Kant’s Argugument for the Existance of Supreme Moral Law

By the end of section II of The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant has established that, if there were a supreme moral law, it would look like the categorical imperative. His task in the final section of the Groundwork is to show that there does in fact exist such a moral law by proving that we have free wills, and secondary to this, he wants to show why we actually take an interest in morality. This paper will provide an account and evaluate the success of Kant’s argument in this final section. By the start of section III, Kant has finished developing the structure of the supreme moral law, were it to exist. He began by analyzing our popular conceptions of morality, and worked toward developing a rational reconstruction of this morality. In line with this effort, Kant specifies the will as the fundamental cause of action for rational beings, and it is the supreme moral law that the will acts for the sake of and from which we derive our duties. This principle, called the categorical imperative, is the â€Å"unconditioned conditioner† of the will, in that it is the determining ground for the will, but is not itself determined by any other law. Kant offers three formulas of the categorical imperative in section II, and it is the third formulation, which requires us to think of ourselves as legislating universal law in a kingdom of ends, that emphasizes the importance of autonomy. It is this concept of autonomy, or freedom of the will, that will be crucial for Kant in