Kant: Critique of Practical Reason (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) by Critique of Practical Reason 2e

Author:Critique of Practical Reason, 2e [tr. Gregor] (Cambridge, 2015)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter III On the incentives of pure practical reason

What is essential to any moral worth of actions is that the moral law determine the will immediately. If the determination of the will takes place conformably with the moral law but only by means of a feeling, of whatever kind, that has to be presupposed in order for the law to become a sufficient determining ground of the will, so that [5:72]the action is not done for the sake of the law, then the action will contain legality indeed but not morality. Now, if by incentive (elater animi) is understood the subjective determining ground of the will of a being whose reason does not by its nature necessarily conform with the objective law, then it will follow: first that no incentives at all can be attributed to the divine will, but that the incentive of the human will (and of the will of every created rational being) can never be anything other than the moral law, and hence that the objective determining ground must always and quite alone be also the subjectively sufficient determining ground of action, if this is not merely to fulfill the letter of the law without containing its spirit.*

For the sake of the law and in order to give it influence on the will one must not, then, look for some other incentive by which that of the moral law itself might be dispensed with, because this would produce sheer hypocrisy without substance,t and it is even hazardous to let any other incentive (such as that of advantage) so much as cooperate alongside the moral law; so nothing further remains than to determine carefully in what way the moral law becomes the incentive and, inasmuch as it is, what happens to the human faculty of desire as an effect of that determining ground upon it. For, how a law can be of itself an immediately a determining ground of the will (though this is what is essential in all morality) is for human reason an insoluble problem and identical with that of how a free will is possible. What we shall have to show a priori is, therefore, not the ground from whichu the moral law in itself supplies an incentive but rather what it effects (or, to put it better, must effect) in the mind insofar as it is an incentive.

What is essential in every determination of the will by the moral law is that, as a free will – and so not only without the cooperation of sensible impulses but even with rejection of all of them and with infringement upon all inclinations insofar as they could be opposed to that law – it is determined solely by the law. So far, then, the effect of the moral law as incentive is only negative, and as such this incentive can be cognized a priori. For, all inclination and every sensible impulse is based on feeling, and the negative effect on feeling (by the infringement upon the inclinations that takes place) is itself feeling.

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