The Online Library of Liberty

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• List of Works Comprising Kant’s System.
• Preface to the Third Edition.
• Introduction.
• Book I.: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Ethics. 1
• Chapter I.: Transit From the Common Popular Notions of Morality to the Philosophical.
• Chapter II.: Transit From Common Moral Philosophy to the Metaphysic of Ethics.
• Chapter III.: Transit From the Metaphysic of Ethics to an Inquiry Into the À Priori Operations of the Will.
• Book II.: Inquiry Into the À Priori Operations of the Will. ( Extracted From the “ Critik of Practical Reason. ”)
• Chapter I.: Analytic of Principles.
• Chapter II.: On the À Priori Spring of the Will.
• Chapter III.: Dilucidation of the Foregoing Analytic.—on Freedom and Necessity.
• Book III.: Introduction to the Metaphysical Elements of Jurisprudence.
• Preface.
• Introduction to the Metaphysic of Ethics.
• Introduction to the Metaphysic of Law.
• Appendix to the Introduction. of Law Equivocal.
• General Division of Jurisprudence.
• Book IV.: The Metaphysical Elements of the Doctrine of Virtue.
• Introduction.
• Elementology of Ethics. of the Duties Owed By Man to Himself.
• Introduction.
• Part I.: Of the Duties of Perfect and Determinate Obligation.
• Part II.: Of the Indeterminate Moral Duties Owed By Man to Himself In Regard of His End.
• Of the Moral Duties Owed By Mankind Toward His Fellow-men.
• Chapter I.: Of the Duty Owed to Others, Considered Simply As Men.
• Conclusion of the Elementology.
• Appendix.
• Methodology of Ethics.
• Part I.: Didactic of Ethics.
• Part II.: The Ascetic Exercise of Ethics.
• Conclusion of the Ethics. Religion, As a Doctrine of the Duties Owed to God, Falls Beyond the Boundary of Pure Moral Philosophy.

GENERAL DIVISION OF JURISPRUDENCE.

A.—

DIVISION OF JURIDICAL OFFICES.

In this division we may follow Ulpian, by slightly modifying our understanding of his legal formulæ,—a meaning perhaps darkly present to his own mind, and which can be evolved from them with great ease and elegance.

1. Honeste vive—(be an honest man).—Juridical honesty or uprightness consists in upholding one’s personal worth, as a man, against all others,—an obligation capable of being expressed by the following formula:—“Suffer thyself not to become the bare mean of others; and if thou serve them, be also their end.” This obligation is afterwards explained, as founded on the rights of humanity in a man’s own person—(lex justi).

2. Neminem læde—(do no man wrong)—even though as a consequence thou must abandon all connections with others, and go out of society—(lex juridica.)

3. Suum cuique tribue—(give each man his own).—Understood literally, these words are void of meaning, for that cannot be given to another which he already has. The formula can therefore alone signify, Enter with thy fellow-men into that state—society—where each man’s own is defended from the violence of his neighbour—(lex justitiæ).

These three classical formulæ make up one entire division of the principles of law, and found a division of juridical obligation into internal—external—and that composite obligation, which is constituted by subsuming the second under the principle of the first.

B.—

DIVISION OF RIGHTS.

A system of rights is called law, and is either natural, or statutable and positive. In the first case, law rests entirely on pure principles à priori; in the latter, it is considered as based on the will of a lawgiver.

2. Right is the ethical faculty or title of obliging another, and is the legal ground on which the latter sort of law is based; and of such right there are two kinds, originary and derived: the first is that birthright of man which subsists independently of any legal act; the second is that which is acquired to him by such an act.

The congenital mine and thine may be also called the inward or intrinsic right, for external right must always be acquired.

There is but one Birthright, Freedom.

Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person’s freedom. Subordinate to this supreme idea, and included under it, are the rights,—1. of Equality,i.e., the title not to be held bound to others beyond what they are in their turn bound to; consequently the right of every one to be his own master (sui juris): 2. The right to be regarded as legally innocent and guiltless, in so far as no one has been injured by his use of his freedom: 3. Lastly, the right to do to every man whatever implies nothing derogatory to that other’s rights, as, for example, to exchange one’s ideas and opinions with another, to tell or promise somewhat, and that whether true or untrue, whether sincerely or insincerely; for it is the province of the other to believe or discredit what is said—to accept or decline what is promised.* The reason why this division, breaking up the conception Freedom into its subordinate parts, has obtained among systems of natural law, is this, that when a question arises as to any derived right, and the question arises on whom the burden lies to prove either the fact, or to establish the law of his case, the party who declines the obligation, and asserts it to be with the other, does in fact appeal to his birthright, and so declares, that to impute to him an obligation to prove, is inconsistent with some part or other (e.g., equality, innocence) of his character freedom; and this may be carried through all the different relations into which freedom can specifically enter.

Further, because this birthright is one and indivisible, the division of rights consists of two members of most unequal dimensions; and therefore this right is discussed now in the introduction, and the subdivisions of natural law restrained to the external rights of mine and thine.

FUNDAMENTAL DIVISION OF THE METAPHYSIC OF ETHICS.

I. All obligations incumbent on man to fulfil, are either juridical, for which outward laws are admissible to co-act their observance, or ethical, where no such legislation is conceivable; and these ethical offices cannot fall under any outward co-active legislation, because such offices depend on certain ends and designs which it is the imperative duty of man to propose to himself. But no outward compulsion can give any person certain intentions, for these depend on himself alone; for even though outward actions can be extorted, tending to that end, still the subject himself may be disinclined to it.

II. Man, as a subject of obligation, is considered singly with reference to his freedom, which is supersensible, that is, his humanity, in which consists his personality, exempting him from every phenomenal determinator (homo noumenon), and requires to be contradistinguished from himself, as the same person subjected to the conditions of time and space (homo phenomenon); and these, when applied to those two kinds of offices, resting on the notions right and end, give birth to the following division of all moral science, and is a division founded on the relations subsisting betwixt the law and the matter of obligation.

Besides the above division, the subjects mutually obliging one another may stand in different relations, and these relationships would afford the ground-plan of another division, according to the relation betwixt the obliger and the obliged.

Where we have exhibited at once the materials and the architectonic form of the science.

The law of nature ought not to be divided, as is often done, into natural and social, but into natural and civil or municipal: the first is called private, the second public law; for to the state of nature, not social institutions, but the civil or municipal, are to be opposed. In the state of nature, society need not be awanting, but only that civil society, securing by public institutions the rights of man; and that is the reason why the natural is called private law (jus privatum).*

BOOK IV.

THE METAPHYSICAL ELEMENTS OF THE DOCTRINE OF VIRTUE.

[* ]To utter a deliberate untruth is in common speech called lying or falsehood; for it may injure the person to whom it is told, if he good-naturedly repeat it, and so render himself the laughing-stock of others. But, juridically, that alone is falsehood which directly violates the rights of man, e.g., the false narrative of a contract, instituted for the purpose of attaching the property of another. Nor is this distinction between these two kindred conceptions ill-founded; for, in any statement made by one man to another, it is entirely at the option of this last what weight he will give to what he hears. And yet, to say of any one that he is a man not to be believed, borders so near on the charge that he is a liar, that the line marking out what falls within the domain of law and what within that of ethics, is all but imperceptible.

[* ]After this follows a course of theoretic law, which omitting, we arrive at ethics or morals strictly so called.—Tr.