Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff Page B

philosopher.
    Morality, according to Kant, possesses an intrinsic dignity; moral action is an end in itself, not a means to an end. As far as morality is concerned, the consequences of an action are irrelevant. Thus virtue has nothing to do with the pursuit of rewards of any kind. The good-will heeds the laws of morality, Kant writes, “without any end or advantage to be gained by it....”
    For this reason, the worst corrupters of morality are those philosophers who offer “boasting eulogies ... of the advantages of happiness,” and hold that morality is a means to its achievement. Many false ethical theories have been advanced, in Kant’s view, but “the principle of one’s own happiness is the most objectionable of all. This is not merely because it is false... Rather, it is because this principle supports morality with incentives which undermine it and destroy all its sublimity....” 10
    Most of Kant’s predecessors had assumed that men are motivated by the desire for happiness. Kant concedes this assumption. All men, he holds, “crave happiness first and unconditionally,” and do so “by a necessity of nature.” Nevertheless, he insists, morality has nothing to do with nature. The ground of moral obligation “must not be sought in the nature of man or in the circumstances in which he is placed....” Regardless of nature, therefore, the “real end” of a creature such as man is not “its preservation, its welfare—in a word, its happiness....”
    This does not mean that morality is based on divine decree. Philosophy, writes Kant, must “show its purity as the absolute sustainer” of moral laws, “even though it is supported by nothing in either heaven or earth.” 11
    Moral laws, according to Kant, are a set of orders issued to man by a nonheavenly, nonearthly entity (which I shall discuss shortly), a set of unconditional commandments or “categorical imperatives”—to be sharply contrasted with mere “counsels of prudence.” The latter are rules advising one how best to achieve one’s own welfare; such rules have for Kant no moral significance. By contrast, a categorical imperative pronounces an action “as good in itself,” no matter what the result, and thus “commands absolutely and without any incentives....”
    Unconditional obedience to such imperatives, “the submission of my will to a law without the intervention of other influences on my mind,” is man’s noblest virtue, the “far more worthy purpose of [men’s] existence ... the supreme condition to which the private purposes of men must for the most part defer.”
    The name for such obedience is duty. “[T]he necessity of my actions from pure respect for the practical [i.e., moral] law constitutes duty. To duty every other motive must give place... .” 12
    Kant draws a fundamental distinction between actions motivated by incentive or desire, actions which a man personally wants to perform to attain some end—these he calls actions from “inclination”—and actions motivated by reverence for duty. The former, he holds, are by their nature devoid of moral worth, which belongs exclusively to the latter. It is not enough that a man do the right thing, that his acts be “in accord with” duty; the moral man must act from duty; he must do his duty simply because it is his duty.
    In theory, Kant states, a man deserves moral credit for an action done from duty, even if his inclinations also favor it—but only insofar as the latter are incidental and play no role in his motivation. But in practice, Kant maintains, whenever the two coincide no one can know that he has escaped the influence of inclination. For all practical purposes, therefore, a moral man must have no private stake in the outcome of his actions, no personal motive, no expectation of profit or gain of any kind.
    Even then, however, he cannot be sure that no fragment of desire is “secretly” moving him. The far clearer case, the one case in which a man can at