Agency and Anthropology in Kant’s Groundwork

Abstract

Recently Bernard Williams described Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals as “the most significant work of moral philosophy after Aristotle, and one of the most puzzling.”¹ This seems to me right on both counts. The puzzles would be fewer if we had a strategy for reading the entire Groundwork and making sense of its multiple transitions between distinct frameworks of argument. One central strategic task is to make sense of Kant’s account of action and agency. He discusses agency under various headings — including willing, rational willing, and freedom — throughout the work. The discussion is complex not only because of this variety of headings, but still more because it is conducted in three distinct frameworks, and because the transitions between these coincide only approximately with the transitions between chapters. The first chapter analyses our common account of morality and claims that it centres on the idea of good willing; the second chapter undertakes a metaphysics of morals by analysing good willing in terms of an abstract account of rational willing as such; the last chapter (in the sections from 450 onwards) argues from the perspective of a critique of reason that rational willing is free and yet compatible with the causality of nature.