The Good Will

A man dives into a river to save a drowning child and fails. Another takes aim at his neighbor and misses. Which one did the right thing? Paul Guyer opens the first section of Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, where the only unqualified good in the world turns out to be a good will: the luck-proof intention to do right. Strip that will of every desire and something startling is left. Then the harder question: if the moral law is this easy to know, why is it so hard to obey? Socrates had an answer. Kant, Guyer argues, built his moral psychology on refusing it.