Critique of Practical Reason

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Core Ideas

Moral Duty versus Moral Legality

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Core Ideas Moral Duty versus Moral Legality

Moral Worth versus Moral Legality

Kant stresses that the moral worth of an action is not based on its effects, or on anything else publicly visible about it, but rather on why the agent performed it. Even the person who has just acted may not know what his inner maxim was. It is worth considering whether Kant's moral theory will say anything concrete about what a person should do, as opposed to how he should do things. It has often been pointed out that the same action can be performed with many different maxims.

This might be problematic. If one describes oneself as acting on the maxim of going to a particular café Sunday morning, one cannot universalize that, for there is no room in the café for everyone in the world. Many harmless actions described precisely enough can lead to such problems. Conversely, if I describe a murder in the right way, there will be no problem universalizing it, since we can all will for that one particular person to be murdered without the whole of society collapsing. So it might seem that whether or not I am allowed to perform many actions has only to do with irrelevant features of how I conceive of what I am doing.

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