Kantian Moral Law

Question 1

What was Kant’s solution to Religious warfare?

Answer 1

To base religion and ethics on reason, not faith.

Question 2

Why is basing ethics on reason good,according to Kant?

Answer 2

Reason is universal in that everyone has it, but not everyone shares the same faith. If ethics could be based on reason, Kant conceived a more harmonious society would follow.

Question 3

Why was humanity ready for a greater autonomy, according to Kant?

Answer 3

The rational will of the individual can choose to align itself with reason, not religious laws forced on them by authority, but laws whose authority consists in the citizen’s autonomous adoption of them due to their rationality.

Question 4

In what period was Kant writing in?

Answer 4

The enlightenment period.

Question 5

Which scholar greatly opposes of Kantian ethics?

Answer 5

Hume’s empiricist ethical anti-realism.
Hume denied that right and wrong existed, concluding that morality reduced to personal feelings.

Question 6

Why is basing morality on reason considered good, according to Kant?

Answer 6

Basing morality on reason means it is not based on subjective desires. Morality is based on universal principles of reason, not contingent on our personal feelings. This means morality is categorical.

Question 7

What is universalisability?

Answer 7

A test of whether an action is morally right whether it could be done by anyone, in any situation regardless of their personal feelings.

Question 8

What are moral actions dependent on?

Answer 8

Doing the right action with the right intention, regardless of personal feelings, the situation or the consequences.

Question 9

What is a ‘Good Will’?

Answer 9

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, to attain a good will we must then act on our duty purely out of a sense of duty.

Question 10

What quotation from Kant suggests that we must avoid personal feelings and attitudes influencing our duty?

Answer 10

‘Do duty for duties sake’.

Question 11

What is Kants absolutist ethics influential on?

Answer 11

Our current theory of human rights. He even invented the idea of the United Nations.

Question 12

What is the contradiction in conception?

Answer 12

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.

Question 13

What is the contradiction in will?

Answer 13

Kant thought maxims like this could not be universalised because they contradicted our rational will to achieve ends. We might require help from others in our life to achieve our ends. We contradict our rational will if we attempt to universalise such maxims.

Question 14

What is the second formulation of the categorical imperative?

Answer 14

Rational agents have and seek goals which Kant called ‘ends’. To treat a person as if they were a mere means to an end is irrational. It contradicts the fact that they have their own ends

Question 15

What quotation from Kant suggests the second formulation of the categorical imperative?

Answer 15

“Always treat persons, whether others or in yourself, always as an end, never merely as a means.” – Kant

Question 16

What is the third formulation of the categorical imperative?

Answer 16

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.

Question 17

What is a postulate?

Answer 17

A postulate is something you have to assume to be true in order to have a basis for reasoning about something.

Question 18

What are the three postulates?

Answer 18

God.
Immortality (of the soul in an afterlife).
Free will. Kant thought that without free will, we could not be responsible for our actions and thus surely ethics would be pointless.

Question 19

Why does Kant believe there must be a God?

Answer 19

For ethics to work, there needs to be justice. Kant thought that there must be a God who lets us in to an afterlife where good people are rewarded with happiness. Kant called this the ‘summum bonum’.

Question 20

How does ethical clarity relate to Kantian ethics?

Answer 20

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. People can recognize the rationality of moral rules through reason. This engages the autonomy of the individual in the way required for a civilised democratic society.

Question 21

What is the issue of clashing duties?

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

How does Sartre object to Kants ethical theory?

Answer 22

Sartre is an existentialist who thinks there can’t be any objective guidance for our ethical views. Kantian ethics cannot provide the moral clarity needed by the enlightenment conception of an autonomous individual.

Question 23

What analogy does Sartre use to object to Kant?

Answer 23

A 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.

Question 24

How does Kant respond to the clashing of duties?

Answer 24

Kant’s response to this objection is to claim that if we think there are clashing duties, we are haven’t used our reason properly.

Question 25

What is a perfect duty?

Answer 25

Perfect duties never clash because they are negative, i.e., simply involve refraining from certain actions (stealing, lying, etc). It will always be possible to simply do nothing.

Question 26

What is an imperfect duty?

Answer 26

Imperfect duties have multiple means of fulfilment.

Question 27

How does B Constant criticise Kant?

Answer 27

The murderer at the door scenario. If a murderer asked us where their victim was, and we knew, Constant argued we should lie. This fits most people’s moral intuitions. Telling the truth cannot be an absolute duty, it seems to depend on the consequences.

Question 28

How does Kant respond to the murderer at the door scenario?

Answer 28

Kant presents the issue of calculation as a strength of his deontological approach. We cannot control consequences, so we cannot be responsible for them.

Question 29

How do consequences have moral value?

Answer 29

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.

Question 30

How do consequentialist theories argue that we can know consequences?

Answer 30

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.

Question 31

What is Bentham’s argument to Kants view on consequences?

Answer 31

Bentham accepts that the best we can do is act on the ‘tendency’ certain actions have to produce pleasure.

Question 32

What did Singer view on consequences?

Answer 32

Singer says we ought act on a ‘reasonable expectation’ regarding what will maximise utility.

Question 33

How does Kant fail to target a consequentialist’s position?

Answer 33

He fails to explain why our intuitions about the ethical relevance of consequences are wrong. We should take consequences into account to the degree that we have knowledge and control over them.

Question 34

How can Kant counter a consequentialist approach?

Answer 34

It may seem unsatisfying or unintuitive to people but allowing bad actions for the ‘greater good’ corrupts people. Abandoning our duty because of consequences is a slippery slope. It might be better to die than become immoral.

Question 35

What is Hegel’s criticism of Kant on social influence?

Answer 35

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. Intuitively, this is how social life actually functions. We are not the atomised radically individual people Kant imagined us to be.

Question 36

What is Kants argument on emotions?

Answer 36

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. Emotions can’t be moral motives because they do not provide the agent with a moral interest in the rightness of their action.

Question 37

What is Bernard Williams argument on Kantian morality?

Answer 37

Influenced by Aristotle, argues that Kantian ‘morality’ is too narrow. He distinguishes it from ‘ethics’, a broader account of how a person comes to be virtuous due to their emotional habits and personal relationships.

Question 38

Why does Micheal Stocker agree with Bernard Williams?

Answer 38

He asks us to imagine being ill in hospital and a friend visiting us, but saying they only came because it was their duty. Acting solely on duty is ‘implausible and baffling’. Stocker argues that acting out of duty is actually incompatible with acting out of cultivated virtuous habits, like love and friendship. The nature of love is that it wills the other’s good for its own sake.

Question 39

What may a virtue ethicist argue on Kant’s view of emotion?

Answer 39

Virtue ethicists argue there is another option. A rational cultivation of virtue allows a person to reliably control their habitual emotional reactions in a morally relevant and interested way. So, emotions can be reliable. Virtue ethics also seems to be more naturally aligned with the practical reality of human psychology and relationships.

Question 40

What is an issue with virtue ethics?

Answer 40

The issue with virtue ethics is its lack of clear guidance and difficulty working in a modern format. We need a legalistic impersonal moral framework, which emotions should be left out of.

Question 41

Why is Kantian ethics used within the declaration of human rights?

Answer 41

The universal declaration of human rights uses Kant’s terminology of ‘dignity’, which for Kant is founded in our nature as autonomous rational end-seeking beings.

Question 42

What is a strength to universalisability?

Answer 42

universalizability is a philosophical encapsulation of a cross-cultural human intuition about fairness. Universalizability is a secularised version of the golden rule, to treat others as you would like to be treated.