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derived from the Categorical Imperative. While this rule can-
not tell us exactly what to do or how to decide in a particular
situation, it serves as an indispensable guide.

Kant published his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
in 1785.¹ It is a short treatise or essay, divided into three
parts; the essay is prefaced by an Introduction, which we may
pass over and go directly to the first section "Transition from
the Common Rational Knowledge of Morals to the Philosophical".

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¹ Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg, East Prussia (now
Kaliningrad) in 1724. He lived all his quiet meticulous life
in his native city, achieving distinction as professor of phi-
losophy at the University of Königsberg. His most ambitious
work, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) is a study of theory
of knowledge. In its pages Kant argued that the mind cannot
know the external world as it is in itself, but only an orderly
array of appearances (phenomena), the product of innate concept-
forms of the mind acting upon sense experience. Kant's ethical
writings followed. In them he claimed that, while as knowing
beings we cannot penetrate beyond a phenomenal knowledge of the
world, we must as acting, willing beings, postulate (though we
cannot prove) an unconditioned realm of freedom beyond the
causal necessity of the phenomenal world, a realm in which we
ourselves have roots. Kant died in 1804.

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