Developing the Moral Motive

In the famous “Incentives” chapter of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant includes a discussion of the Biblical injunction to “[l]ove God above all, and your neighbor as yourself” (KpV 5:83). Kant reads this not as a commandment to feel love and then to do good out of this, but rather as a commandment to strive toward eventually doing our duty gladly. But Kant explicitly warns against flattering ourselves to think that our moral disposition has ever developed into such an “ideal of holiness” that love replaces respect for the moral law: focusing on the gladly part of doing our duty gladly risks sidelining the duty part, the fact that moral laws impose obligations on us whether we like it or not.