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Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

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Kant’s Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant
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Page 1: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Kant’s Deontological

Ethics

The Ethics of Immanuel Kant

Page 2: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Immanuel Kant [1724-1804]

• Immanuel Kant is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy.

• His contributions to metaphysics,

epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him.

Page 3: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Immanuel Kant [1724-1804]

• A large part of Kant’s work addresses the question “What can we know?”

• The answer, if it can be stated simply, is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the natural, empirical world.

Page 4: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Immanuel Kant [1724-1804]

• It is impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible realm of speculative metaphysics.

• The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is that the mind plays an active role in constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind’s access only to the empirical realm of space and time.

Page 5: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Introduction to Kant’s Ethics

• Kant acknowledged that he had despised the ignorant masses until he read Rousseau and came to appreciate the worth that exists in every human being.

• Kant insisted that actions resulting from desires cannot be free.

Page 6: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Kant’s Philosophy

• Autonomous Decisions• Deontology (Deon = Duty)• Actions in themselves are right or wrong• Ethical rules should never be broken• Human value• Duties – used to derive reason and moral

decision

Page 7: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Duty Ethics

• The obligation to do our duty is unconditional.

• That is, we must do it for the sake of duty, because it is the right thing to do, not because it will profit us psychologically, or economically, not because if we don’t do it and get caught we’ll be punished.

• The categorical imperative was Kant’s name for this inbred, self-imposed restraint, for the command of conscience within that tells us that the only true moral act is done from a pure sense of duty.

Page 8: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Introduction to Kant’s Ethics

• Freedom is to be found only in rational action.

• Moreover, whatever is demanded by reason must be demanded of all rational beings; hence, rational action cannot be based on an individual’s personal desires but must be action in accordance with something that he can will to be a universal law.

Page 9: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Introduction to Kant’s Ethics

• This view roughly parallels Rousseau’s idea of the general will as that which, as opposed to the individual will, a person shares with the whole community.

• Kant extended this community to all rational beings.

Page 10: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Deontological [Duty] Ethics• Kant’s most distinctive

contribution to ethics was his insistence that one’s actions possess moral worth only when one does his duty for its own sake.

• Kant first introduced this idea as something accepted by the common moral consciousness of human beings and only later tried to show that it is an essential element of any rational morality.

Page 11: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Deontological [Duty] Ethics• Kant’s claim that this idea

is central to the common moral consciousness expressed, albeit in an explicit and extreme form, a tendency of Judeo-Christian ethics; it also revealed how much Western ethical consciousness had changed since the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Page 12: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Deontological Ethics Ethical theory that judges

the moral rightness of an act in terms of the intrinsic moral value of the act itself

Page 13: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative

• Kant’s ethics is based on his distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives.

• He called any action based on desires a hypothetical imperative, meaning by this that it is a command of reason that applies only if one desires the goal in question.

• For example, “Be honest, so that people will think well of you!” is an imperative that applies only if one wishes to be thought well of.

Page 14: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative

• A similarly hypothetical analysis can be given of the imperatives suggested by, say, Shaftesbury’s ethics: “Help those in distress, if you sympathize with their sufferings!”

• In contrast to such approaches, Kant said that the commands of morality must be categorical imperatives: they must apply to all rational beings, regardless of their wants and feelings.

• “When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.”Abraham Lincoln

Page 15: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative• To most philosophers this poses

an insuperable problem: a moral law that applied to all rational beings, irrespective of their personal wants and desires, could have no specific goals or aims, because all such aims would have to be based on someone’s wants or desires.

• It took Kant’s peculiar genius to seize upon precisely this implication, which to others would have refuted his claims, and to use it to derive the nature of the moral law.

Page 16: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative• Because nothing else but

reason is left to determine the content of the moral law, the only form this law can take is the universal principle of reason.

• Thus, the supreme formal principle of Kant’s ethics is: “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

Page 17: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.
Page 18: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

A Problem of Kant’s Ethics

• Kant still faced a major problem.

• He had to explain how one can be moved by reason alone to act in accordance with this supreme moral law; and, second, he had to show that this principle is able to provide practical guidance in one’s choices.

Page 19: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

A Problem of Kant’s Ethics

• If one combines Hume’s theory that reason is always the slave of the passions with Kant’s denial of moral worth to all actions motivated by desires, the outcome would be that no actions can have moral worth.

• To avoid such moral skepticism, Kant maintained that reason alone can lead to action without the support of desire.

Page 20: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

A Problem of Kant’s Ethics

• The moral law inevitably produces a feeling of reverence or awe.

• If he meant to say that this feeling then becomes the motivation for obedience, however, he was conceding Hume’s point that reason alone is powerless to bring about action.

Page 21: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Deontology

• One thing that can be said confidently is that Kant was firmly opposed to the utilitarian principle of judging every action by its consequences.

• His ethics is a deontology. • In other words, the rightness of an action,

according to Kant, depends not on its consequences but on whether it accords with a moral rule, one that can be willed to be a universal law.

Page 22: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Deontology

• In one essay Kant went so far as to say that it would be wrong for a person to tell a lie even to a would-be murderer who came to his house seeking to kill an innocent person hidden inside.

• This kind of situation illustrates how difficult it is to remain a strict deontologist when principles may clash.

Page 23: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Deontology

• Apparently, Kant believed that his principle of universal law required that one never tell lies, but it could also be argued that his principle of treating everyone as an end would necessitate doing everything possible to save the life of an innocent person.

Page 24: Kants Deontological Ethics The Ethics of Immanuel Kant.

Deontology

• Another possibility would be to formulate the maxim of the action with sufficient precision to define the circumstances under which it would be permissible to tell lies—e.g., perhaps there could be a universal law that permitted lying to people who intend to commit murder. Kant did not explore such solutions, however.


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