Editing Critique of Practical Reason (section)

==Analytic: Chapter Two==
Kant begins by explaining how, for practical reason, every motive one has intends some effect on the world, whose realization is the production of its object. In contrast, the concept of an object of ''pure'' practical reason is one whose possibility is distinguished from impossibility in virtue of its capacity to be brought about by a willing of the necessary action independently of one's material conditions for doing so. When it is desire that is driving us, we first examine the possibilities that the world leaves open to us, selecting some effect at which we wish to aim. Acting on the practical moral law does not work in this way. The only possible object of the practical law is the Good, since the Good is always an appropriate object for the practical law.

It is necessary to avoid the danger of understanding the practical law simply as the law that tells us to pursue the good, and try to understand the Good as that at which the practical law aims. If we do not understand the good in terms of the practical law, then we need some other analysis by which to understand it. The only alternative is to mistakenly understand the Good as the pursuit of pleasure and evil as the production of pain to oneself.

This sort of confusion between the Good and pleasure also arises when we confuse the concepts of ''good versus evil'' with the concepts of ''well-being versus bad.'' Well-being, when contrasted with the bad, is merely pleasure. But this is not the case with the good, in the sense of ''morally'' good. A morally good person may suffer from a painful disease (bad), but he does not therefore become a bad (evil) person. If a morally bad person is punished for his crimes, it may be bad (painful) for him, but good and just in the moral sense.

Past philosophical investigations into morality have erred in that they have attempted to define the moral in terms of the good rather than the other way around. As a result, they have all fallen victim to the same error of confusing pleasure under one guise or another with morality. If one desires the good, one will act to satisfy that desire, that is in order to produce pleasure.

The [[Moral absolutism|moral law]], in Kant's view, is equivalent to the idea of freedom. Since the noumenal cannot be perceived, we can only know that something is morally right by intellectually considering whether a certain action that we wish to commit could be universally performed. Kant calls the idea that we can know what is right or wrong only through abstract reflection ''moral rationalism''. This is to be contrasted with two alternative, mistaken approaches to moral epistemology: ''moral empiricism'', which takes moral [[good and evil]] to be something we can apprehend from the world and ''moral mysticism'', which takes morality to be a matter of sensing some supernatural property, such as the approbation of God. Although both positions are mistaken and harmful, according to Kant, moral empiricism is much more so because it is equivalent to the theory that the morally right is nothing more than the pursuit of pleasure.

In this chapter, Kant makes his clearest and most explicit formulation of the position he adopts with respect to the question of the fundamental nature of morality. Kant's position is that moral goodness, which consists in following the rule of the categorical imperative, is more fundamental to ethics than good consequences, and that it is the right motivations—an obligation to duty—which is criterial for defining a person as good. Hence, Kant is a [[deontologist]], in the terminology of contemporary philosophy, particularly that of analytic philosophy. Hence, he concludes that we can never have sure insight into whether one has witnessed a genuinely moral act, since the moral rightness, or lack thereof, consists in the will's having been determined to action in the right way from the noumenal world, which is by definition unknowable. For this reason among others, he is categorized as a ''moral rationalist''.