Metaphysical Elements of Justice: The Complete Text of the Metaphysics of Morals, Part 1

by Immanuel Kant, John Ladd (translator)

John Ladd has made extensive revisions to his original translation of this work, which now comprises the first part of Kant's Metaphysics of Morals in its entirety. In addition to numerous emendations occasioned by the publication in 1986 of a critical edition of the German text, this new edition reinstates those passages abridged in the previous edition: Kant's discussion of contracts, marriage & the family. In a supplementary introduction written for this edition, Ladd comments on issues raised by the new material, such as the relevance of Kant's conception of marriage to his view of the status of women. An updated bibliography, glossary & index are also provided.

Genres: Philosophy

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1797

About the author

Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century philosopher from Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He's regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe & of the late Enlightenment. His most important work is The Critique of Pure Reason, an investigation of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics & epistemology, & highlights his own contribution to these areas. Other main works of his maturity are The Critique of Practical Reason, which is about ethics, & The Critique of Judgment, about esthetics & teleology.

Pursuing metaphysics involves asking questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Kant suggested that metaphysics can be reformed thru epistemology. He suggested that by understanding the sources & limits of human knowledge we can ask fruitful metaphysical questions. He asked if an object can be known to have certain properties prior to the experience of that object. He concluded that all objects that the mind can think about must conform to its manner of thought. Therefore if the mind can think only in terms of causality–which he concluded that it does–then we can know prior to experiencing them that all objects we experience must either be a cause or an effect. However, it follows from this that it's possible that there are objects of such a nature that the mind cannot think of them, & so the principle of causality, for instance, cannot be applied outside experience: hence we cannot know, for example, whether the world always existed or if it had a cause. So the grand questions of speculative metaphysics are off limits, but the sciences are firmly grounded in laws of the mind. Kant believed himself to be creating a compromise between the empiricists & the rationalists. The empiricists believed that knowledge is acquired thru experience alone, but the rationalists maintained that such knowledge is open to Cartesian doubt and that reason alone provides us with knowledge. Kant argues, however, that using reason without applying it to experience will only lead to illusions, while experience will be purely subjective without first being subsumed under pure reason. Kant’s thought was very influential in Germany during his lifetime, moving philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists & empiricists. The philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer saw themselves as correcting and expanding Kant's system, thus bringing about various forms of German Idealism. Kant continues to be a major influence on philosophy to this day, influencing both Analytic and Continental philosophy.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This portion of the Metaphysics of Morals was read at about the same time as Kant's Logic and at the same place: a cafe/bar in Hanover, N.H. during breaks from school in New York. Having read several of his works on ethics, it is easy to get them mixed up, but I believe this was the one in which he distinguished between judicable and injudicable acts, giving as an example of the latter a life-raft case: two alone at sea, enough food for one, one survives to return. Food for thought, that one.

More generally, Kant's duty ethics is intellectually attractive as it is the most demanding of the all ethical systems (others being natural law, virtue and utilitarian ethics). Basically, it requires one to be wholly good and omniscient--everything the Christian god is said to be, except omnipotent. By "good" Kant means, in an acceptably circular argument, to promote and never disable the ethical capacity of other agents. The omniscience part is the obligation to universalize so that one's actions promote the greatest good for the greatest number without infringing upon the ethical agency of any (i.e. their freedom and their intelligence to exercise it responsibly), in other words to act in accord with general principles as if one were legislating for the Kingdom of God. This, of course, is impossible for we finite beings as it requires an infinite induction, yet the effort is required--the same tension, in other words, as obtains between his concepts of the understanding and his ideas of reason in the First Critique.

Interestingly, Kant never explicitly gets at the problematic of agency. What is the agent anyway? One gets the impression usually that he just assumes that individual human bodies are agents--the modern commonsense of the thing. But agency, as the study of cultural anthropology or of depth psychology makes clear, is not so simple as that. An agent can be a nation or a tribe or a family as in the Bible. An agent might also be a psychological complex. Kant gets at this problematic indirectly, usually in his theological writings and then often in reference to Christ, god incarnate, whom he employs as the very model of ideal ethical agent. This I find very interesting and also a necessary consequence of his ethical reasoning. Clearly, we are called to be as Christ was.

Did Kant avoid being explicit about this very low Christology because it would have never passed the Prussian state censor? Or was it a more subtle, personal censor which stayed his pen?