A Path to the Metaphysics of Moral

Abstract

The title of this paper might suggest to some readers Kant’s Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. This is intended. Correspondingly, what I will attempt here is to present a reflective version of Kant’s path which led him to the idea and need of the metaphysics of morals in the Groundwork of The Metaphysics of morals. The following will be somewhat free and speculative, but entirely loyal to Kant’s spirit. In doing this I will use help from Thomas Hobbes, Richard Dawkins, and Victor Frankl. I believe that such a reflection on Kant’s path can have a meaning of its own. Furthermore, it can have important implications for the current debate about the artificial process of making human beings entirely homogeneous and perfect with respect to their bodies and intelligence, that is, for the so-called transhumanism or posthumanism debate. As far as I can discern, the ultimate reason for Nick Bostrom, one of the most representative figures of the transhumanism movement, for pursuing the process without limits and so in the end producing an all-mighty superintelligence called “posthuman” is its inevitability due to the following foreseeable danger and subsequent fear: that otherwise, it would be possible for some evil minds to produce it ahead of us and then enslave us. I think that, if this is really the situation in which we find ourselves now, we must be said to be really in a very miserable state. If so, then it is worth thinking back and trying to get a better understanding of why we have started pursuing the process of perfection, what in fact we are doing in doing so, and what basic problems this might have. A reflection on Kant’s path to the idea and need of the metaphysics of morals can help us. For this purpose, my reflective version will be attuned to this aim.