kantian ethics Flashcards
(13 cards)
what is kantian ethics
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity” – Kant.
Kant’s solution was to base religion and ethics on reason, not faith. Reason is universal in that everyone has it. it is first hand ‘a priori’.
Kantian ethics is deontological, meaning ‘duty-based’.
immanual kant ws a german philsopher he wrote ‘groundwork for the metaphysics of morals’ , ‘critique of practical reason’ and ‘the metaphysics of morals’
duty and good will
A Good will is held by a person who has the right intention when performing their duty. Once we have used our reason to figure out our duty, we should then act purely out of a sense of duty. We should leave out personal feelings/desires and just do ‘duty for duty’s sake’.
Kant illustrates with a shopkeeper who lowers their prices to attract more customers and another who does the same action but out of a sense of fairness to their customers. Only the latter has a good will.
Hypothetical vs categorical imperatives
the categorical imperative - something we have a duty to always do
the hypothetical - you should do X if you want Y
“The categorical imperative would be one which presented an action as of itself objectively necessary, without regard to any other end”
The first formulation of the categorical imperative
universability
‘Act only according to that maxim by which you could at the same time will it become a universal law’. – Kant.
This means that we should only act on an ethical principle if it is logically possible for everyone to act on it. This is the test of universalizability.
E.g Kant thinks lying cannot be universalised because if everyone were to lie, there would be no such thing as honesty or truth anymore.
The second formulation of the categorical imperative
“Always treat persons, whether others or in yourself, always as an end, never merely as a means.” – Kant
“every other rational being also represents his existence as consequent on the same rational ground as is valid for me” – Kant.
It is acceptable to treat someone as a means, so long as you also treat them as an end.
- Kant illustrates this with the example of being waited on in a restaurant. Technically you are treating the waiter as a means. However, Kant says this is acceptable according to the 2nd formulation so long as they are also treated at the same time as an end
The third formulation of the categorical imperative
kingdom of ends
reminder to always act on the moral law. If everyone followed Kant’s ethics we would live in a ‘kingdom of ends’, a world of rational beings where everyone was treated as an end. Kant argued we should behave as if we did live in that world. We must not put aside the moral law simply because others might not be following it.
The three postulates
Kant thought that there were three postulates we have to assume to be true if ethics is to be based on reason.
god, immortality, freedom
Kant thought that without free will, we could not be responsible for our actions and thus surely ethics would be pointless.
For ethics to work, there needs to be justice. So, Kant thought that there must be a God who lets us into an afterlife where good people are rewarded with happiness. Kant called this the ‘summum bonum’, meaning the highest good.
clashing duties
strength - ethical clarity
Kant’s precise rules and method for figuring them out is available to all rational beings. It doesn’t assert rules upon people from an external authority.
however
weakness - clashing duties - Kant said ‘ought implies can’. We must be capable of doing an action for it to be our duty. If duties clash and one cannot be done, then it can’t be our duty. However, if those duties were obtained through the Kant’s formula of the categorical imperative, then Kant’s ethical theory cannot tell us our duty. -
sartre - soldier trying to decide whether to go to war to defend their country, or stay home and look after his sick parent. They cannot do both, but both are universalizable and neither involve treating people as a mere means. It follows that both are their duty, and so there are clashing duties.
Sartre is an existentialist who thinks there can’t be any objective guidance for our ethical views. Kantian ethics cannot provide the moral clarity
kants response
if we think there are clashing duties, we are haven’t used our reason properly. He distinguished between perfect duties, where there is only one way of fulfilling them, and imperfect duties, where there are multiple ways of fulfilling them. We have a perfect duty to tell the truth because there is only one way we can fulfil our duty to tell the truth, and that is to avoid lying. However, in the case of looking after a sick relative or fighting for your country, there are multiple ways in which these duties could be fulfilled. You could pay for someone else to look after your sick family member, or help the country’s war effort while remaining at home, perhaps by working in a factory, while then also being able to look after your sick family member.
However, we can press the objection further, that there are surely situations where one duty cannot be fulfilled. The soldier’s life circumstances might simply be such that they only have the means of fulfilling one imperfect duty.
Kant’s vs consequentialism
Strength: Kant’s critique of consequentialism -
B. Constant criticised Kant with the murderer at the door scenario. - Constant argued we should lie.
In response, Kant presents the issue of calculation as a strength of his deontological approach. We cannot control consequences, so we cannot be responsible for them. So, they cannot be relevant to our moral decision-making.
- Kant illustrates that if we lied about where the victim was, yet unknown to us the victim had actually moved there, then we would be responsible for their death.
Weakness: consequences do have moral value
. He claims we cannot completely control consequences and thus cannot be responsible for them. However, it seems that we can predict and control consequences to some degree. So, it could follow that we are responsible for them to that degree.
moral obligation consists in doing what we are best able to judge will maximise happiness. It may often be difficult to tell what the right action is. However, our moral obligation is simply that we do our best to maximise utility.
Hegel criticised Kant’s understanding of the self for overlooking the fact that we exist in complex webs of social influence. Part of who we are depends on our interactions with other people. Applying Hegel’s insight to Kant’s ethics, we exist in deep connection to other people and thus to that extent are in fact responsible for each other’s actions
The role and value of emotions in ethics
Strength: Kant: emotions are unreliable
- . He argues that emotions are unreliable because they are transient and fickle. Reason’s ability to produce respect for the moral law is more stable
-Barbara Herman’s interpretation of Kant is that emotions can only lead to a right action by luck. When acting out of duty, we will the moral rightness of our action. The rightness of the action is a “nonaccidental effect” of one’s concern.
Weakness: emotion can have value as motivation for moral action -
Bernard Williams, influenced by Aristotle, argues that Kantian ‘morality’ is too narrow.
- Michael Stocker agrees. He asks us to imagine being ill in hospital and a friend visiting us, but saying they only came because it was their duty. Clearly, acting solely on duty is ‘implausible and baffling’.
Williams argues such cases show how Kantian morality is unnatural and requires “one thought too many”. A virtuous person can cultivate their emotional reactions so that their feelings reliably motivate them to do what’s right.
Stocker argues that acting out of duty is actually incompatible with acting out of cultivated virtuous habits, like love and friendship.
Debates over Kant’s meta-ethics
One strength of Kant’s ethics is that it provides an objective basis for a universal ethics based on reason’s recognition of morally equality. -
Without the categorical imperative, we only have hypothetical imperatives, which Kant didn’t think could really provide a basis for morality. If morality were a system of hypothetical imperatives, people would only do moral actions because it suited their ends. Kant thinks humans are fundamentally motivated by self-interest. We would only choose to be moral when it suited us.
Weakness: Phillipa Foot’s critique that morality is a system of hypothetical rather than categorical imperatives.
- Foot accepts that there are categorical imperatives, but denies that Kant’s claim that it is irrational to disobey them. This would mean reason cannot discover a universal moral law.
We have no basis for claiming it irrational to violate categorical imperatives. Their power over us could simply be the result of social conditioning, not reason. So, Kant’s categorical imperative does not derive from reason. -
“My argument is that they [Kant] are relying on an illusion, as if trying to give the moral “ought” a magic force” – Foot.
universal law evaluation
strength - Universalizability is a secularised version of the golden rule, to treat others as you would like to be treated. Similar ethical precepts are found in ancient Chinese and Hindu philosophy. Even teachers use this ethics when disciplining misbehaving students.
weakness
There are universalizable maxims that do not seem distinctly moral.
“It is very easy to see that many immoral and trivial non-moral maxims are vindicated by Kant’s test” – Alasdair McIntyre
McIntyre gives the example of “Always eat mussels on Mondays in March” and “Keep all your promises throughout your entire life except one”. No contradiction arises in conception or will when conceiving of everyone acting on these maxims.
What if someone decided they wanted to steal but used the maxim ‘it’s acceptable for people born on February 29th to steal’. This could be universalised because if only a minority of people steal, the concept of property on which stealing depends would not be undermined by only a few people stealing.
There are also non-universalizable maxims that do not seem distinctly immoral. A rich person giving lots of money to charity is not something which can possibly be done by everyone. Yet, it seems absurd to think it our duty to avoid acting on that maxim if we can.
Kant’s first formulation seems to be overly abstract.
