n alone, and whether or not a person acted morally depended on whether he/she had acted on reason alone.The essential difference between Kant and Hume that affected their whole thinking on the matter of morality was each one's belief about the autonomy of the will. Kant saw the will as fully autonomous and therefore needing no external sources for motivation, thus making it possible to act out of reason alone.This view went completely against that put forward by Hume. Hume believed that "reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions". He argued that reason is used to discover the causes of pain or pleasure, but it is the prospect of pain or pleasure that causes action, not the reasoning alone, as that is entirely indifferent to us. This notion of always being motivated by pleasure or pain is very important, as it follows from this that when we act morally, it is a desire that makes us act and not reason. "Since morals, therefore, have an influence on the actions and affections, if follows that they cannot be derived from reason, and that because reason alone, as we have already proved, can never have any such influence. Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason" (David Hume 'A Treatise of Human Nature').Kant saw it as essential that the will must not be the slave of the passions for moral actions to be possible. Kant differentiated two kinds of imperative statements: first, the hypothetical imperative, which has the general for "If you want to achieve P then you should do X"; and, second, the categorical imperative, of the form "You should do X".Hypothetical imperatives are unproblematic. They are straightforward sentences that express mundane statements of fact. Categorical ones, on the other hand, are highly problematic. My own reaction to any categorical imperative is to a...
