The title of Beneke’s Grundlegung zur Physik der Sitten is an obvious play with Kant’s Groundwork for metaphysics of morals: in essence, Beneke appears to be suggesting that morals should be brought down from the abstractions of Kantian ethics and into the natural world we live in. This attempt is evident, firstly, in the form Beneke chooses - it is not written as a scholarly book, but as a collection of letters sent to a Kantian friend. In addition, Beneke sides, against Kant, with Jacobi, a philosopher of the concrete.
Beneke’s attack against Kantian morals goes farther than these rather formal matters. The main point of content Beneke has with Kant is that morals and ethics are not primarily based upon reasoning, but on feeling. In one sense, this is just a restatement of Beneke’s thesis that all conceptual activities are just reactivations of sensory and perceptual activities. On the other hand, Beneke’s statement has also stronger implications - he wants to say that what we feel to be moral or immoral is our only criterion for stating what is moral or immoral.
Beneke’s criterion of morality goes against some central Kantian tenets about morality, first of them being that moral behaviour should be based on an assumed absolutely free choice of noumenal will. As Kantians would note, feelings are part of the physical world and therefore always have causes and therefore are not absolutely free, unlike they thought human reason to be. Beneke would agree, but also reject the whole notion of absolutely free choice - all we need in morality is free will in the sense of a will not affected by external coercion.
Furthermore, Kantians would note that feeling can never be a universally valid criterion for anything, since feelings differ from one individual to another. Beneke, on the other hand, is against the very notion of a priori certain statements, except as statements that we feel to be true whatever our circumstances. Furthermore, he contends that ethics need not be universally valid, but could be, for instance, relative to culture. His pet example is bigamy, which is ethically wrong in Europe, but might be acceptable for cultures where men have higher sex drives (Beneke does not consider the possibility of females with a higher sex drive). He also appears to accept that different cultural values can be graded and that civilisation brings with it higher values.
Beneke does give a sort of definition of what immoral or unethical activity consists of - activity is immoral, when it has been caused by a desire so extensive that it hinders other desires. Note that Beneke is not saying that immorality would be connected to a too extensive pleasure. In fact, he is very much against what he calls a monkish attitude in which all pleasures are disparaged. For instance, there is nothing wrong in enjoying the carnal delights, but it is only when a person becomes addicted to these delights and when too much of her time is spent in trying to obtain them that her actions become immoral. Beneke also notes that this definition of immorality/morality is in a sense not dependent on the culture - one is not immoral or moral because of one’s values, but because of how well one lives in accordance with these values.
What seems at first unclear is how to extend this definition to ethics involving persons other than oneself. Beneke’s answer is simply to assume that people also have desire to help other people and too strong egoistic desires hinder the altruistic desires. What Beneke does not seem to have considered is the possibility that a person might not have any altruistic desires - such a person would not, according to Beneke’s definition, be immoral, although he would always act egoistically.
An interesting consequence of Beneke’s feeling-based ethics is that he can assume the existence of moral geniuses, who have an instinctual knack of doing the right thing. Beneke also notes that just like aesthetic excellence comes in two variations - beauty based on harmony of forces and sublimity based on grandiosity of a single force - similarly ethical excellence comes in two shapes. Firstly, he notes, there is the ethical excellence arising out of lack of ethical struggles or a state of complete innocence, and secondly, there is also the excellence arising out of struggle with strong desires. Considering for a while, which type of excellence is better, he then comes to the conclusion that ethical behaviour generated from struggle is at least more stable - an innocently ethical person might later succumb to the temptations of strong desires.
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