A talk about Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

This afternoon I had a talk with Chris about Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. After I stepped into his office and sat down before him, he asked me: what's your question? Actually, I had no ready question about the book because I had too many puzzles about it. It is really hard for me to raise a specific question currently, but I had to give a question to start our talk. Chris was confused by me and did not know what I am asking about. In fact I was also confusing about what I was going to ask. The question I raised was about the relation between formula of universality and formula of autonomy. It seemed very strange to Chris and he asked what exactly it was. Till the moment I began to realize the question I have in my understanding about Kant's work.

The question goes exactly like this: according to the formula of autonomy, one can give herself the law that she should act on all the time, but how is this connected with the formula of universality, which says that act on that maxim through which you can also will it as a universal law. Since each one is autonomous, they may raise different laws which is valid to themselves particular for themselves but might be contradict to each other when these laws are universalized among all rational beings. Chris let me offer examples to illustrate my view. I tried but failed. I tried to use examples of hypothetical imperative to illustrate that if a hypothetical is a moral law for one then it would be contradict to categorical imperative held by another one. But this example is on basis of wrong interpretation of Kant's hypothetical imperative. According to Kant, hypothetical imperative could be moral principles because they are conditional to something outside of person.

Then Chris helped me clarify some important points of this book. The first one is that there are four formulas of categorical imperatives, which are that of universality, of humanity, of kingdom of ends, and that of autonomy. The four of them, according to Kant, are the same one. Each of them is an aspect of the categorical imperative. The single categorical imperative is a formal requirement for morality. All duties derives from it. The second one is the distinction between hypothetical imperative and categorical imperative mentioned above. When we were talking about this issue, I asked another question which was actually clarified by Chris. It goes as follows: once I get a duty which is from the categorical imperative, I will look for means to achieve it. Then, is the action conditional one? Yes, it is. It is conditional to the end of the duty.Then, can we say such an action is also hypothetical. Categorical imperative just give us the end of duty, but can not promise the means directly. But this question is not challenging enough. Then means taken for achieving the end of duty is really conditional to the duty, but the duty is from categorical imperative. Just because of this, the action is considered as moral. The duty is derived from the categorical imperative, so it is internal and therefore action for sake of the duty is not conditional to things outside of person. So, it can not be considered as hypothetical.

Chris is very patient and enthusiastic. He invited me to talk with him every Thursday as I like. I am thankful to his enthusiasm. I believe our talk will be more fruitful in the future.