What did Kant mean when he said "The death of dogma is the beginning of morality"?
Does it mean that you can only start being truly ethical when you are not looking at things based on a series of axioms on how thing should behave, but instead take each case by its individual merits?
Morality is what makes humans human. Dogma is a technical term for Kant that in short means a claim that has no objective reality (cannot be proven). Morality and certain religious beliefs (eternal soul, God) have objective reality for Kant. And morality is autonomy and therefore dogmas are kind of opposite to morality.
I made a full text search for "Geburt" [birth] "Dogma", "Dogmen" [pl.] and "Dogmatismus" [dogmatism] in the german Akademieausgabe, which includes not only his books and essays, but his letters and handwritings as well as opus postumum, too. At google, though, a certain connection to Schopenhauer occured which I have not looked up further. It seems to be more of a saying.
One text that comes close to it is in his late Dispute Between the Faculties, Ak. 7:42, where he writes about "Glaubenssätze" (which may be translated as either dogmas or doctrines), that may be overcome by morals, but by this not provoking a conflict with religious belief at all.
The more likely one is from the "Religion Within the Boundaries of Pure Reason", Ak. 6:80 fn., where he describes how we could conceive humanity to be newborn as a moral one as soon as the dogma of the orinial sin would be rejected. But he also makes clear that humans have always been (potentially) moral, no matter what the dogmas are, and that Jesus as virgin-birthed is sort of a conceiving of true humanity within the dogma:
To conceive the possibility of a person free from innate propensity to evil by having him born of a virgin mother is an idea of reason consistent with,as it were, a moral instinct difficult to explain and yet undeniable. For, since natural generation cannot take place without sensual pleasure on both sides and yet seems to relate us to the mating of animals generally far too closely (for human dignity), we look upon it as something to he ashamed of - an attitude* whichcertainly was the real cause of the belief in the sanctity of the monastic state - and imagine it,therefore, as something immoral, something not reconcilable with the perfection of a humanbeing, yet grafted in his nature and hence also passed on to his followers as an evil predisposition. — Now, the idea of the birth, independent of any sexual intercourse (virginal),of a child untainted by moral blemish is well suited to this obscure representation (merely sensible on one side, yet moral and hence intellectual on the other), though not without its theoretical difficulties (with respect to which, however, it is not at all necessary to determineanything from a practical point of view). For, according to the hypothesis of epigenesis, the mother, who descended from her parents through natural birth, would still be tainted with this moral blemish and would pass it on to her child, at least half of it, even in a supernatural birth.To escape this consequence, therefore, we would have to assume the theory that the seeds [ofthe descendants] pre-exist in the progenitors, not, however, the theory that these seeds develop on the female side (for then the consequence is not escaped) but on the male side alone (not onthe part of the ova but of the spermatozoa).
So as you can see, in some sense in the person of Jesus the dogma has died and opened the possibility for his morality. But this is only due to the fact that the dogma of original sin only had this possibility left.
