Nature is entirely impersonal and nonmoral...

Nature is entirely impersonal and nonmoral; it may be viewed as if it were the product of a great and benevolent designer, but we cannot affirm that it is such. We have, therefore, to look for the realm of morals outside the realm of nature. Morals must be independent of how the world goes, for how the world goes is nonmoral.

Moreover, Kant never proceeds, as Descartes and some of the empiricists did, by looking for a basis for knowledge, for some set of first principles or hard data, in order to vindicate our claims to knowledge against some hypothetical skeptic. Kant takes the existence of arithmetic and that of Newtonian mechanics for granted and inquires what must be the case with our concepts for these sciences to be possible. So also with morals.

Kant takes the existence of an ordinary moral consiousness for granted; his own parents, whose sacrifices had made his education possible, and whose intellectual gifts were notably less than his own, seemed to him models of simple goodness. When Kant read Rousseau, Rousseau’s remarks on the dignity of ordinary human nature struck home at once.

It is the moral consciousness of this ordinary human nature which provides the philosopher with an object for analysis; as in the theory of knowledge, the philosopher’s task is not to seek for a basis or a vindication, but to ask what character our moral concepts and precepts must have to make morality as it is possible. Kant therefore is among those philosophers who see their task as one of post eventum analysis; science is what it is, morality is what it is, and there’s an end on’t.

This essentially conservative view is all the more surprising when we recall that Kant’s lifetime (1724-1804) was a period of rapid social change. Part of the explanation of Kant’s attitudes is perhaps biographical; Königsberg, near Prussia’s eastern limits, was no metropolis, and Kant led an isolated academic existence. But much more important is the fact that Kant conceived his task as the isolation of the a priori, and therefore unchanging, elements of morality.

In different societies there might be different moral schemes; Kant insisted on his own students coming to terms with the empirical study of human nature. But what is it that makes these schemes moral? What form must a precept have if it is to be recognized as a moral precept? Kant approaches this question from an initial assertion that nothing is unconditionally good-except a good will.