Good and Evil, According to Kant

In Chapter II [of the Analytic of the] Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues against employing concepts of "good" and "evil," as impossible prior to rules/laws determining the will. He argues that the only objects of pure practical reason are the good and the evil. He attempts to distinguish good from well-being, and evil from ill-being which plays an important role in his elaboration on the concept of objects of pure practical reason. He lays out the possibility of two accounts in defining an object.

Kant states there are two possible accounts for an object of practical reason. Kant designates the only possible account (for moral experience) is that objects of pure practical reason exist independent of physical capacity to perform action, and their moral possibility solely depends on whether or not it is a law that is determining the will - not the object itself. This is only possible, according to Kant, in the case of the moral law - which pure practical reason alone determines the will. If this is true, then it follows that there is essentially only two objects of pure practical reason: the good and the evil (186). If, the opposite path is chosen and objects of physical possibility determine the will - then the will would be determined according to that which brings pleasure and pain (154); the former represents the determination of the will according to that which we understand "through the faculty of desire, and the latter through the faculty of aversion." However, this could not be the case. It would be impossible to determine what brings pleasure and pain without relying on experience, which in turn is dependent upon sense impressions. This of course is heteronomy and not morality. He continues:

Well-being or ill being always signifies only a reference to our state of agreeableness or disagreeableness, of gratification or pain, and if we desire or avoid an object on this account we do so only insofar as it is referred to our sensibility and to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure it causes (188).