Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant

(1724 - 1804 ) Prussian philosopher

Attributed

• "Two things fill the heart with renewed and increasing awe and reverence the more often and the more steadily that they are meditated on: the starry skies above me and the moral law inside me."

• "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."

• "A metaphysics of morals is therefore indispensably necessary, not merely because of a motive to speculation - for investigating the source of the practical basic principles that lie a priori in our reason - but also becuase morals themselves remain subject to all sorts of corruption as long as we are without that clue and supreme norm by which to appraise them correctly..."
  • Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

• [on the supreme principle or category imperative] "I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law."
  • Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

• "I do not, therefore, need any penetrating acuteness to see what I have to do in order that my volition be morally good. Inexperienced in the course of the world, incapable of being prepared for whatever might come to pass in it, I ask myself only: can you also will that your maxim become a universal law?"
  • Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

• "...even if there never have been actions arising from such pure sources, what is at issue here is not whether this or that happened; that, instead, reason by itself and independently of all appearances commands what ought to happen; that, accordingly, actions of which the world has perhaps so far given no example, and whose very practicability might be very much doubted by one who bases everything on experience, are still inflexibly commanded by reason... because ... duty ... lies, prior to all experience, in the idea of a reason determing the will by means of apriori grounds."
  • Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

• "Morality is thus the relation of actions to the autonomy of the will, that is, to a possible giving of universal law through its maxims. An action that can coexist with the autonomy of the will is permitted; one that does not accord with it is forbidden. A will whose maxims necessarily harmonize with the laws of autonomy is a holy, absolutely good will. The dependence upon the principle of autonomy of a will that is not absolutely good (moral necessitation) is obligation. This, accordingly, cannot be attributed to a holy being. The objective of an action from obligation is called duty."
  • Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals