PHIL 120 · Ethics and Political Philosophy — The Good Will and the Categorical Imperative

Led by Immanuel Kant

The fourth module of the Cambridge Part IA Ethics paper, led by Kant. Against Mill's grounding of morality in happiness, Kant grounds it in reason alone. The module builds the Groundwork from the good will and the motive of duty, through the categorical imperative and its formulas — universal law, humanity as an end in itself, the kingdom of ends — to autonomy and freedom, and confronts the objections of formalism, rigorism, and the worth of acting from love.

1. Module 4 ○ Open

   The Good Will and the Categorical Imperative

   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.

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