OBEDIENCE TO THE LAW:

OBEDIENCE TO THE LAW: BY Maxim D'Souza S

According to Kant the morality consists in obedience to the law of our own reason, and immorality, on the contrary, in heteronomy, that is, in obedience to any, even Divine, authority distinct from our own reason, or in action from any other motive than respect for our reason as a law. The entire moral value of a human action is made to consist in the moral disposition of a person or the inner attitude of a person's will, whereby obedience to law results purely out a respect for law.
Kant holds that motivating the will by anything else than obedience to the law is fatal to the practical reason. In the Metaphysics of Morals he says, "The pleasure that must be precede our obedience to the law in order for us to act in conformity with the law is pathological, and our conduct then follows the order of nature; but the pleasure that we can feel only after having determined to obey the law is in the moral order. If we fail to observe this distinction and take as our basic principle eudaemonism (the happiness principle) instead of eleutheronomy (the freedom principle of inner legislation), we effect the euthanasia of all morals.
In the critique of practical reason Kant says, respect for the moral law is the only and the undoubted moral motive and this feeling is directed to no object except on the ground of this law. The moral law first determines the will objectively and directly in the judgment of reason and freedom, whose causality can be determined by the law, consists just in this, that it restricts all inclinations and consequently self esteem, by the condition of obedience to its pure law.
Respect for the moral law then must be regarded as a positive, thought indirect, effect of it on feeling in as much as this respect weakens the impending influence of inclination by humiliating self esteem, and hence also as a subjective principle of activity, that is, as a motive to obedience to the law and as a principle of the maxims of a life conformable to it. Moral law is ultimately enacted by reason and demanding obedience from mere respect for reason.
Kant's stress on the moral law as characterized by absolute necessity, which is yet the determining principle of the will of human agents, is aimed at getting at the practical rule independent of all empirical conditions, which allows no exception, requiring universal obedience as such. As Kant puts it in the second critique, "pure reason is practical of itself alone, and it gives (to man) a universal law, which we call the moral law.