Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785)

Less systematic and well argued and hence more confusing than the albeit initially more difficult Critique of Practical Reason. As Kant points out in the Critique of Pure Reason, "if the size of a book were measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required to understand it [and the reasoning behind it], then we could say about many books that they would be much shorter if they were not so short." (A xix) ( )

Inasmuch as we can praise Kant's brilliance and analytical rigour, the Metaphysics of Morals falls patently flat if only because he is overextending the gains he has made in the first Critique to apply to the domain of ethics. Any movement from "is" to "ought" (i.e., the shift from ontology to ethics) is going to be fraught with perils. I would say that, from the standpoint of Kant's entire oeuvre, this is his lowest point. That being said, no serious reader in philosophy can bypass this text as it is essential reading in the development of ethics in the transition from the Enlightenment to subsequent Romanticism. ( )

6

Interesting... if you're forced into it by your Ethics teacher, like I was.

Kant is very hard to read, at least for me, however when reading him you discover a first rate mind, that looks very deeply into the human condition. In this book Kant looks for ground to build a system of moral and ethics on. While it has flaws, for its time his conclusions are breath taking. ( )