Abstract

To understand Kantian moral philosophy as it is presented in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Mo rals it is important to grasp not only Kant's strictly metaphysical exposition but also his analyses of the application of his doctrine to particular cases of everyday morality. At the same time each of the four examples he presents should serve, according to Kant, as a kind of type for a whole class or list of moral norms, a type that visibly represents a recognized class of duties to oneself or others. A careful examination, however, reveals that even the so-called duties to oneself can be represented consistently only as duties to that law-giving power of the moral world that raises the dignity of moral freedom in man above any nonrational nature in the world. Yet, in reality the dignity of humanity is not absolute, for without assuming the existence of a supreme will we cannot have a genuine grounding for these duties in the exact form in which they appear to Kant. This is quite obvious in the first of Kant's four examples, his discussion of suicide from weariness with life