Abstract

The view that morality consists of laws has a rich, particularly religious, tradition. In current debates on ethics, however, it is anything but philosophical commonsense. Not least due to the return to the advantages of virtue ethics, principle-oriented ethics such as the moral law approach have lost popularity. Despite this, the advantages of law-based ethics can also be defended; one paradigm here is still Immanuel Kant’s attempt to ground the objectivity of morality on the concept of a moral law. Accordingly, the aim of this text is to explore the systematic potential of ethics based on the concept of law. For this purpose, I will examine the historical roots of a connection between the concept of morality and that of law and then focus on Kant’s approach to morality. Finally, I will outline the advantages of his conception of morality as autonomy over alternative models of justification of morality.