Kant’s Discussion of the Ordinary Moral Consciousness

Abstract

We have just seen that in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant said that his view about a priori moral laws which ‘command absolutely’ is also the view of ‘every man, if only he tries to think a law of that sort clearly’. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) — hereafter to be called the Groundwork — Kant showed that he was in earnest in thus referring to the moral beliefs of ordinary men, for he devotes the first section of the book to an analysis and defence of them, referring to ‘the common reason of mankind’⁶ and ‘the ordinary moral rational knowledge’.⁷ It might be thought most unlikely that ordinary men could believe, even implicitly, anything so complex and technical as that the moral law is a priori and pure, that is, that it is known independently of experience and contains in itself no concepts that are derived from experience. Yet this is just what Kant seeks to show.