I do not agree with Kant on his notion that the motivation behind the action is enough evidence to judge an action as moral or immoral. Not only do I disagree with the way he attempts to define moral laws, I find that when Kant suggests that our actions ought to be thought of as universal laws, he is making a very vague claim. I believe that there can be no universal means to judge the morality of an action. Kant makes it very clear that his categorical imperative will provide a universal law of morality.
One case where I agree with Kant is the case of victimless crimes. I think that so long as an action does not interfere negatively with another person it cannot be judged to be immoral. I will do my best to explain the three types of actions that are present in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; moral actions, immoral actions and neutral actions. A moral action would be defined as an action that positively affects the greatest number of participants in a given society and was committed with the intent to uphold the moral laws that are held in that society. A society could be a family, town, nation, or even an entire walk of life. An immoral action is defined as very simply the opposite; an action that negatively affects a great number of people in a given society and that was committed with malice intent. Finally, we come to neutral actions. A neutral action is an action that has no affect on any individual within the society other that the ones that are initially performing the action. I think that the types of actions that can be neutral are much more trivial and arbitrary. Such as jay-walking, the act of jay-walking would be a not-moral action. That is to say that this action is not an immoral action, but it is impartial. For Kant, actions such as this cannot be moral because they fail to provide sufficient motivation either way to be deemed moral or immoral.
It seems that on the surface it would be easy to fall into the assumption that with Kant is it a hit or miss style of morality, but upon deeper reflection it becomes clear that the categorical imperative does not divide morality into two distinct sections. Kant would not say that morality is black and white. While motivation is a key ingredient for morality for Kant, there tends to be some gray area. And that is only natural as we are not machines.
