Basic Writings

Introduction

introduction Moral philosophy is concerned with human actions.At the outset it states that certain actions are felt as good, others as bad; that bad actions often give rise to remorse; that on account of the so-called sense of justice we demand punishment for bad actions. These moral phenomena are often considered to be something supersensible —the voice of God, as the theologians put it. In his essay Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant denied decisively the communication between this world and the other, which the church calls revelation. He had also demonstrated in his Critique of Pure Reason that no knowledge at all of the transcendent is possible,because our power of knowledge is valid only within space and time. Despite all this, even Kant saw in moral consciousness something transcendent, to a certain extent a revelation from the transcendent world. Admittedly, before the theory of evolution appeared, many of these phenomena could not be explained by immanent causes, and a transcendent explanation is certainly far more satisfying than—none at all.Yet today,since Lamarck and Darwin have written, moral phenomena can be traced back to natural causes just as much as physical phenomena: moral man stands no closer to the intelligible world than physical man. This natural explanation rests essentially on the following proposition: The higher animals have developed by natural selection from lower ones, for instance , human beings from the apes. I do not go into the reasons for this proposition.For I consider it to be proven by the writings of Darwin, and in part already by those of Lamarck. Anyone who has a different opinion may as well leave the present work unread: since he denies the premises, he cannot agree with the conclusions. ...