The second of Kant’s three critiques deals specifically with human agency and morality. Kant begins, “If, now, it is found that this rule is practically correct, then it is a law because it is a categorical imperative. Thus practical laws refer only to the will, without regard to what is attained by its causality…. In a practical law reason determines the will immediately, not by means of an intervening feeling of pleasure or displeasure, not even in this law; and that it can as pure reason be practical is what alone makes it possible for it to be lawgiving…. Pure reason is practical of itself alone and gives (to the human being) a universal law which we call the moral law…. Accordingly the moral law is for them an imperative that commands categorically because the law is unconditional; the relation of such a will to this law is dependence under the name of obligation, which signifies a necessitation, though only by reason and its objective law, to an action which is called duty.”
Kant contrasts duty with happiness. “The direct opposite of the principle of morality is the principle of one’s own happiness made the determining ground of the will…. The maxim of self-love (prudence) merely advises; the law of morality commands…. What duty is, is plain of itself to everyone, but what brings true lasting advantage, if this is to extend to the whole of one’s existence, is always veiled in impenetrable obscurity…. The moral law commands compliance from everyone, and indeed the most exact compliance. Appraising what is to be done in accordance with it must, therefore, not be so difficult that the most common and unpracticed understanding should not know how to go about it, even without worldly prudence…. To satisfy the categorical command of morality is within everyone’s power at all times; to satisfy the empirically conditioned precept of happiness is but seldom possible.”
Kant next contrasts morality with legality. “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 the action is not done for the sake of the law, then the action will contain legality indeed but not morality.” It is reason alone, not any feelings of the senses or outside pressures, that must determine the free will towards moral duty. “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.”
Kant reiterates his categorical imperative that all rational agents must be treated by other agents as ends, in and of themselves, and not merely as means. “The moral law is holy (inviolable)…. A human being alone, and with him every rational creature, is an end in itself: by virtue of the autonomy of his freedom he is the subject of the moral law…. This subject is to be used never merely as a means but as at the same time an end…. In the order of ends the human being (and with him every rational being) is an end in itself, that is, can never be used merely as a means by anyone (not even by God) without being at the same time himself an end, and that humanity, in our person must, accordingly, be holy to ourselves: for he is the subject of the moral law.”
Kant squares his philosophy with his understanding of Christianity, “The moral law is holy (inflexible) and demands holiness of morals, although all the moral perfection that a human being can attain is still only virtue, that is, a disposition conformed with law from respect for law…. With respect to the holiness that the Christian law demands, nothing remains for a creature but endless progress…. The moral law of itself does not promise any happiness…. Holiness of morals is prescribed to them as a rule even in this life while the well-being proportioned to it, namely beatitude, is represented as attainable only in an eternity…. Morals is not properly the doctrine of how we are to make ourselves happy but of how we are to become worthy of happiness.”
Finally, Kant concludes, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not need to search for them and merely conjecture them as though they were veiled in obscurity or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.”
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