Kantian Ethics

According to Kant, everything that we can think of as desirable or good are not good in themselves, rather they qualify or are thought of as being good. Example of such things that are considered as good or desirable include intelligence, wit, temperament, wealth, and health etc. All these things are not good in themselves as they can also be used for bad purposes. These things only qualify as good when used to achieve a good outcome. Therefore, according to Kant, the only thing that can be thought of to be good in itself is the good will behind an act, which is good even if it fails to bring about positive results.
Kant, however, argues that even though a goodwill is good in itself, it is not enough to be considered as a basis of morality. This is because many a times an act of goodwill is performed out of a personal interest, or out of an inclination. To be considered as a basis of morality, an act has to be unconditionally good; and personal interests or inclinations deprive the goodwill behind that act to be considered as unconditionally good. A will behind an act is, therefore, unconditionally good, according to Kant, if the act is performed out of a sense of “Duty” and duty alone, i.e. there is no inclination or personal interest attached with the will. In other words, we should act from respect for the moral law, keeping aside our personal interests.
Kant then goes on to propose that the actions done from duty should be morally based upon a maxim, i.e. the rule which determines the duty or the actions that we must carry out; and the maxim must form the Law of morality. To form the Law of morality, the maxim must satisfy two properties.
The first property is that the maxim could be formed into a universal law of nature, i.e. if all rational beings follow that maxim, it would not contradict itself. The second property would be to decide if you would be willing to live in a world where that maxim is followed universally.
Kant then gives examples of testing if a maxim satisfies these properties. One of the examples is to test a maxim which states that making false promises are moral if it gets you what you are in need of. For instance, if you are in financial difficulty you can take out a loan by promising to pay it back even though you know you would not be able to pay it back. Now if you universalize this maxim, that is to say that everyone in financial difficulty makes a false promise knowing that they would not be able to keep it, we would find that the lender would never accept such promises because he would be aware of the fact that there is no intent by the promisor of keeping the promise; as a result making promises would become impossible and the maxim would contradict itself. This maxim therefore does not satisfy the first property and therefore cannot be formed into a moral law.
If, according to Kant, we take those maxims which satisfy the two properties and raise it to form universal laws of nature which would only determine our actions and not our inclinations, we would achieve freedom from our interests. In other words we would not be a slave of our inclinations or interests and would, as rational beings, freely act out of a sense of duty determined by the law that we ourselves have universalized. This would also mean that every rational being would be autonomous as everyone would be determining the universal law himself. Also, by testing for the first property, a rational being would consider, not only himself as an end, but all rational beings as an end in themselves.