Allen W. Wood - Action Quotes

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When Kant distinguishes between actions that have moral content or [true, authentic, inner] moral worth and those that do not, he is not distinguishing what has moral value from what has none. Instead, the distinction he is drawing is between what has a special, fundamental, essentially or authentically moral value from what is valuable from the moral standpoint but does not have the sort of value that lies right at the heart of morality.

Allen W. Wood
Kant's argument [...] cannot and need not rest on the claim that all these alternatives to his interpretation of rational action can be conclusively refuted. It involves only the claim that his interpretation is more natural and reasonable than they are. I also think that so understood, Kant's argument does as much as can possibly be required of any argument purporting to establish a claim about what has ultimate value. In philosophy, as Aristotle wisely tells us, we must not apply the wrong standards to a subject matter (Aristotle 1094b25). This also means we must not expect more of a claim, or an argument for it, than is reasonable.

Allen W. Wood
What interests Kant in all these cases is only this: Did the agents in these cases have to constrain themselves through respect for moral principles in order to perform the dutiful action? If they did, and the agent did the dutiful action, then that action was done from duty. If they did not, then the agent is not acting from duty in the sense intended in this discussion (whatever the real motive for the action may have been – in case that issue were to come up).

Allen W. Wood
It is [...] an elementary misunderstanding to think that Kantian ethics is committed to a system of inflexible moral rules just because it regards moral imperatives as categorical imperatives. [...] It is also an elementary misunderstanding of the concept of a categorical imperative to think that because Kantian ethics grounds obligation on such imperatives, it has no concern for ends or (therefore) for the consequences of actions.

Allen W. Wood