4:407

          The second section: Transition from moral philosophy to the metaphysics of morals of Kant mainly discusses how it’s impossible to find behavior solely based on duty alone, and basically discusses how pure motives are. The passage that introduces this ideology starts in the very beginning.  I will be further analyzing the second paragraph of the second section, which is 4:407. The paragraph starts out by saying that it is difficult to determine whether an action purely was done on moral grounds and only on one’s duty. Sometimes situations arise that nothing, besides the moral ground of duty, could be more influential enough to do such an extraordinary action that required a lot of sacrifice that the person had to go through.  People automatically think that the behavior is done for their own personal gain or some other motive, but you can’t jump to that conclusion only based on the significance of the action and how much sacrifice it takes. On the other hand, we can’t just assume the action was done on a moral motive either. Basically, we can never 100% know the motives of an action because sometimes the person doesn't even know themselves. Even if we do the best examination and scrutiny of a situation, theirs is no way of telling what the true incentives are. The moral worth is not defined by the actions that we see, but it is determined by the interior values someone has. Unfortunately, this is something that we can’t see from the exterior.