3. What is Kant's starting point in the Groundwork?

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we think about Kant's starting-point in the Groundwork. What is the basic idea from which the whole discussion proceeds?

Course

In this course, Professor Adrian Moore (University of Oxford) explores Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals through eight key questions. In particular, we think about the fundamental difference between the three main strands of moral philosophy (consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics), Kant's various formulations of what he calls the categorical imperative (as opposed to the hypothetical imperative), the relationship between the categorical imperative and the will of God, and the relationship between ethics and free will.

Lecturer

Adrian Moore is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he is also a Tutorial Fellow at St Hugh’s College. He was an undergraduate at Cambridge and a graduate at Oxford, where he wrote his doctorate under the supervision of Michael Dummett. His publications include The Infinite; Points of View; Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty: Themes and Variations in Kant’s Moral and Religious Philosophy; and, most recently, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things.