Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
Decide its fate
The record
Time
An eveningA season76 pages, about 2 hours: half the length of a typical book on the shelf.
Getting in
Walk right inSteep climbSection I starts from ordinary moral judgment and works toward the idea of duty.
One of a kind
Others do thisNothing else doesCommentary connects its kingdom of ends to Rawls’s original position in A Theory of Justice, on the shelf at 607 pages.
The case for it
on its concise exposition
“It is in this book that we find the basis, that is to say, the essentials of his Ethics set forth with an acute penetration and systematic conciseness, as in no other of his writings. It has, moreover, the great advantage of being the first of Kant’s moral works, appearing, as it did, only four years later than the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, and consequently it dates from the period when, although he was sixty-one, the detrimental effect of old age on his intellect was not yet perceptible.”
Arthur Schopenhauer · On the Basis of Morality, 1840 on the fundamental principles
“it lays out the fundamental principles of Kant’s moral philosophy”
Adrian Moore · Five Books, 2016 on its influence today
“the most frequently addressed historical text in contemporary moral philosophy”
Susan Shell · Claremont Review of Books, 2003 on practicing the ethics
“trying his ethics out in person? I find it calming and grounding.”
a Substack review
The case against
on impersonal duty
“A nation goes to pieces when it confounds its duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every ‘impersonal’ duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction.”
Friedrich Nietzsche · The Antichrist, 1895 on sections 1 and 2
“argues obscurely for the categorical imperative twice, in section 1 and again in section 2”
Michael Huemer · graduate seminar paper, 1993 on how forbidding it reads
“the more accessible (yet still rather forbidding!)”
Jack Maden · Philosophy Break, 2026 on careful reading
“more often talked about than read with care”
Susan Shell · Claremont Review of Books, 2003
