It’s been a little while since I’ve written about Kant’s *Groundwork* here, but it’s high time to get back to it since we’re barely through the first 2/3 of the first section of the book. Say what you will about Kant, but don’t blame him for not rewarding deep reading. My subject here is Kant’s “third proposition” about morality:
> Duty is the necessity of an action out of respect for law.
Kant has two things he wants to tell us about this proposition that reveal a great deal about his moral theory. The first is that while we can have respect for law, we cannot have respect for any kind of inclination, whether it be in ourselves or in others. It’s important to put ourselves in not-so-present-day shoes in order to see what Kant is getting at here. One of the most alluring incentives to do what one is supposed to do is that one will be punished if one shirks one’s “duty”. There are various punishments that one could have in mind: the corporeal punishment of a parent, the retribution of an army commander, or the divine wrath of God. But all of these forms of punishment motivate behavior not by duty but by making use of our very basic inclination to avoid pain and suffering–in other words, fear. But morality is not about fear, for Kant. We’re not responsible for our proclivity to fear or not to fear. We are responsible for what we decide to do for our own reasons, and acting from duty is importantly different than acting from fear. What the slave-driver creates is not duty, but pain to which we (as animals) know how to respond. More after the break.
So acting from fear is acting from inclination and has no intrinsic moral worth. But the other side of the condition is true as well. We cannot have respect for anything but the law. I’d go into this more, because it may not be intuitively obvious, but I want to save that for another post devoted solely to the topic. Suffice it to say for now that respect is a key feeling because it is a result of the law acting as one’s motivation. But now we’re at the idea that since moral worth cannot come from inclination, the purpose we hold for an action, or the effects (actual or expected) of an action, the only thing left is conformity to the law as such. As Kant says:
> Hence there is nothing left which can [morally] determine the will except objectively the law and subjectively pure respect for this practical law.
The second thing Kant wants to tell us about this proposition is that it is the only way that an action *could* have moral worth because all the effects of the action *could* have come about by some other means other than the good will. If you remember, the good will was previously declared by Kant to be the only thing that was good in and of itself. But the effects of one’s actions could be created in some other way. For instance, say that I hear a drowning child was saved from a watery death yesterday. This could be the result of someone’s jumping in to save the drowning child. But it could also be because, as the child was drowning, a huge wave swelled up underneath him that carried the child to shore. Thus the mere saving of the child was not in itself the moral worth of the situation (though it might seem so to the child). That action could have come about in different ways. The problem is that one could trace itself back to something with intrinsic worth (a good will), but the other could only trace itself back to a freak weather pattern. Thus, the commonality between effects of actions, purposes for actions, and inclinations in general is that they do not trace themselves back to something truly valuable. Thus, they are not necessarily good.
Now it certainly makes sense to argue here that while it’s true that all effects *could* come about from other sources than a good will, that some effects do in fact come about from the actions of a good will. I think this is an important question to pose to Kant at this point. He doesn’t give anything like an answer. (However, he can be read as giving something like an answer with the idea that one need not be successful at producing good effects to do something good.) Even if Kant can’t be re-read in this way, it may make sense for a Kantian-type ethical theory to allow the results of some actions to have moral worth. But the reason Kant does not seem so concerned to make the argument here is that it is not what he is doing to account for all instances of moral worth. Rather, he is doing “groundwork” or a foundation for the idea of a more specific moral theory. Thus, in a way all he is trying to establish is what would be absolutely necessary for something to have moral worth. And since effects could come about by some other means than as products of a good will, they are not absolutely necessary for something to be good. Unfortunately, the *Groundwork* isn’t meant to catalog everything that could be moral–that task is saved for the actual *Metaphysics of Morals*. Rather, it is the foundation on which a moral theory has to be built. And I tend to find this particular foundation plausible.
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