Led by Immanuel Kant
About this course
The fourth module of the Ethics paper presents the great rival to utilitarianism: Kant's attempt to ground morality in reason alone, owing nothing to desire or consequence.
Where Mill makes the right depend on the good — on producing happiness — Kant reverses the order entirely. The only thing good without qualification, he argues, is a good will; moral worth lies not in what an action achieves but in its being done from duty; and duty, if it commands at all, commands unconditionally — categorically, not "if you want happiness, then…". From the bare idea of such an unconditional law Kant derives his supreme principle, the categorical imperative, in its famous formulas: act only on a maxim you could will to be a universal law; treat humanity, in yourself and others, always as an end and never merely as a means; act as a self-legislating member of a kingdom of ends. Underneath lies the idea that gives the theory its grandeur — that every rational being is autonomous, the author of the law it obeys, and so possesses a dignity beyond all price, never to be sacrificed for the welfare of others.
The student leaves able to build and assess Kantian ethics — and holding the central division of the paper, between grounding the right in the good (Mill) and the right prior to the good (Kant) — as the inquiry turns from how to live to how to live together. They read Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals directly.
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Led by Immanuel Kant
The question
Can morality be grounded in reason alone, with no appeal to happiness or consequences? Kant argues that it must be. The only unconditional good is a good will; an action has moral worth when done from duty, not from inclination or for an outcome; and genuine duty commands categorically, never as a mere means to something we happen to want. From this he derives one supreme principle in several forms — universalise your maxim; treat persons always as ends and never as mere means; act as a legislator in a kingdom of ends — resting on the dignity of every rational being as a free, self-legislating author of the moral law. The module asks the student to weigh this against Mill, and to test it on the hard objections: that it is an empty formalism, that it forbids even the life-saving lie, that it slights the goodness of acting from love.