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Allen Wood's Kantian Ethics is an ambitious monograph promising us to map out the general structure of Kant's moral philosophy.1 Out of fifteen chapters, ten discuss canonical topics in Kant's thought (in this order) - reason, moral worth, ethical theory, the moral law, humanity, autonomy, freedom, virtue, duties and conscience - with more exotic chapters dedicated to social justice, punishment, sex, lies and consequences. My review covers the traditional part (chapters 4-9). The book aims to critically re-evaluate Kant's writings on morality: hence its title, Kantian ethics, not Kant's ethics (p. ix). To borrow Karl Popper's metaphor, Wood attempts nothing less than a rational reconstruction of science - Kant's moral 'science' denoting, as is common in classical German idealism, a systematic investigation of a subject-matter bound by first principles or presuppositions. Yet, aside from this 'positive' or reconstructive side, Wood's undertaking has a 'negative' side as it endeavours to dispel common, but misplaced, criticisms of Kant's moral philosophy: its alleged rigorism, overdemandingness and avoidance of moral dilemmas.
In reconstructing Kant's moral science we must return to basics, to the Groundwork, before we work our way up to the Metaphysics of Morals (via occasional detours into Religion and the Critique of Practical Reason). The Groundwork's second section is a crucial element in this reconstructive enterprise because it lays bare the corpus of Kant's notion of duty-bound conduct (p. 69). A coherent reading of Kant's moral science, Wood argues, would in the final analysis disclose it to be a science of duty (ch. 2, esp. pp. 33-9), which is dialectically linked to the notion of reasons (pp. 16, 92-5). But before taking up this positive task (in determining what Kant's moral science is about), a negative task or critique (to determine what Kant's moral science is not about) is in order. Wood's critique targets two tendencies in Kantian scholarship:
1.
preoccupation with the 'universalizability' formula of the categorical imperative (CI);
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preoccupation with the equivalence thesis interpreting the three, or indeed five, different CI formulations as morally equivalent.
Critique
It is requisite to explore the infrastructure of Kant's moral law as it sets the background for Wood's analysis. Section one of the Groundwork introduces Kant's famous argument...