Immanuel Kant is one of the greatest Western philosophers of all time. His work has had a profound influence on those thinkers that came after him in many different areas. One of the most important of these spheres is ethics, where he attempted to develop a metaphysic of morals.
In this sense, he did not wish to just determine what the correct and incorrect courses of action were, but to establish a theory that would serve to determine how one should act. He attempted to establish universal laws that would govern people’s behavior through reason. As such, he did not discuss the correct action that would result from a given set of circumstances, but set maxims that it was a duty for everybody to follow at all times.
This was a consequence of his tripartite division of sciences, modeled after the ancient Greeks: Physics, Ethics and Logic. The latter of these arrives at knowledge in a formal way. Furthermore, he defines physics as the material study of nature; ethics, on the other hand, would study freedom through material knowledge as well.
In a further subdivision, both of these would have a twofold distinction as well, separating between the use of experience and the use of a priori principles in order to study precise objects of understanding. This latter would be metaphysics, which may be of morals or of nature. He found the important aspect here to be the human will. “For the metaphysic of morals has to examine the idea and the principles of a possible pure will, and not the acts and conditions of human volition generally, which for the most part are drawn from psychology” (Kant). In this sense, he believed that the individual pure will would be the universal way to determine whether one was behaving correctly or not.
Works Cited
Kant, Immanuel. Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals. Bartleby. Web. 19 Jun. 2016. <http://www.bartleby.com/32/601.html>.
