Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/531

517 in the briefest possible way. 'Rationality' involves 'lawfulness' and 'universal validity': hence the demands of duty are a priori binding for all rational beings. Thus, therefore, is the whole groundwork of Kant's ethical structure built on the basis of the mutual implications of abstract a priori conceptions, without any regard to actual human experience.

But what is the real meaning of this leading principle of Kant's ethics: "Act only in accordance with that precept which you can also wish should be a general law for all rational beings"? This is plainly no real principle at all; it is only a sort of finger-post. The Zahlmeister that holds the cash of reality here, Schopenhauer says, is none other than Egoism. And here we enter upon his next charge against the Kantian ethics. It is nothing but an abstract reformulation of the old theological morality; and, like the former, it is, at bottom, egoistic.

My action is labelled right or wrong, Kant says, according as I can will the maxim of my act to be an universal law or not. But why do I will one way or the other? What is the real spring of action in either case? Schopenhauer answers readily: "Egoism, which is the nearest, ever ready, original, and living standard of all volition and which has at any rate the jus primi occupantis before every moral principle." To the superficial reader of Kant's ethics, this assertion may appear absurd. Why, he would say, Kant sets out at the very start to establish morality distinctly on the basis of disinterested adherence to the demands of duty, to the rationally necessitated course of an autonomous will. What is Kant's morality but a morality of the austere pursuit of virtue, fiat justitia pereat mundus? Yes, Schopenhauer answers, but does not Kant also tell you that, while you, as a rational moral being, must pursue virtue with no eye to the consequences of your conduct, nevertheless in the rational order of things virtue does involve happiness, and vice the opposite? It is the inevitableness of this coincidence, which apparently necessitates Kant's three ethical postulates: Transcendental Freedom, to make responsibility of the moral agent rationally possible, and thus