Introduction

Kant's short treatise Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is by far the best known of his writings in moral philosophy. Its influence has been out of all proportion to its size; so too has been the amount of commentary, interpretation, criticism, and debate to which it has given rise. Yet we have little historical evidence about Kant's decision to write this treatise. Like the Critique of Practical Reason, it seems to have been almost a by-product of his plan to write a “metaphysics of morals,” the vicissitudes of which are outlined in the editorial introduction to The Metaphysics of Morals. Early in 1784 Kant's friends and associates began to mention in their correspondence his work on a “Prodromus” or “Prolegomena” to his metaphysics of morals. In September of that year Hamann reported that Kant had sent off the manuscript of his Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, and in April 1785 that he had received four copies of the book from his publisher in Halle.

Kant's reasons for writing a treatise preliminary to his metaphysics of morals are adequately explained within the Groundwork itself. Before the supreme principle of morality is applied to human nature it should be exhibited in its purity. Three years earlier, in the Critique of Pure Reason and in his lectures on ethics roughly contemporaneous with it, Kant had recognized that the principle for appraising actions as duties is the formal principle expressed in “the categorical imperative.”

Within a few years of the publication of his Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was recognized by his contemporaries as one of the seminal philosophers of modern times – indeed as one of the great philosophers of all time. This renown soon spread beyond German-speaking lands, and translations of Kant's work into English were published even before 1800. Since then, interpretations of Kant's views have come and gone and loyalty to his positions has waxed and waned, but his importance has not diminished. Generations of scholars have devoted their efforts to producing reliable translations of Kant into English as well as into other languages.

There are four main reasons for the present edition of Kant's writings:

1. Completeness. Although most of the works published in Kant's lifetime have been translated before, the most important ones more than once, only fragments of Kant's many important unpublished works have ever been translated. These include the Opus postumum, Kant's unfinished magnum opus on the transition from philosophy to physics; transcriptions of his classroom lectures; his correspondence; and his marginalia and other notes. One aim of this edition is to make a comprehensive sampling of these materials available in English for the first time.

2. Availability. Many English translations of Kant's works, especially those that have not individually played a large role in the subsequent development of philosophy, have long been inaccessible or out of print. Many of them, however, are crucial for the understanding of Kant's philosophical development, and the absence of some from English-language bibliographies may be responsible for erroneous or blinkered traditional interpretations of his doctrines by English-speaking philosophers.

Kant was drawn to philosophy through his interest in natural science, not through moral or political concerns. His systematic interests in practical philosophy were slow in developing, and in the beginning his theoretical discussions of morality were governed less by his substantive moral convictions than by concerns about the grounding of knowledge and the architectonic structure of a system of philosophy. Yet from early in his career, Kant did have distinctive and deeply held moral beliefs, formed partly, no doubt, by his pietistic religious upbringing, but profoundly influenced by modern Enlightenment culture and especially by the writings of Jean- Jacques Rousseau. In the end, Kant's mature thought was grounded on the primacy of the practical, and the critical philosophy is at least as much a moral outlook as it is a position on matters of knowledge, theory, or speculative metaphysics.

Among the works Kant published during the last decade of his life, the emphasis was heavily on practical topics – morality, religion, politics, education, pragmatic anthropology, the final end and historical destiny of the human species. Kant's critical writings on practical philosophy, here collected for the first time in a single volume, are equal in importance and influence to anything else in his philosophy, even the Critique of Pure Reason.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF MORAL THEORY: 1762–81

At the end of 1762 Kant submitted to the Prussian Royal Academy of Sciences a prize essay, Inquiry concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals (in the competition it finished second to an essay by Moses Mendelssohn).

Introduction

In 1796 Benjamin Constant, a French politician and author, published a pamphlet entitled Des réactions politiques. The following year a translation was published in the journal Frankreich im Fahr 1797, apparently edited by Karl Friedrich Cramer. In a note Cramer said that Constant had told him that Kant was the “German philosopher” he referred to as holding a view about lying that would make society impossible. Granting that he had “somewhere or other” put forward the view, Kant undertook to refute the “French philosopher's” conclusion that it would make civil society impossible. Kant's reply was published in the September issue of the Berliner Blätter, founded by Biester after publication of the Berlinische Monatsschrift had been discontinued. (See Biester's letters to Kant of August 5 and September 20, 1797, 12:191–2 and 200–1.)

In The Doctrine of Right, published in January 1797, Kant had included, in everyone's innate right to freedom, one's being authorized to communicate one's thoughts to others, to tell or promise them something “whether what he says is true and sincere or untrue and insincere; for it is entirely up to them whether they want to believe him or not.” Contractual rights are acquired by the two acts of promising and accepting; only then does failure to fulfill one's promise deprive another of what is his. However, Kant later distinguished between “what is only formally wrong and what is also materially wrong,” a distinction that “has many applications in the doctrine of right.”

On July 30, 1792, Kant wrote to Johann Erich Biester, editor of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, requesting that he return “as soon as possible” a manuscript, the four parts of which were to have appeared in four successive issues of the journal (AK 11:336). The manuscript was eventually published as Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Biester had obtained the Berlin censors' imprimatur for the treatise that became Book I of Religion but, despite his appeal from their decision, had been firmly denied permission to publish the treatise that became Book II. As Kant pointed out, the first treatise, without the others, could cut an “odd figure” in the journal. In place of it he offered to provide a strictly “moral” treatise, dealing with Christian Garve's criticism of Kant's moral principle in Part I of his Essays on Various Topics from Morals, Literature and Social Life (1792).

The treatise, as Kant first described it, never appeared. Instead, the reply to Garve became Part I of Kant's essay “On the Common Saying: That May Be True in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice,” which was published in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1793. Since Garve's criticism was, in part, that Kant's formal principle could not provide a motive for action, it could well be brought under the “common saying.” So too could Kant's contention against Hobbes, in Part II, that subjects have noncoercive rights against their sovereign, and his objection, in Part III, to Moses Mendelssohn's view that the human race will never make moral progress. As to why Kant chose to focus on this common saying and extend it, there is no hard evidence.

Introduction

Kant's review of Part I of Johann Heinrich Schulz's work (the full title of which is given in the text of the review) was published in a Königsberg journal, Rässonirenden Bücherverzeichnis. Part I of Schulz's work, like Kant's review of it, appeared in 1783. Part II was published in the same year, whereas Parts III and IV did not appear until 1790. The dates are of interest.

As for Kant's review, it is worth noting that he wrote it shortly before the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. A reviewer, Kant says, should first present briefly the author's position and then judge the work as a whole. Kant's judgment might profitably be compared with Part III of the Groundwork.

Schulz's career is of interest in the context of political events in Prussia. He was a preacher, in Gielsdorf, whose defiance of the ecclesiastical establishment extended from his personal appearance to his views on the relevance of orthodox religion to the relation of subject and sovereign. His refusal to wear a wig while preaching to his congregation earned him the nickname Zopfschulz (“pigtail-Schulz”). Such behavior was symptomatic of the philosophic position that made him suspect to the church authorities. Frederick the Great had protected Schulz from prosecution by the Brandenburg Consistory, but he was brought to court under the religious edict drawn up by Frederick William II and his minister Wöllner. Although the judges found Schulz not guilty of contradicting the teachings of Christianity, the king reversed their verdict, fined the judges, and dismissed Schulz from his appointment.

Introduction

Since the eighteenth century was the “Age of Enlightenment,” it was appropriate to ask “What is Enlightenment?” Kant's answer to the question appeared in the December 1784 issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift. As his concluding note indicates, the September issue, which Kant had not yet received, contained an essay on the same topic by Moses Mendelssohn. The occasion for both replies to the question could have been an essay in the December 1783 issue, “Is It Advisable to Sanction Marriage through Religion?” by Johann Friedrich Zöllner, which contained the passage “What is Enlightenment? The question, which is almost as important as the question What is truth?, should be answered before one begins to enlighten others. And yet I have never found it answered anywhere.”

As might be expected, Kant's answer and Mendelssohn's were not in agreement. Consistently with his eudaimonism, Mendelssohn had located enlightenment in the cultivation of what Kant would call the theoretical, as distinguished from the practical, use of one's intellectual powers. To this extent, Kant's reply to Garve in “Theory and Practice” would serve against Mendelssohn as well.

Kant's insistence upon freedom of the press, in the present context as the instrument of enlightenment, reappears in virtually all his political writings. A number of points introduced here – Kant's distinction between the public and the private use of reason, his principles of scriptural exegesis, his views about what kind of sect a government could sanction consistently with its own interest – were elaborated in a treatise written in 1794, which had to be withheld from publication because of the repressive measures of Frederick the Great's nephew and successor.

Introduction

The present Introduction to this review will simply paraphrase the Introduction of the editor by the Academy Edition, Paul Menzer. The review was included as an appendix in AK 8 because Kraus testifies that he has made use of a short essay by Kant. On this basis Vaihinger had the review published (in volume 16 of Philosophische Monatschefte, 1880, pp. 193–208) under the title “A Hitherto Unknown Essay by Kant on Freedom” and attempted a reconstruction of Kant's contribution to it. Menzer forgoes such a reconstruction but thinks that Vaihinger's opinion that the beginning of the review in particular may be traced to Kant may be correct. Kant's notes for the review are to be found in 23:79–81 (Vorarbeit zur Ulrich Rezension).

Kraus's review invites comparison with Kant's own review, in 1783 (8:9–14), of the book by Schulz to which Kraus refers. A translation of Kant's review is included in this volume.

I am indebted to Sharon Byrd and Jan Jörden for their assistance with an earlier draft of this translation.

THE EDITION

The two parts of The Metaphysics of Morals were first published separately, the Doctrine of Right probably in January 1797 and the Doctrine of Virtue in August of that year. In the edition of 1798, Kant's revisions to the text were apparently limited to adding a parenthetical explanation of his term Läsion (Ak. 6:249) and an appendix in reply to Bouterwek's review of the Doctrine of Right published on February 18, 1797. A more extensively revised edition was published in 1803, during Kant's lifetime but without his cooperation.

With two exceptions to be noted later, the present translation is based on the text of The Metaphysics of Morals edited by Paul Natorp in Volume 6 (1907) of the Prussian Academy of the Sciences edition of Kant's works. Natorp's decision not to use the “improved” edition of 1803 is based on his conviction that such alterations in the Doctrine of Virtue as are improvements do not justify the use of a text in the production of which Kant was not involved. I have followed Natorp in relegating to notes any substantive emendations that clarify the text. I have also made use of his notes in identifying authors whose works Kant cites. Bouterwek's review is included in Volume 20 of the Academy edition.

It has long been recognized that the text of The Doctrine of Right is corrupt to the extent that paragraphs 4–8 in §6 do not belong there. On the history of this discovery, see Thomas Mautner, “Kant's Metaphysics of Morals: A Note on the Text,” Kant-Studien 72 (1981): 356–9.

Introduction

In October 1785 Gottlieb Hufeland (1760–1817), then a twenty-five-year-old scholar with doctorates in philosophy and law at the University of Jena, sent Kant a copy of his book on natural right (see AK 10:388–389, 412–413). Kant was requested to review it for the Fenaer Allegemeine Literaturzeitung (see AK 10:398–399), and the review appeared on April 18, 1786 (AK 13:173).

Hufeland's approach to ethics is Wolffian, basing ethics in general on the striving for perfection. He attempts to derive the individual's right from the obligation to pursue one's own perfection, arguing that it entails the authorization to use coercion to defend one's perfection and to act so as to increase it. Kant's review praises the thoroughness and scholarship of Hufeland's book, and expresses optimism about Hufeland's future contributioon to this and other areas of philosophy.

In his review Kant emphasizes the points on which he and Hufeland agree, such as the apriority of principles of right, but criticizes Hufeland's derivation of right from an obligation, arguing that this leads to the paradox that people have no rights they may not press to the full, and also leaves indeterminate the extent of an individual's rights. Kant's own approach, already present in the Critique of Pure Reason, is to base right on the conditions of everyone's external freedom under universal laws (A316/B373).

The manuscript for this book was virtually complete only a few months before the death of Mary J. Gregor on October 31, 1994. She had finished not only nearly all of the texts themselves, but also the introductions and editorial notes accompanying the individual works. Only two short essays remained to be translated. Apart from minor revisions (to which she had agreed), the only other editorial work left to be done was the General Introduction and the glossaries. Some corrections in the translations were due to the helpful comments of B. Sharon Byrd, Thomas McCarthy, and Georg Geismann.

Gregor's translations of Kant are characterized not only by meticulous linguistic accuracy and scholarly erudition but also by an unfailing sense of style and an uncanny ability to render Kant's meaning into readable and even elegant English. Over a period of more than thirty years, she produced excellent English versions of Kant's writings: The Doctrine of Virtue (1964), Anthropology from a Pragmatic Standpoint (1974), The Conflict of the Faculties (1979), “On the Philosopher's Medicine of the Body” (1985), and the whole of the Metaphysics of Morals (1991). Her translations of all these works are being used as the basis of the Cambridge Edition versions.

In addition to her accomplishments as a translator, Gregor made significant contributions to Kant scholarship. She wrote articles on Kant's moral and political philosophy, and her book Laws of Freedom (1963) was almost alone at the time in stressing the indispensability of the Metaphysics of Morals for a proper understanding of Kant's ethical theory.

Introduction

Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) was a publisher, satirical novelist, and popular enlightenment philosopher of empiricist sympathies who attacked Kant and his philosophy for its forbidding style of writing and its use of abstruse terminology (see Metaphysics of Morals, editorial note 8.) In 1796, after Nicolai had ridiculed Schiller for his use of Kantian jargon, Kant alluded to Nicolai's criticisms in Metaphysics of Morals (6:208-209), insisting that they do not apply to the critical philosophy itself. Shortly thereafter, in his novel Leben und Meinungen Sempronius Gundiberts (1798), Nicolai responded by explicitly directing his satires at Kant himself. On the title page appeared the phrase “The ridiculous despotism,” drawn from Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, B xxxv) but now directed back at him. In the novel the terminology of a priori and a posteriori was employed both playfully and contemptuously, and variants of it were devised for purposes of ridicule.

In the same year, Nicolai also published a posthumous volume of Vermischten Schriften by the conservative writer Justus Möser (1720–1794), containing an uncompleted fragment of an essay on “Theory and Practice,” directed polemically against Kant's essay on the same topic. When Kant condemns as unjust some existing social and political arrangements (in particular, the political privileges of the hereditary nobility), Möser dismisses this as the irresponsible work of a ridiculous “theorist” who is out of touch with “practical” reality. This too angered Kant, and the philosopher held Nicolai as well as Möser responsible for the attempt to make a laughingstock of him.

Introduction

In 1795 King Frederick William II of Prussia withdrew from the War of the First Coalition and, on April 5, concluded the separate Peace of Basel with the revolutionary government of France. In a letter of August 15 of the same year (12: 35) Kant offered the Königsberg publisher Nicolovius what may well be the most widely read of his informal works, Toward Perpetual Peace.

Projects for “perpetual peace,” and criticisms of them, had been in the air since 1713, when the Abbé St. Pierre, a secretary at the congress preceding the Treaty of Utrecht, had published the first two volumes of his Projet pour rendre la paix perpetuelle en Europe. Among the more prominent of his defenders and critics were Leibniz, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, and Rousseau. As might be expected, Kant was aware of the debate. In a Reflection that Adickes dates from about 1755 Kant notes Bayle's view that, although “it is possible in abstracto to put the rules of Christianity into practice, this is not the case with regard to princes: it was impossible in connection with the Abbé St. Pierre's proposal” (6: 241; AK 16, #2116). As the present essay shows, Kant did not consider the idea of a league of nations impossible, but he did not rely for his evidence upon experience of how princes have behaved.

Introduction

Kant's essay “On the Wrongfulness of Unauthorized Publication of Books” was first published in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in May 1785. On June 5 the editor of the journal, Johann Erich Biester, wrote to Kant about other matters and, in passing, expressed the hope that Kant would soon use “our mouth, in order to deliver your speech to the public by means of us.” Apart from the fact that, as the opening paragraph of this essay indicates, the topic of literary piracy was being discussed at the time, nothing definite is known about the occasion for this essay. Perhaps Kant's discussion of the subject twelve years later, in Part I of The Metaphysics of Morals, was an attempt to substantiate his assertion that the case he makes is “undoubtedly to be found in the elementary concepts of natural right” and to provide “the requisite eloquence of Roman legal scholarship,” insofar as this could be done within the limits of metaphysical first principles.

Kant himself was eventually involved in legal difficulties because of the cavalier way in which questions of copyright were treated. Had Kant given J. H. Tieftrunk permission to include, in his proposed collection of Kant's minor writings, all three parts of Der Streit der Fakultäten? Tieftrunk assumed that he had and published all three, though not in serial order. The authorized publisher of the book, C. F. Nicolovius, brought a lawsuit against Tieftrunk, who cited as his evidence Kant's failure to object when proofs for the collection were sent to him.

Introduction

In his Preface to the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Kant stated his intention of writing a book to be called The Metaphysics of Morals. There is no indication that he intended to produce a work entitled the Critique of Practical Reason. Metaphysics, he explained, has two parts, metaphysics of nature and metaphysics of morals, and just as a critique of pure speculative reason is the only foundation for a metaphysics of nature, so a critique of pure practical reason is the only foundation for a metaphysics of morals. However, what it was necessary and feasible to do could be done in the course of laying the foundation for the metaphysics of morals. Section III of the Groundwork, the transition to a “critique of pure practical reason,” would suffice.

By April 1786 Kant had begun his extensive revisions for the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason and, early in the course of making them, apparently entertained the thought of adding to it a critique of practical reason. In November 1786 the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung, announcing the forthcoming publication of the new edition, said that in it a critique of pure practical reason would be appended to the critique of pure speculative reason contained in the first edition (AK 3:556). However, no such addition was made. In April 1787 Kant had completed his revisions, and his only extensive rewriting beyond the Transcendental Analytic was in the Dialectic's chapter on “The Paralogisms of Pure Reason,” a part having no direct bearing on moral philosophy.