Taking the general concept of 'obligation' as a guiding theme, this chapter identifies certain unconsidered features of the development of German Enlightenment thought that were taken up and further developed in the context of Immanuel Kant's new approach to moral philosophy. Drawing upon the earlier research of Mariano Campos, the chapter reconstructs the developmental history of Wolff's theory of obligation. In his first programmatic work, the Philosophia practica universalis, mathematica methodo conscripta of 1703, Christian Wolff defends a positivistic concept of law and obligation that owes much to the thought of Samuel Pufendorf. Wolff was fundamentally shaken by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's objections to the position defended in his first published work, as the thorough self-criticism that Wolff presented in the Ratio praelectorum of 1718 clearly reveals. In his understanding of obligation, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduces new emphases of his own that reinforce the authentically compelling character of practical prescriptions.

Immanuel Kant's moral theory has been generally characterised in a variety of ways: as a formalist ethics, as an ethics of duty, as a deontological ethics, and so forth. But it is also an important feature of Kant's theory that it represents what one can call an 'ethic of maxims'. Otfried Höffe, one of the most thorough contemporary interpreters of Kant's thought, introduced this expression precisely to emphasise the central role played by the concept of a maxim in Kant's ethics. The concept of maxims probably derives from Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau's concept of maxim appears as Grundsatz or fundamental principle in Kant's Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime. From the beginning, Kant's concept of a maxim or a fundamental principle involves a conscious decision that is taken and applied by only a few individuals.