Question I know that Kant's moral philosophy is to be considered "intentional" since he focuses on intentions and not on the action itself, each of us should act "according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will". I was told that Kant didn't agreed the foundation of the concept of Good/Evil that past philosophers did; the reason was that they based their moral on an external thing (like ethical relativism or utilitarianism). Moral is for Kant universal and form a priori in the figure of the Moral Law. If I test my intention/action with the Moral Law, couldn't I be considered as looking for a universal order and so for a kind of usefulness?

Accepted:
October 11, 2011

Comments

You're absolutely right on in how you're thinking about the difference between Kant's approach to moral philosophy and that of his predecessors. Kant's predecessors took morality to be based on something external (such as, for example, God, or the achievement of some end), what Kant called 'heteronomous' conceptions of morality; Kant thought that morality consisted in autonomy, the capacity of rational agents to determine the rightness or wrongness of actions by a law that they gave themselves. (On the relation between Kant's ethics and that of his predecessors, I highly recommend J. B. Schneewind's magisterial The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy.) This law that agents gave themselves, Kant suggested in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals could be tested in particular cases by trying to determine whether one's intention--or, to use Kant's technical term, one's 'maxim'--could be universalized. (Note that there are various formulations of this universalizability test. If you're interested in understanding these details, there are any number of good introductions to Kant's ethics: the essays in the Yale University Press translation of the Groundwork are a good place to start because the volume includes both essays and a good translation of the Groundwork, although it is not, admittedly, the standard translation of the Groundwork, that of Mary Gregor published by Cambridge University Press.) Since this test, however, abstracts away from any end to be achieved by one's maxim and also does not take into account any relation between one's action and any other being (such as God), and considers only the form of one's maxim, namely, whether it can be universalized, Kant did not think that his approach to morality had anything to do with usefulness. (In fact, early in the Groundwork, Kant notes that the object of his inquiry, the good will, must be considered apart from any end it may achieve.) While Kant did seek to achieve universality, he thought that universality in ethics could only be achieved if one abstracted away from externals and considered only the form of the maxim by which one proposed to act.