Critique of Practical Reason - Analytic: Chapter Two

Analytic: Chapter Two

Kant points out that every motive has an intended effect on the world. When it is desire that is driving us, we first examine the possibilities that the world leaves open to us, selecting some effect at which we wish to aim. Acting on the practical moral law does not work in this way. The only possible object of the practical law is the Good, since the Good is always an appropriate object for the practical law.

It is necessary to avoid the danger of understanding the practical law simply as the law that tells us to pursue the good, and try to understand the Good as that at which the practical law aims. If we do not understand the good in terms of the practical law, then we need some other analysis by which to understand it. The only alternative is to mistakenly understand the Good as the pursuit of pleasure and evil as the production of pain to oneself.

This sort of confusion between the Good and pleasure also arises when we confuse the concepts of good versus evil with the concepts of good versus bad. The good, when contrasted with the bad, is really just pleasure. But this is not the case with the good, in the sense of morally good. A morally good person may suffer from a painful disease (bad), but he does not therefore become a bad (evil) person. If a morally bad person is punished for his crimes, it may be bad (painful) for him, but good and just in the moral sense.

The error of all past philosophical investigations into morality is that they have attempted to define the moral in terms of the good rather than the other way around. In this way, they have all fallen victim to the same error of confusing pleasure with morality. If one desires the good, one will act to satisfy that desire, that is in order to produce pleasure.

The moral law, in Kant's view, is equivalent to the idea of freedom. Since the noumenal cannot be perceived, we can only know that something is morally right by intellectually considering whether a certain action that we wish to commit could be universally performed. Kant calls the idea that we can know what is right or wrong only through abstract reflection moral rationalism. This is to be contrasted with two alternative, mistaken approaches to moral epistemology: moral empiricism, which takes moral good and evil to be something we can apprehend from the world and moral mysticism, which takes morality to be a matter of sensing some supernatural property, such as the approbation of God. Although both positions are mistaken and harmful, according to Kant, moral empiricism is much more so because it is equivalent to the theory that the morally right is nothing more than the pursuit of pleasure.

In this chapter, Kant makes his clearest and most explicit formulation of the position he adopts with respect to the question of the fundamental nature of morality. Kant's position is that moral goodness, which consists in following the rule of the categorical imperative, is more basic to ethics than good consequences, and that it is the right motivations--an obligation to duty-- which is criterial for defining a person as good. Hence, Kant is a deontologist, in the terminology of contemporary philosophy, particularly that of analytic philosophy. He also takes a position on the important question of how we can distinguish what is right from what is wrong. Kant believes that we can never really be sure when we have witnessed a moral act, since the moral rightness of an act consists of its being caused in the right way from the noumenal world, which is by definition unknowable. Hence, he is a moral rationalist.