Moral Argument

Question 1

The Moral Argument from Kant – Innate Moral Awareness

Answer 1

• Kant believed in the existence of an innate moral awareness within each person.
• We are innately aware of this moral law and framework of the universe.
• Kant meant that a priori (knowledge gained prior to experience) every person has a powerful sense of right and wrong, though not always the knowledge of how to act.
• Therefore we need sense experience of the world in order to verify the rightness of our moral actions – morality is therefore a priori synthetic.

Question 2

The Moral Argument from Kant – Summum Bonum

Answer 2

• The Summum Bonum is the highest good – the state where happiness and moral virtue come together.
• For Kant stemming from his believe that the universe was rational and fair (though he admitted that this could not be proved), morally correct actions would lead to the state of happiness and the highest good.
• However people who do their duty in acting according to the good will and follow the categorical imperative however do not see the Summum Bonum realised – good people are just as likely to have bad things happen to them as good people.

Question 3

The Moral Argument from Kant

Answer 3

• For Kant – God is a postulate (something implied or asserted to find a solution to a dilemma, which is probable but not provable) of practical reason who guarantees the Summum Bonum.
• As moral conduct doesn’t result in the Summum Bonum in this life, Kant argues that in a rational universe it is necessary to postulate immortality as the place where the Summum Bonum occurs, and God as the guarantor that it will occur.
• Kant is not setting out to create a proof of God (he does not think that proving the existence of God was possible as this goes beyond human experience). Instead Kant view was that morality is pointless unless there is a God to reward it.

Question 4

Psychological Challenges from Freud

Answer 4

Freud presents a different explanation of our moral sense – it exists because we learned as we grew up that there were right ways and wrong ways to behave. We were rewarded when we were ‘good’ and punished when we were ‘bad’ until a sense of right and wrong became second nature to us. God is not the only possible explanation for the human sense of morality. Religious belief is psychological – belief, experiences and impulses come from within the mind and not from any external, supernatural being.