ETHICS being Universal law is law which is made by rational wills like mine ‘There arises’, Kant tells us, ‘a systematic union of rational beings under common objective laws—that is a kingdom.’ A rational being is subject only to laws that are made by himself and yet are universal: the moral will is autonomous, giving to itself the laws that it obeys In the kingdom of ends, we are all both legislators and subjects The idea of the autonomy of the moral will is very attractive; but one wonders how Kant can be so conWdent that the operation of all the diVerent rational choices of maxim will produce a single system of universal laws Can we, as he cheerfully tells us to do, ‘abstract from the personal diVerences between rational beings, and also from all the content of their private ends’ (G, 433)? ‘In the kingdom of ends’, Kant tells us, ‘everything has either a price or a worth’ If it has a price, something else can be put in its place as a fair exchange; if it is beyond price and is unexchangeable, then it has worth There are two kinds of price: market price, which is related to the satisfaction of need, and fancy price, which is related to the satisfaction of taste Morality is above and beyond either kind of price: Morality, and humanity so far as it is capable of morality, is the only thing which has worth Skill and diligence in work have a market price; wit, imagination, and humour have a fancy price; but Wdelity to promises and benevolence based on principle (not on instinct) have an intrinsic worth (G, 435) Kant made room, in the kingdom of ends, for a sovereign or head who was (like the members) a legislator, but who (unlike the members) was not subject to law and did not act out of duty This sovereign is no doubt God, but he is given no special role in the determination of the moral law Kant’s successors in later centuries, who have been attracted by the idea of the autonomous will as the moral legislator, have quietly dropped the sovereign, and turned the kingdom of ends into a republic of ends, in which no legislator is privileged over any other Hegel’s Ethical Synthesis We noticed earlier that Kant’s ethics stood at an opposite pole from Aristotle’s For Aristotle the overarching ethical concept was that of happiness, which was the ultimate goal of every fully rational human 267