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What matters is the motive / Immanuel Kant

9 important questions on What matters is the motive / Immanuel Kant

Which two approaches rejected Kant?

approach 1(maximimizing welfare) and approach 3(promoting virtue)

Why advocates Kant for approach 2?

-capacity for reason is bound up with our capacity for freedom
Heteronomy: Act according to determinations given outside of me.
-To act freely is not to choose the best means to a given end; it is to choose the end itself, for its own sake.

What means Immanuel Kant respecting human digity?

treating persons as ends in themselves(for example; throwing the person from the bridge to save the people in the race; using the person as means and thus not respecting the man as an end in himself.

What are 2 ways reason can command the will?

-(CONDITIONAL) Hypothetical imperative (cruciaal belangrijk): If you want X, then do Y. example: if you want good business reputation treat your customers honestly
-(UNCONDITIONAL) Categorical imperative; “If the action would be good solely as a means to something else,” Kant writes, “the imperative is hypothetical. can only qualify as an imperative of morality.

What is the rejection of Kant on Utilitarianism?

⁃ Based on personal morality but also as a basis for law.
⁃ Utility fails to reject the rights of each persons to pursue his or her own end

Kant’s categorical imperative tells us to treat everyone with respect, as an end in itself. Isn’t this pretty much the same as the Golden Rule? (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”)

No. The Golden Rule depends on contingent facts about how people would like to be treated. The categorical imperative requires that we abstract from such contingencies and respect persons as rational beings, regardless of what they might want in a particular situation.

Kant seems to suggest that answering to duty and acting autonomously are one and the same. But how can this be? Acting according to duty means having to obey a law. How can subservience to a law be compatible with freedom?

Duty and autonomy go together only in a special case—when I am the author of the law I have a duty to obey. My dignity as a free person does not consist in being subject to the moral law, but in being the author of “this very same law . . . and subordinated to it only on this ground.”

If autonomy means acting according to a law I give myself, what guarantees that everyone will choose the same moral law? If the categorical imperative is the product of my will, isn’t it likely that different people will come up with different categorical imperatives? Kant seems to think that we will all agree on the same moral law. But how can he be sure that different people won’t reason differently, and arrive at various moral laws?

When we will the moral law, we don’t choose as you and me, particular persons that we are, but as rational beings, as participants in what Kant calls “pure practical reason.” So it’s a mistake to think that the moral law is up to us as individuals. Of course, if we reason from our particular interests, desires, and ends, we may be led to any number of principles. But these are not moral principles, only prudential ones. Insofar as we exercise pure practical reason, we abstract from our particular interests.

Kant argues that if morality is more than a matter of prudential calculation, it must take the form of a categorical imperative. But how can we know that morality exists apart from the play of power and interests? Can we ever be sure that we are capable of acting autonomously, with a free will? What if scientists discover (through brain-imaging, for example, or cognitive neuroscience) that we have no free will after all: Would that disprove Kant’s moral philosophy?

Freedom of the will is not the kind of thing that science can prove or disprove. Neither is morality. It’s true that human beings inhabit the realm of nature. Everything we do can be described from a physical or biological point of view.

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What matters is the motive / Immanuel Kant

9 important questions on What matters is the motive / Immanuel Kant

Which two approaches rejected Kant?

Why advocates Kant for approach 2?

What means Immanuel Kant respecting human digity?

What are 2 ways reason can command the will?

What is the rejection of Kant on Utilitarianism?

Kant’s categorical imperative tells us to treat everyone with respect, as an end in itself. Isn’t this pretty much the same as the Golden Rule? (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”)

Kant seems to suggest that answering to duty and acting autonomously are one and the same. But how can this be? Acting according to duty means having to obey a law. How can subservience to a law be compatible with freedom?

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