contingent in itself. We can always free ourselves from the rule by giving up the aim. By contrast, the unconditional command leaves the will no choice to do the opposite. So it alone carries the kind of necessity we require in a law.
Second, there is also a very great source of difficulty in understanding the possibility of this categorical imperative, or law of morality. It is a synthetic practical statement*) independent of experience. Understanding the possibility of statements of this kind presents so much difficulty in theoretical knowledge that we can easily judge it will present no less in practical knowledge.
In tackling this problem, let us first try to see whether the mere concept of a categorical imperative might also supply its formula. This would contain the statement that alone can be a categorical imperative. For even once we know what such an absolute command says, understanding how it is possible will still require a separate, difficult effort. We will put that off until the last section.
When I think of a hypothetical imperative in general, I do not know in advance what it will contain until its condition is given to me. But when I think of a categorical imperative, I know at once what it contains. For besides the law, the imperative contains only the necessity that the maxim**) conform to this law,
*) Without presupposing a condition based on any inclination, I connect the deed with the will independently of experience, and therefore necessarily. This necessity is only objective, however: it falls under the idea of a reason that had complete power over all subjective motives. So this is a practical statement that does not analytically derive willing one action from another willing already presupposed—for we do not have such a perfect will. Instead, it connects willing an action directly with the concept of the will of a rational being, as something not contained in that concept.
**) A maxim is the subjective principle of acting. It must be distinguished from the objective principle, namely, the practical law. A maxim contains the practical rule that reason determines in accordance with the subject's conditions, often the subject's ignorance or inclinations. It is therefore the principle according to which the subject acts. The law, however, is the objective principle, valid for every rational being, and the principle according to which the subject ought to act—that is, an imperative.
421 and the law contains no condition that limits it. So nothing remains but the universality of a law in general, to which the maxim of the action must conform. This conformity alone is what the imperative actually presents as necessary.
There is therefore just one categorical imperative: Act only on a maxim that you can at the same time will to become a universal law.
Now suppose all imperatives of duty can be derived from this one imperative as their principle. Then at least we will be able to show what we mean by duty and what this concept is meant to express, even if we leave unsettled whether what we call duty might be an empty concept altogether.
The universality of the law according to which effects occur is what constitutes nature in the broadest sense, in terms of its form. That is, nature means the existence of things insofar as it is determined by universal laws. So the universal imperative of duty could also read: Act as if the maxim of your action were to become, through your will, a universal law of nature.
Let us now list some duties, following the usual division into duties to ourselves and to other people, and into perfect and imperfect duties.*)
1) Someone is weary of life because of a series of evils that have grown to the point of hopelessness. This person still
*) It is important to note here that I reserve the division of duties entirely for a future Metaphysics of Morals. The division here is therefore only a freely chosen one, to put my examples in order. Here, by a perfect duty, I mean one that permits no exception in the interest of inclination. In this sense I have not only external but also internal perfect duties. This runs against the usage accepted in the schools. But I do not intend to defend it here, since it makes no difference to my aim whether it is granted to me or not.
422 has enough use of reason to ask whether taking their own life might be contrary to duty to themselves. They now test whether the maxim of their action could become a universal law of nature. Their maxim is: “From self-love, I make it my principle to shorten my life when its continuation threatens more evil than it promises pleasure.” The only remaining question is whether this principle of self-love could become a universal law of nature. We soon see that a nature whose law was to destroy life through the very feeling whose purpose is to drive us to promote life would contradict itself. It could not exist as nature. So that maxim cannot possibly hold as a universal law of nature, and consequently conflicts completely with the supreme principle of all duty.
2) Someone else is driven by need to borrow money. They know very well that they will not be able to repay it. But they also see that no one will lend them anything unless they firmly promise to repay it at a specified time. They want to make such a promise. But they still have enough conscience to ask: “Isn't it forbidden and contrary to duty to get out of difficulty in this way?” Suppose they decided to do it anyway. Their maxim of action would be: “When I believe I need money, I will borrow money and promise to repay it, even though I know that will never happen.” Now this principle of self-love or personal advantage might well be compatible with my whole future well-being. But the question now is whether it is right. So I turn the demand of self-love into a universal law and put the question this way: “What would happen if my maxim became a universal law?” I immediately see that it could never hold as a universal law of nature and agree with itself. It would necessarily contradict itself. For a universal law allowing everyone who believes they are in need to promise whatever they please, intending not to keep the promise, would make promising itself, and whatever end one might have in it, impossible. No one would believe that anything had been promised to them. They would laugh at all such statements as empty pretense.
3) A third person finds in themselves a talent that, with some
423 development, could make them useful in all sorts of ways. But they find themselves in comfortable circumstances and prefer to pursue pleasure rather than work at extending and improving their natural gifts. Still, they ask whether their maxim of neglecting these gifts agrees not only with their tendency to seek amusement, but also with what is called duty. They see that nature could still exist under such a universal law. Human beings could let their talents rust, like the inhabitants of the South Seas, and intend to spend their lives only in idleness, amusement, and reproduction—in a word, enjoyment. But they cannot possibly will this to become a universal law of nature, or to be implanted in us as such a law through natural instinct. For as a rational being this person necessarily wills all their abilities to be developed, since these serve them, and are given to them, for all sorts of possible aims.
A fourth person is doing well but sees others struggling with great hardships, whom they could also help. They think: “What has that to do with me? Let everyone be as happy as heaven wills, or as they can make themselves. I will take nothing from them, and will not even envy them. But I have no wish to contribute anything to their well-being or to help them in need!” Now if this way of thinking became a universal law of nature, the human race could certainly still exist. It would doubtless do better than if everyone chattered about sympathy and goodwill, and even eagerly practiced them on occasion, yet also cheated wherever possible, sold people's rights, or otherwise damaged them. But although a universal law of nature could well exist according to that maxim, it is impossible to will such a principle to hold everywhere as a law of nature. For a will that decided this would conflict with itself. Many cases could arise in which the person needs the love and sympathy of others. Through such a law of nature, arising from their own will, they would rob themselves of all hope of the help they wish for.
These, then, are some of the many actual duties, or at least what we take to be duties. It is clear how their division follows from the one principle
424 stated above. We must be able to will that a maxim of our action become a universal law. This is the standard for judging the morality of the action in general. Some actions are such that their maxim cannot even be thought of as a universal law of nature without contradiction. Still less could we will that it should become one. Other actions do not involve this inner impossibility. But it is still impossible to will their maxim to be raised to the universality of a law of nature, because such a will would contradict itself. We can easily see that the first kind conflicts with strict or narrow duty, which allows no relaxation. The second conflicts only with broad duty, which carries merit. In this way, these examples fully present all duties in their dependence on the one principle, as regards the kind of obligation involved, not the object of their action.
Now whenever we break a duty, if we pay attention to ourselves, we find that we do not really will our maxim to become a universal law. That is impossible for us. Instead, we will that its opposite remain a universal law. We merely take the liberty of making an exception for ourselves, or even just for this occasion, in favor of our inclination. So if we considered everything from one and the same standpoint, namely reason, we would find a contradiction in our own will. A certain principle would be objectively necessary as a universal law, yet subjectively it should not hold universally but should allow exceptions. But we consider our action at one moment from the standpoint of a will entirely in line with reason, and at another from the standpoint of a will affected by inclination. So there is no actual contradiction here. There is, however, resistance by inclination to the rule of reason (antagonismus). This turns the principle's strict universality (universalitas) into mere general validity (generalitas), so that the practical principle of reason is supposed to meet the maxim halfway. Although our own impartial judgment cannot justify this, it still proves that we really do acknowledge the validity of the categorical imperative. With all our respect for it, we merely allow ourselves a few exceptions that seem to us insignificant and forced upon us.
425 We have at least shown this much: if duty is a concept that is to have meaning and give real laws for our actions, it can be expressed only in categorical imperatives, never in hypothetical ones. We have also clearly presented the content of the categorical imperative and made it definite enough for any use. This is already a great deal, since that imperative would have to contain the principle of all duty, if there is any such thing at all. But we have not yet reached the point of proving a priori that such an imperative actually exists: that there is a practical law that commands absolutely, on its own and without any incentives, and that following this law is a duty.
As we try to reach that point, one warning is extremely important. We must never think of trying to derive the reality of this principle from the particular character of human nature. Duty is supposed to be the practically unconditional necessity of an action. It must therefore hold for all rational beings to whom an imperative can apply at all. Only for that reason must it also be a law for every human will. By contrast, anything derived from humanity's particular natural constitution, from certain feelings and tendencies, or even, if possible, from a particular direction taken by human reason that need not hold for the will of every rational being, can give us a maxim, but not a law. It can give us a subjective principle, according to which we have a tendency and inclination to be allowed to act. It cannot give us an objective principle according to which we would be required to act even if all our tendencies, inclinations, and natural constitution opposed it. Indeed, the fewer subjective causes there are in favor of a duty, and the more there are against it, the more this shows the command's sublimity and inner dignity. Yet this does not in the least weaken the constraint imposed by the law or take anything away from its validity.
Here we see philosophy placed in a precarious position. It is supposed to stand firm, although it hangs from nothing in heaven and rests on nothing on earth. Here it must prove its purity as the keeper of its own laws, not as the herald of laws whispered to it by an implanted sense or by who knows what guardian nature. All such laws, however much better they may be
426 than nothing at all, can never supply the principles reason dictates. These must have their source entirely a priori, and with it their authority to command. They must expect nothing from human inclination, but everything from the supreme power of the law and the respect owed to it. Otherwise, they must condemn human beings to self-contempt and inward disgust.
Anything empirical is therefore not merely wholly unfit to be added to the principle of morality. It is also highly damaging to the purity of morals themselves. For the true worth of an absolutely good will, a worth beyond all price, consists precisely in this: the principle of its action is free from every influence of contingent grounds that only experience can supply. We cannot give too many or too frequent warnings against this carelessness, or even base way of thinking, that looks for the principle among empirical motives and laws. When human reason grows tired, it likes to rest on this cushion. Dreaming of sweet illusions, which make it embrace a cloud instead of Juno, it substitutes for morality a bastard patched together from parts of quite different origins. This looks like anything one wants to see in it—except virtue, to anyone who has once seen virtue in its true form.*)
So the question is this: is it a necessary law for all rational beings always to judge their actions by maxims that they can themselves will to serve as universal laws? If it is, then it must already be connected, entirely a priori, with the concept of the will of a rational being in general. To discover this connection, however much we resist, we must take a step beyond our present ground into metaphysics. We enter a part of it distinct from speculative philosophy: the metaphysics of morals.
*) To see virtue in its true form is simply to present morality stripped of every admixture of what belongs to the senses and of all the false decoration of reward or self-love. Anyone whose reason has not been completely spoiled for all abstraction can easily discover, with the slightest attempt, how much virtue then outshines everything else that appeals to the inclinations.
427 In a practical philosophy we are not concerned with accepting grounds for what happens. We are concerned with laws for what ought to happen, even if it never happens, that is, with objectively practical laws. So here we do not need to investigate the grounds for why something pleases or displeases. We do not need to ask how the pleasure of mere sensation differs from taste, or whether taste differs from a general satisfaction of reason. We do not need to ask what feeling of pleasure and displeasure rests on, or how desires and inclinations arise from it, and how maxims then arise from those through the cooperation of reason. All of that belongs to an empirical psychology, and an empirical psychology would form the second part of the doctrine of nature if it were treated as a philosophy of nature, insofar as that is founded on empirical laws. Here, though, we are speaking of the objectively practical law, and so of the relation of a will to itself, insofar as the will determines itself purely through reason. Anything that has a reference to the empirical then drops out by itself. For if reason by itself alone determines the conduct (and we now want to examine the possibility of exactly this), it must necessarily do so a priori.
The will is thought as a capacity to determine itself to act in accordance with the representation of certain laws. Such a capacity can be found only in rational beings. Now what serves the will as the objective ground of its self-determination is the end. When this end is given through reason alone, it must count equally for all rational beings. What instead contains only the ground of the possibility of the action whose effect is the end is called the means. The subjective ground of desire is the incentive, and the objective ground of willing is the motive. This gives the difference between subjective ends, which rest on incentives, and objective ends, which depend on motives that hold for every rational being. Practical principles are formal when they abstract from all subjective ends. They are material when they put these, and so certain incentives, at the ground. The ends that a rational being sets himself at will as effects of his action (material ends) are all only relative. Only their relation to a specially constituted faculty of desire in the subject gives them their worth. That worth is therefore never general, valid for all rational beings and for every act of willing, and necessary
428 principles, that is, practical laws, that it can offer. So all these relative ends are only the basis of hypothetical imperatives.
But suppose there were something whose existence in itself has an absolute value, something that could be the basis of definite laws as an end in itself. Then the basis of a possible categorical imperative, that is, of a practical law, would lie in that thing, and in it alone.
Now I say this: a human being, and in general every rational being, exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means to be used as this or that will pleases. In all of their actions, whether directed at themselves or at other rational beings, they must always be regarded at the same time as an end. All objects of inclinations have only a conditional value. If there were no inclinations, and no needs based on them, their object would have no value. The inclinations themselves, as the sources of need, have so little absolute value that nobody could wish to have them for their own sake. On the contrary, to be entirely free of them must be the universal wish of every rational being. So the value of all objects to be acquired through our action is always conditional. Beings whose existence rests not on our will but on nature still have only a relative value, as means, if they are beings without reason. That is why they are called things. Rational beings, on the other hand, are called persons, because their nature already marks them out as ends in themselves, that is, as something that must not be used merely as a means. And so, to that extent, it limits all arbitrary choice (and is an object of respect). These, then, are not merely subjective ends, whose existence, as an effect of our action, has a value for us. They are objective ends, that is, things whose existence is itself an end. And it is an end of such a kind that no other end can be put in its place, an end that these things would then serve merely as means. For without this, nothing of absolute value would be found anywhere at all. But if all value were conditional, and therefore contingent, no supreme practical principle could be found anywhere for reason.
So if there is to be a supreme practical principle, and, with regard to the human will, a categorical imperative, it must be one that comes from the idea of what is necessarily an end for everyone because it is an end in itself, and that forms an objective
429 principle of the will, and so can serve as a universal practical law. The basis of this principle is: rational nature exists as an end in itself. This is how a human being necessarily thinks of their own existence. To that extent it is a subjective principle of human actions. But every other rational being also thinks of their existence in this way, on the very same basis in reason that holds for me*). So it is at the same time an objective principle, from which, as a supreme practical basis, all laws of the will must be able to be derived. The practical imperative will therefore be this: Act so that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of anyone else, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means. Let us see whether this can be carried out.
To stay with the earlier examples:
First, by the concept of necessary duty to oneself, a person who is considering suicide will ask themselves whether their action can be compatible with the idea of humanity as an end in itself. If they destroy themselves to escape a burdensome condition, they are using a person merely as a means to keep up a bearable condition until the end of life. But a human being is not a thing. So a human being is not something that can be used merely as a means. In all their actions, they must always be regarded as an end in itself. So I cannot dispose of the human being in my own person by maiming, ruining, or killing them. (I must pass over here the closer definition of this principle that would prevent all misunderstanding, for example about having limbs cut off to save myself, or about the danger I expose my life to in order to preserve my life, and so on. That belongs to morality proper.)
Second, as for necessary or owed duty to others: a person who intends to make a lying promise to others will see at once that they want to use another human being merely as a means, without that person at the same time containing the end in themselves. For the person I want to use for my own purposes by such a promise cannot possibly agree to my way of treating them,
*) I set up this proposition here as a postulate. The reasons for it will be found in the last section.
430 and so cannot contain the end of this action in themselves. This conflict with the principle, where other people are concerned, is clearer when one brings in examples of attacks on the freedom and property of others. There it is plainly evident that a person who violates the rights of human beings means to use the persons of others merely as means. They do not take into account that others, as rational beings, should always be valued at the same time as ends, that is, only as beings who must also be able to contain in themselves the end of that very same action*).
Third, as for contingent (meritorious) duty to oneself, it is not enough that the action does not conflict with humanity in our person as an end in itself. It must also harmonize with it. Now humanity has natural capacities for greater perfection. They belong to nature's end for humanity in us as subjects. Neglecting them could perhaps be compatible with the preservation of humanity as an end in itself, but not with the furthering of this end.
Fourth, as for meritorious duty to others: the natural end that all human beings have is their own happiness. Now humanity could indeed continue to exist if no one contributed anything to the happiness of others, provided they did not deliberately take anything away from it. But this would be only a negative agreement, not a positive one, with humanity as an end in itself, if everyone also failed to strive, as far as they can, to further the ends of others. For the subject who is an end in itself must have ends that are, as far as possible, also my ends, if that idea is to have its full effect in me.
This principle of humanity, and of every rational nature in general, as an end in itself (which is the supreme limiting
*) Let no one think that the trivial saying "What you do not want done to you," and so on, can serve here as a guide or principle. For it is only derived from that principle, and with various limits. It cannot be a universal law, because it does not contain the basis of duties to oneself, or of duties of love toward others (for many a person would gladly agree that others should not do them good, if only they were excused from doing good to others), and finally not of owed duties toward one another. For on this basis the criminal would argue against the judges who punish them, and so on.
431 condition of the freedom of each human being's actions) is not borrowed from experience. There are two reasons. First, it is universal, since it applies to all rational beings in general, and no experience is enough to settle anything about that. Second, in it humanity is presented not as an end of human beings (subjectively), that is, not as an object that people of their own accord actually make their end. It is presented as an objective end, one that is meant, as a law, to be the supreme limiting condition of all subjective ends, whatever ends we may have. So it must arise from pure reason. For the basis of all practical lawgiving lies objectively in the rule and in the form of universality, which makes it capable of being a law (at least a law of nature). That is according to the first principle. Subjectively, however, it lies in the end. But the subject of all ends is every rational being, as an end in itself. That is according to the second principle. From this now follows the third practical principle of the will, as the supreme condition of its harmony with universal practical reason: the idea of the will of every rational being as a universally lawgiving will.
By this principle, all maxims are rejected that cannot be compatible with the will's own universal lawgiving. So the will is not simply subject to the law. It is subject to it in such a way that it must be seen as giving the law to itself, and for that very reason, in the first place, as subject to the law (of which it can regard itself as the author).
The imperatives in the earlier way of presenting them were these: the universal lawfulness of actions, resembling an order of nature; and the universal priority as ends of rational beings in themselves. These did exclude from their commanding authority every mixing in of some interest as an incentive, precisely because they were presented as categorical. But they were only assumed to be categorical, because one had to assume something of that kind if one wanted to explain the concept of duty. That there are practical propositions that command categorically could not be proved by itself, just as it cannot be done anywhere in this section, and so cannot yet be done here either. But one thing could have been done, namely this. The renunciation of all interest in willing from duty is the specific mark that distinguishes the categorical from the hypothetical imperative. That renunciation could have been indicated as well in the imperative itself, through
432 some provision that it contained. And this is what happens in the present third formula of the principle, namely the idea of the will of every rational being as a universally lawgiving will.
For if we think of such a will, then a will that stands under laws may still be bound to that law by means of some interest. But a will that is itself supremely lawgiving cannot possibly, to that extent, depend on any interest. For such a dependent will would itself still need another law, which would limit the interest of its self-love to the condition of being valid as a universal law.
So the principle of every human will, as a will that is universally lawgiving through all its maxims *), would fit the categorical imperative very well, if it were otherwise sound. It would fit it in this: precisely because of the idea of universal lawgiving, it is based on no interest, and so it alone among all possible imperatives can be unconditional. Or, better still, we can turn the proposition around: if there is a categorical imperative (that is, a law for the will of every rational being), it can only command us to do everything from the maxim of our will as the will of one who could at the same time have itself, as universally lawgiving, for its object. For only then are the practical principle and the imperative that one obeys unconditional, because it can have no interest at all as its basis.
Now it is no wonder, when we look back on all the efforts ever made to find the principle of morality, why they all had to fail. People saw human beings as bound to laws by their duty. It never occurred to them that human beings are subject only to their own lawgiving, which is nevertheless universal, and that they are bound only to act in line with their own will, which, according to its natural end, is universally lawgiving. For if people thought of human beings only as subject to a law (whatever law it might be), then this law had to bring with it some
*) I can be excused here from giving examples to illustrate this principle, for those that first illustrated the categorical imperative and its formula can all serve the same purpose here.
433 interest as an attraction or a compulsion, because the law did not arise as law from their own will. Instead, this will was constrained by something else, in accordance with a law, to act in a certain way. By this entirely necessary consequence, though, all the work of finding a supreme basis of duty was lost beyond recovery. For what people got was never duty, but only the necessity of an action arising out of some interest. This interest might be one's own or someone else's. But then the imperative always had to turn out conditional, and it could not be suited at all to be a moral command. So I will call this principle the principle of the autonomy of the will, in contrast with every other principle, which I therefore count as heteronomy.
Every rational being must regard themselves, through all the maxims of their will, as universally lawgiving, so as to judge themselves and their actions from this point of view. This concept leads to another concept that is attached to it and is very fruitful, namely the concept of a realm of ends.
By a realm I mean the systematic union of different rational beings through common laws. Now laws determine ends according to their universal validity. So if we set aside the personal differences between rational beings, and likewise all the content of their private ends, we can think of a whole of all ends in systematic connection (both of the rational beings as ends in themselves, and of the particular ends that each may set for themselves). That is, we can think of a realm of ends, which is possible according to the principles above.
For all rational beings stand under the law that each of them should treat themselves and all others never merely as a means, but always at the same time as an end in itself. From this arises a systematic union of rational beings through common objective laws, that is, a realm. Because these laws have in view precisely the relation of these beings to one another as ends and means, this realm can be called a realm of ends (admittedly only an ideal).
A rational being belongs to the realm of ends as a member if they are universally lawgiving in it, but are also themselves subject to these laws. They belong to it as head if, as lawgiving, they are subject to no one else's will.
434 A rational being must always regard themselves as lawgiving in a realm of ends made possible by freedom of the will, whether as a member or as head. But they can hold the place of head not merely through the maxim of their will. They can hold it only if they are a completely independent being, without need and without any limit on a power that is adequate to their will.
Morality, then, consists in the relation of every action to the lawgiving through which alone a realm of ends is possible. This lawgiving must be found in every rational being themselves, and it must be able to arise from their will. The principle of this will is therefore never to act on a maxim unless it is also possible for that maxim to be a universal law. That is, to act only in such a way that the will can regard itself, through its maxim, as at the same time universally lawgiving. Now if the maxims do not already agree necessarily, by their very nature, with this objective principle of rational beings as universally lawgiving, then the necessity of acting according to that principle is called practical constraint, that is, duty. Duty does not apply to the head in the realm of ends, but it does apply to every member, and indeed to all of them in equal measure.
The practical necessity of acting by this principle, that is, duty, does not rest at all on feelings, impulses, and inclinations. It rests solely on the relation of rational beings to one another. In this relation the will of a rational being must always be regarded at the same time as lawgiving, because otherwise they could not think of these beings as ends in themselves. So reason relates every maxim of the will, as universally lawgiving, to every other will, and also to every action toward oneself. It does this not for the sake of any other practical motive or future advantage, but from the idea of the dignity of a rational being, who obeys no law except the one they at the same time give themselves.
In the realm of ends, everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent. Whatever, on the other hand, is above all price, and so allows no equivalent, has a dignity.
What relates to the general inclinations and needs of human beings has a market price. What, even without presupposing a need, suits a certain taste, that is, a liking for the
435 mere purposeless play of the powers of our mind, has an affection price. But what makes up the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself has not merely a relative value, that is, a price, but an inner value, that is, dignity.
Now morality is the condition under which alone a rational being can be an end in itself, because only through it is it possible to be a lawgiving member in the realm of ends. So morality, and humanity so far as it is capable of morality, is the only thing that has dignity. Skill and diligence in work have a market price. Wit, lively imagination, and humor have an affection price. Faithfulness in promises and goodwill from principles (not from instinct), on the other hand, have an inner value. Neither nature nor art contains anything that could take their place if they were lacking. For their value does not consist in the effects that arise from them, in the advantage and benefit they produce. It consists in the attitudes of mind, that is, the maxims of the will, which are ready to show themselves in this way in actions, even if success did not favor them. These actions also need no recommendation from any subjective disposition or taste to look on them with immediate favor and liking, and no immediate tendency or feeling for them. They present the will that carries them out as an object of immediate respect. Nothing but reason is required for this, in order to impose them on the will, and not to get them from it by flattery, which would in any case be a contradiction where duties are concerned. This valuation therefore shows the value of such a way of thinking to be dignity. It places that way of thinking infinitely above all price. It can in no way be reckoned or compared with any price without, so to speak, doing violence to its holiness.
And what is it, then, that entitles the morally good attitude of mind, or virtue, to make such high claims? It is nothing less than the share that it gives the rational being in universal lawgiving. Through this share the being becomes fit to be a member in a possible realm of ends. Their own nature had already destined them for this, as an end in itself and for that very reason as lawgiving in the realm of ends, as free with regard to all laws of nature, obeying only those that they themselves give, and according to which their maxims can belong to a universal lawgiving (to which they at the same time
436 subject themselves). For nothing has a value except the one that the law determines for it. But the lawgiving itself, which determines all value, must for that very reason have a dignity, that is, an unconditional, incomparable value. For this value the word respect alone supplies the fitting expression of the valuation that a rational being must make of it. Autonomy is therefore the basis of the dignity of human nature and of every rational nature.
The three ways given of presenting the principle of morality are, at bottom, just so many formulas of one and the same law. Any one of them unites the other two within itself, by itself. Still, there is a difference among them. It is more subjective than objectively practical: its point is to bring an idea of reason closer to intuition (by a certain analogy), and in this way closer to feeling. For all maxims have
1) a form, which consists in universality. Here the formula of the moral imperative is expressed this way: maxims must be chosen as if they were to hold as universal laws of nature;
2) a matter, namely an end. Here the formula says: the rational being, as an end by its nature, and so as an end in itself, must serve every maxim as the limiting condition of all merely relative and arbitrary ends;
3) a complete determination of all maxims by that formula, namely: all maxims, out of their own lawgiving, should harmonize into a possible realm of ends as a realm of nature*). The progress here goes as if through the categories of the unity of the form of the will (its universality), the plurality of the matter (of the objects, that is, of the ends), and the allness or totality of the system of them. But one does better, in moral judging, always to proceed by the strict method and to take as the basis the universal formula of the categorical imperative: act on the maxim that can at the same time make itself a universal law
*) Teleology considers nature as a realm of ends. Morality considers a possible realm of ends as a realm of nature. There, the realm of ends is a theoretical idea for explaining what exists. Here, it is a practical idea for bringing about what does not exist but can become real through what we do and refrain from doing, and indeed in keeping with this very idea.
437 can make. But if we also want the moral law to gain entry, it is very useful to run one and the same action through the three concepts mentioned. That brings the action, as far as possible, closer to intuition.
We can now end where we began: with the concept of an unconditionally good will. A will is absolutely good if it cannot be evil. So its maxim, when made a universal law, can never conflict with itself. This principle is therefore also its supreme law: always act on that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will. This is the only condition under which a will can never be in conflict with itself. And such an imperative is categorical. The will's validity as a universal law for possible actions is analogous to the universal connection of the existence of things under universal laws, which is the formal side of nature in general. So the categorical imperative can also be expressed this way: Act on maxims that can at the same time have themselves as universal laws of nature for their object. This, then, is what the formula of an absolutely good will is like.
Rational nature stands out from the rest by setting an end for itself. This end would be the matter of every good will. But in the idea of a will that is absolutely good, without any limiting condition (the achievement of this or that end), we must set aside completely every end to be brought about. Such an end would make every will good only relatively. So here the end must be thought of not as one to be brought about but as a self-standing end, and therefore only negatively. That is, it is an end that must never be acted against. It must therefore never be valued merely as a means in any act of willing, but always at the same time as an end. This end can be nothing other than the subject of all possible ends itself. For that subject is also the subject of a possible absolutely good will, and such a will cannot, without contradiction, be ranked below any other object. The principle: act toward every rational being (yourself and others) so that in your maxim it counts at the same time as an end in itself, is therefore basically the same as the principle: act on a maxim that, for every rational being,
438 at the same time contains its own universal validity within itself. At bottom the two are one and the same. For I must limit my maxim, in using means for any end, by the condition that it be valid universally as a law for every subject. That says just as much as this: the subject of ends, that is, the rational being itself, must never be made the basis of the maxims of action merely as a means. It must be made their basis as the supreme limiting condition on the use of all means—that is, always at the same time as an end.
It follows beyond dispute from this that every rational being, as an end in itself, must be able to regard itself as also giving universal law with respect to all the laws to which it may ever be subject. For this very suitability of its maxims for universal lawgiving marks it out as an end in itself. It also follows that its dignity (prerogative) above all mere natural beings brings with it this requirement: it must always take its maxims from its own standpoint and, at the same time, from the standpoint of every other rational being as a lawgiving being. (Such beings are for this reason also called persons.) In this way a world of rational beings (mundus intelligibilis) is possible as a realm of ends, and indeed through the lawgiving of all persons themselves, as members. So every rational being must act as if, through its maxims, it were always a lawgiving member in the universal realm of ends. The formal principle of these maxims is: act as if your maxim were also to serve as a universal law (for all rational beings). A realm of ends is therefore possible only by analogy with a realm of nature. Yet the first is possible only through maxims, that is, rules that one imposes on oneself, and the second only through laws of causes that produce effects under outside compulsion. Even so, we also call the whole of nature a realm of nature, although we regard it as a machine. We call it that on this ground: so far as it is related to rational beings as its ends. Such a realm of ends would really come about through maxims whose rule the categorical imperative prescribes to all rational beings, if they were followed universally. However, a rational being cannot count on this: that if it follows this maxim punctually itself, every other being will therefore be faithful to the same maxim. Nor can it count on this: that the realm of nature and its purposive arrangement will harmonize with it, as a suitable member, toward a realm of ends possible through that being itself—that is, that its expectation of happiness
439 will be favored. Even so, that law remains in full force, because it commands categorically: act on the maxims of a universally lawgiving member of a merely possible realm of ends. And here lies the very paradox. It is that the mere dignity of humanity as rational nature, with no other end or advantage to be reached through it—and so mere respect for a bare idea—should nevertheless serve as a rule for the will that never lets up. It is also that the loftiness of the maxim consists precisely in its independence from all such incentives, and so does the worthiness of every rational subject to be a lawgiving member in the realm of ends. Otherwise that subject would have to be pictured as subject only to the law of nature that governs its needs. Suppose the realm of nature and the realm of ends were both thought of as united under one head. Then the realm of ends would no longer remain a bare idea but would gain true reality. This would indeed give it the addition of a strong incentive, but never an increase in its inner worth. For even so, this sole, unlimited lawgiver would still always have to be pictured as judging the worth of rational beings only by their unselfish conduct, which they prescribe to themselves purely from that idea. The essence of things does not change because of their external relations. What alone makes up a human being's absolute worth, leaving those relations out of account, is the standard by which that human being must be judged—by anyone at all, even by the highest being. Morality is therefore the relation of actions to the autonomy of the will, that is, to possible universal lawgiving through the will's maxims. An action that can coexist with the autonomy of the will is permitted. One that does not agree with it is not permitted. A will whose maxims necessarily agree with the laws of autonomy is a holy will, an absolutely good will. The dependence of a will that is not absolutely good on the principle of autonomy (moral constraint) is obligation. Obligation therefore cannot be applied to a holy being. The objective necessity of an action from obligation is called duty.
From what was just said, it is now easy to explain how this happens. The concept of duty makes us think of being subject to the law. Yet by that very concept we also, at the same time,
440 picture a certain loftiness and dignity in the person who fulfills all their duties. For there is indeed no loftiness in that person in so far as they are subject to the moral law. But there is loftiness in so far as, with respect to that same law, they are at the same time lawgiving, and are subordinate to it only for that reason. We also showed above that neither fear nor inclination, but only respect for the law, is the incentive that can give an action moral worth. Our own will, in so far as it would act only under the condition of a universal lawgiving possible through its maxims—this will, which is possible for us in the idea—is the proper object of respect. The dignity of humanity consists in just this capacity to give universal law, though on the condition of also being itself subject to this same lawgiving.
The autonomy of the will
as the supreme principle of morality.
Autonomy of the will is the quality of the will by which it is a law to itself, independent of every quality of the objects of willing. The principle of autonomy is therefore: to choose only in such a way that the maxims of one's choice are also included, in that same willing, as a universal law. That this practical rule is an imperative—that is, that the will of every rational being is necessarily bound to it as a condition—cannot be proved by merely analyzing the concepts found in it, because it is a synthetic proposition. We would have to go beyond the cognition of objects and on to a critique of the subject, that is, of pure practical reason. For this synthetic proposition, which commands apodictically, must be capable of being cognized entirely a priori. But that task does not belong in the present section. That the principle of autonomy just stated is the only principle of morality, however, can very well be shown by merely analyzing the concepts of morality. For such analysis finds that the principle of morality must be a categorical imperative, and that this imperative commands nothing more or less than precisely this autonomy.
441 The heteronomy of the will
as the source of all counterfeit principles of morality.
If the will looks for the law that is to determine it in something else than the fitness of its maxims for its own universal lawgiving—that is, if it goes beyond itself and looks for the law in the nature of one of its objects—the result is always heteronomy. Then the will does not give the law to itself. Instead the object gives the law to the will, through its relation to the will. Whether this relation rests on inclination or on ideas of reason, it allows only hypothetical imperatives to be possible: I ought to do something because I want something else. By contrast, the moral, and therefore categorical, imperative says: I ought to act in such and such a way, even if I wanted nothing else. For example, the first says: I ought not to lie, if I want to keep my honor. The second says: I ought not to lie, even if it would bring me not the slightest disgrace. The latter, then, must set aside every object so completely that the object has no influence at all on the will. The point is that practical reason (will) should not merely manage an interest that is not its own, but simply show its own commanding authority as supreme lawgiving. So, for example, I ought to try to promote the happiness of others, not as if its existence mattered to me (whether through direct inclination, or through some pleasure taken in it indirectly, by way of reason), but only because the maxim that excludes it cannot be included in one and the same willing as a universal law.
Division
of all possible principles of morality from the assumed basic concept of heteronomy.
As long as human reason lacks a critique, it does here what it does everywhere in its pure use: it first tries every possible wrong way before it succeeds in hitting on the one true way.
All principles that one may take from this standpoint are either empirical or rational. The first, which come from the principle
442 of happiness, rest on physical or moral feeling. The second, which come from the principle of perfection, rest either on the rational concept of perfection as a possible effect, or on the concept of a self-standing perfection (the will of God) as the cause that determines our will.
Empirical principles are altogether unsuited to be a foundation for moral laws. For the universality with which these laws are supposed to hold for all rational beings without distinction, and the unconditional practical necessity this places on them, drops away if their ground is taken from the particular constitution of human nature or from the accidental circumstances in which human nature is placed. Still, the principle of one's own happiness is the most objectionable of all. This is not merely because it is false, and because experience contradicts the claim that well-being always matches good conduct. It is also not merely because it contributes nothing to establishing morality, since it is one thing to make someone happy and another to make them good, and one thing to make them prudent and sharp about their own advantage and another to make them virtuous. It is most objectionable because it puts incentives under morality that are more likely to undermine it and destroy all its loftiness. They put the motives for virtue in the same class as those for vice. They teach only how to calculate better, and they wipe out entirely the specific difference between the two. On the other hand, take moral feeling, this supposed special sense*). To be sure, appealing to it is shallow. People who cannot think believe that feeling will see them through, even where only universal laws are at stake. Feelings also differ from one another infinitely in degree, by nature, so they give no equal standard of good and evil. And no one can judge validly for others by their own feeling at all. Even so, moral feeling stays closer to morality and its dignity. It does virtue the honor of ascribing the liking and high esteem for it to virtue directly, and it does not tell it, so to speak,
*) I count the principle of moral feeling under that of happiness, because every empirical interest promises a contribution to well-being through the mere pleasantness that something affords, whether this happens directly and without an eye to advantages, or with regard to them. Likewise, along with Hutcheson, one must count the principle of sympathy with the happiness of others under the same moral sense assumed by Hutcheson.
443 to its face that what ties us to it is not its beauty but only advantage.
Among the rational, or reason-based, grounds of morality is the ontological concept of perfection. This concept is empty and indeterminate, and so useless for finding, in the immense field of possible reality, the greatest sum that suits us. When it tries to tell the reality in question here apart specifically from every other, it has an unavoidable tendency to turn in a circle, and it cannot avoid secretly presupposing the very morality it is supposed to explain. Even so, it is better than the theological concept, which derives morality from a divine, most perfect will. It is better not merely because we do not, after all, intuit that will's perfection but can derive it only from our own concepts, of which the concept of morality is the foremost. It is better because of what follows if we do not do this. (If we did do it, it would be a gross circle in explaining.) The concept of that will that would then remain to us is built from the qualities of desire for honor and for domination, joined with fearful ideas of power and eagerness for revenge. It would have to be the foundation for a system of morals directly opposed to morality.
But if I had to choose between the concept of the moral sense and that of perfection in general (neither of which at least does damage to morality, although they are quite unfit to support it as foundations), I would decide for the latter. The reason is that it at least draws the decision of the question away from sensibility and before the court of pure reason. It decides nothing even there. Still, it keeps in reserve, unfalsified, the indeterminate idea (of a will that is good in itself) for closer determination.
For the rest, I believe I can be spared a lengthy refutation of all these doctrines. It is so easy. It is presumably also so well understood even by those whose office requires them to declare for one of these theories (because audiences do not much like a postponement of judgment) that the effort would be wasted. What interests us more here is to know this: that these principles everywhere set up nothing but heteronomy of the will as the first ground of morality, and for that very reason must necessarily miss their aim.
444 Everywhere that an object of the will must be laid down as the basis in order to prescribe to the will the rule that is to determine it, the rule is nothing but heteronomy. The imperative is conditional, namely: if or because one wants this object, one ought to act in such and such a way. So it can never command morally, that is, categorically. The object may determine the will by means of inclination, as in the principle of one's own happiness, or by means of reason directed at the objects of our possible willing in general, as in the principle of perfection. Either way, the will never determines itself directly, through the idea of the action alone. It is determined only through the incentive that the foreseen effect of the action has on the will. I ought to do something because I want something else. And here yet another law must be laid down as the basis in me as subject, according to which I necessarily want this something else. That law in turn needs an imperative to limit this maxim. For the impulse that the idea of an object possible through our powers is supposed to exert on the subject's will, according to the subject's natural makeup, belongs to the nature of the subject. It may belong to sensibility (inclination and taste), or to understanding and reason, which by the particular constitution of their nature exercise themselves with pleasure on an object. So it would really be nature that gives the law. Not only must that law be known and proved through experience, which makes it contingent in itself and so unfit to be an apodictic practical rule, as the moral rule must be. It is also always only heteronomy of the will: the will does not give itself the law, but a foreign impulse gives it the law, by means of a nature of the subject that is attuned to the will's receptivity.
The absolutely good will, whose principle must be a categorical imperative, will therefore be undetermined with respect to all objects. It will contain only the form of willing in general, and indeed as autonomy. That is, the fitness of the maxim of every good will to make itself a universal law is itself the only law that the will of every rational being imposes on itself, without putting any incentive or interest beneath it as a ground.
How such a synthetic practical a priori proposition is possible, and why it is necessary, is a task whose solution no longer lies within the limits of the metaphysics of morals. Nor have we
445 asserted its truth here, much less claimed to have a proof of it in our power. We showed only, by developing the concept of morality that is now generally current, that an autonomy of the will unavoidably attaches to it, or rather underlies it. Whoever therefore holds morality to be something, and not a fanciful idea without truth, must at the same time grant the principle of morality that was stated. This section was therefore, just like the first, merely analytic. Now, that morality is no figment of the mind follows if the categorical imperative, and with it the autonomy of the will, is true and absolutely necessary as an a priori principle. This requires a possible synthetic use of pure practical reason. But we may not venture on that use without first sending ahead a critique of this faculty of reason itself. In the last section we have to present the main outlines of that critique, enough for our purpose.
About this section
Section II is part of Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant. This page sets the German original beside 2 direct-source translations, so any line can be checked against the source. It is section 3 of 4 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
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