Founder of a Metaphysics of Morals 283the concept of duty in its total purity is not only incomparably simpler, clearer, and
more comprehensible and natural for everyone's practical use than any motive drawn
from happiness, or mixed with happiness and with considerations of happiness (which
always require a great deal of skill and thought). In the view of even the most common
human reason, the concept of duty is far stronger, more penetrating, and more prom¬
ising than any motives borrowed from the self-interested principle of happiness...^29
On May 2, Hamann told Herder that Kant was "working hard on per¬
fecting his system." The counter-critique of Garve had become a "fore¬
runner" of moral philosophy.^30 At the beginning of August he reported
that Kant was still indefatigably working on it, and that now his academic
helper (amanuensis) Jachmann was also busy with it.^31 So by that time, the
final version of the text was already being prepared and the Groundwork was
more or less finished.
The Groundwork is a most impressive work. It is forcefully written, and
it shows Kant at his best. Curiously enough, it was Kant's first extended
work exclusively concerned with moral philosophy or ethics. No matter how
much his previous works are characterized by moral concerns, Kant always
places them in a larger metaphysical context. The book consists of a short
Preface, three main sections, and short concluding remarks. Though it takes
up only about sixty pages, it may well be Kant's most influential work.^32
The Preface starts from an observation on the common division of philo¬
sophical disciplines among the ancients into physics, ethics, and logic. Kant
argues that this division is "perfectly suitable" for some purposes, but claims
that it obscures a more important distinction between material and formal
sciences. Indeed, every science has both a formal and a material part. While
the formal part deals with the logical or mathematical principles underly¬
ing the science, the material part concerns its particular subject matter.
Kant's entire critical philosophy was meant to contribute to the formal
aspect of science. His moral philosophy is no exception. It concentrates
upon the merely formal aspects of morality, leaving aside the empirical
content, which belongs to anthropology, for Kant. He thinks that it is
"clear of itself from the common idea of duty and of moral law" that moral
philosophy ultimately cannot deal with empirical concerns.^33 Because its
claims are universal, the form of moral philosophy must be just as much
a priori as that of theoretical philosophy. Still, the Groundwork was not de¬
signed to deliver all of the metaphysics of morals. Kant claims that he
sought only to describe and establish "the supreme principle of morality.''''^24
Kant's procedure involves two steps, first an analytic part and then a