The edition

The two parts of The Metaphysics of Morals were first published separately, the Doctrine of Right probably in January 1797 and the Doctrine of Virtue in August of the same year. In the edition of 1798, Kant's revisions to the text were apparently limited to adding a parenthetical explanation of his term Läsion (AK 249) and an appendix in reply to Friedrich Bouterwek's review of the Doctrine of Right published on 18 February 1797. A more extensively revised edition was published in 1803, during Kant's lifetime but without his cooperation.

The present translation is based on the text of The Metaphysics of Morals edited by Paul Natorp in volume 6 (1907) of the Prussian Academy of the Sciences edition of Kant's works. Natorp's decision not to use the “improved” edition of 1803 is based on his conviction that such alterations in the Doctrine of Virtue as are improvements do not justify the use of a text in the production of which Kant was not involved. I have followed Natorp in relegating to notes any substantive emendations that clarify the text. I have also made use of his notes in identifying authors whose works Kant cites.

It has long been recognized that the text of The Doctrine of Right is corrupt to the extent that paragraphs 4–8 in §6 do not belong there. On the history of this discovery, see p. 40 n. 18. Bernd Ludwig, in his Philosophische Bibliothek edition of the Rechtslehre (Hamburg, Meiner, 1986), proceeded on the hypothesis that this corruption of the text could have been far more extensive than this passage and could account for the obscurity of the work elsewhere.