Three years earlier, in the Critique of Pure Reason and in his lectures on ethics roughly contemporaneous with it, Kant had recognized that the principle for appraising actions as duties is the formal principle expressed in “the categorical imperative. Before the supreme principle of morality is applied to human nature it should be exhibited in its purity. Kant's reasons for writing a treatise preliminary to his metaphysics of morals are adequately explained within the Groundwork itself. In September of that year Hamann reported that Kant had sent off the manuscript of his Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, and in April 1785 that he had received four copies of the book from his publisher in Halle. It is true that moral laws and duty are spoken of in the general moral philosophy (contrary indeed to all fitness). Early in 1784 Kant's friends and associates began to mention in their correspondence his work on a “Prodromus” or “Prolegomena” to his metaphysics of morals. For the metaphysic of morals has to examine the idea and the principles of a possible pure will, and not the acts and conditions of human volition generally, which for the most part are drawn from psychology. Like the Critique of Practical Reason, it seems to have been almost a by-product of his plan to write a “metaphysics of morals,” the vicissitudes of which are outlined in the editorial introduction to The Metaphysics of Morals. Yet we have little historical evidence about Kant's decision to write this treatise. Its influence has been out of all proportion to its size so too has been the amount of commentary, interpretation, criticism, and debate to which it has given rise. Kant's short treatise Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is by far the best known of his writings in moral philosophy.
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