Kant and the Foundations of Morality

Halla Kim is associate professor of philosophy and faculty at the Schwalb Center for Israel and Jewish Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Halla Kim explores the leading themes in Kant's philosophical ethics from a structural-methodological point of view to highlight the activities of reason vis-à-vis the blind forces of brute nature. Basing the study on Kant's short, but monumental, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kim also draws on other major writings by Kant and his critics. Kim shows that philosophical ethics, as Kant conceived it, must capture the gist of the ineluctable, inescapable, and irreducible freedom we strive to exemplify in our practical lives. Viewed this way, the moral law is none other than the law of the will determining itself. It is the law of the self-activity of the will. Contending that the concepts and doctrines in Kant's ethics should be understood as an ethics of the self-activity of the will, Kim argues that the categorical imperative is the particular way this moral law is addressed to finite rational beings.Kant and the Foundations of Morality provides new perspective on the philosopher's thought to benefit studies of eighteenth-century philosophy, epistemology, modern philosophy, moral theory, moral philosophy, and ethics.

Chapter 1. The Purpose, the Method, and the Structure of the GroundworkChapter 2. The Search for the Supreme Principle of MoralityChapter 3. Prudence and MoralityChapter 4. The Formulation of the Categorical ImperativeChapter 5. The Unity of the Categorical ImperativeChapter 6. The Authentication of MoralityChapter 7. The Metaphysical Foundation of Morality