Founder of a Metaphysics of Morals 281clearly, he also viewed honor as one of the most fundamental concepts of
morality. Indeed, when he summarizes the true content of human duties
in a book that offers his own views on the most general principles of ethics,
his first rule reads:
Act in such a way that you will appear in your conduct as a reasonable and noble man,
and that you express the character of an enlightened and forceful mind...^21
We must act with a view to how we will appear to others. To be sure, these
"others" are perhaps best understood in terms of a disinterested spectator
conceived after Adam Smith and David Hume, but it is society that is ex¬
pressed in these others.
Honor was still important in eighteenth-century Germany. Indeed, it
may be characterized as one of the central moral precepts of the Prussian
Ständestaat. The estates and the guild system were pervaded by it just as
much as was the nobility. Honor may even have been more important to the
citizens of the larger towns and cities in Prussia than it was to many mem¬
bers of the nobility. Without honor, a member of a guild was nothing. To
be dishonored was to be excluded from the guild. Ehrbarkeit or honorable-
ness was almost everything.^22 So when Garve argued that each profession
had its own moral code, that it should have its own code, and that philoso¬
phers should make distinct the "obscure maxims which people of differ¬
ent professions follow," he seems to be endorsing a most important aspect
of Prussian society. Kant's political and historical essays of the previous
year show that he had far surpassed this view. He was not worried so much
about the particularities of Prussian or even European society as he was
concerned with the destiny of humanity as a whole. Prussia was just one
episode in the narrative of a universal history from a cosmopolitan point
of view.
As the son of a master artisan who was an important member of a guild,
Kant had directly experienced the kind of moral disposition or ethos that
Cicero and Garve were talking about. Indeed, it always remained an im¬
portant notion for him.^23 Yet it was not fundamental to morality. Honor-
ableness or Ehrbarkeit was for Kant a merely external form of morality, or
an honestas external He realized clearly that it depended on the social
order, and for this very reason he rejected it as the basis for our maxims.
The ground of moral obligation, he says, must not be found "in the nature
of man nor in the circumstances in which man is placed, but must be
sought a priori solely in the concepts of pure reason."^25 "Honor" and "hon¬
orable" could therefore not possibly capture the true nature of morality. A