Reading Journal

profilejasoncrn
KantSlides.ppt
Home>Social Science homework help>Philosophy homework help>Reading Journal

Immanuel Kant

1724-1804

*

For reasons we’ll see as things go on

  • Kant is the heart of Western morality and politics
  • Understand Kant and you understand all of Western morality and politics (either directly or by contrast)
  • And you understand Eastern morality and politics (by contrast)

What is the Good?

  • What has value intrinsically--in and of itself?

*

A good will

  • A good will is not a necessary and sufficient condition for being good--it is the only thing that can be good, purely, at all
  • Anything else commonly thought to be good (money, health, even happiness) can be quite bad (in what sense?) if secured by the actions of a will that is bad

What is the will?

  • Loosely, the motive for one’s actions
  • More precisely:
  • The self conscious causal source of one’s actions

What makes a good will good?

It’s intrinsic character

  • Not in virtue of what it can effect or accomplish (or fail to…)
  • NB: a standing denial of consequentialism

How is a good will demonstrated?

  • Note the concern with demonstration and not development
  • Kant’s concern is with the Metaphysics of Morals, not the development of good moral character (cf. Aristotle)

A good will is demonstraded

  • By acting from duty
  • Not just in accord with duty
  • Parallel case of acting from and in accord with a rule
  • E.g., stay near to the surface of the Earth

When do we act from duty?

  • To answer this question, we must introduce and discuss the notion of an imperative
  • An imperative is a command
  • It purports to constrain one’s actions or beliefs in a certain way
  • That is, if one has an imperative to do or not do something, one is under an obligation to either do or not do that

Imperatives are of 2 kinds

  • Hypothetical: If you want ‘X’ (where X is some other object or reward), then you must (that’s the imperative part) do ‘Y’ (where Y is some action)
  • The force of a hypothetical imperative derives from the ultimate desire for the object or reward whose attainment is conditioned on the means (the X)

In a hypothetical imperative

  • The constraint is completely exhausted by the ultimate value
  • In other words, if one no longer accepts the ultimate value (desires it, etc.), one is completely released from the obligation
  • One is not obligated to do Y (for example) tout court

Example of a hypothetical imperative

  • If you want to succeed in this era of globalization, you had better get a college degree
  • As you can see, this imperative is completely conditional on your acceptance of and desire for the ultimate value: success in this era of globablization

On the other hand

  • A categorical imperative commands absolutely
  • Do ‘Y’
  • Without condition
  • Absolutely

Example of a categorical imperative (for Kant)

  • For Kant, the imperative ‘Don’t lie’ is categorical (more on this example later)
  • The obligation to tell the truth is never conditioned on some other good or value
  • E.g., ‘Tell the truth unless you think it will hurt their feelings’, etc.
  • The fundamental question for Kant is whether there are indeed such imperatives
  • Think of what Mill would say

The position of the will vis-à-vis imperatives

  • The will lies, as it were, at the nexus of imperatives
  • That is, the will can be inclined either hypothetically or categorically
  • So one can have a will to ‘Do Y if X holds’
  • Or one can have a will to simply ‘Do Y’, come what may

Graphic representation of this

  • Categorical Hypothetical

The Will

Action

The role of inclinations in the determination of the will

  • When the will is determined hypothetically, it is inclinations that serve as the psychological source of the will’s state
  • That is, what makes one obey a hypothetical command (or ignore it) is one’s peculiar and contingent tastes, predispositions, and nature

In sum

  • Our inclinations are those peculiar facts about us that determine which hypothetical imperatives bind our wills and which do not

When the will is determined categorically

  • There are no peculiar facts that condition or limit the scope of the imperative
  • One is bound to ‘Do Y’, no matter what one’s peculiar facts, etc.
  • In this sense alone, Kant claims that one’s will is determined by duty
  • Note: one’s will can’t be categorically determined to be bad

In the case of a categorical determination

  • Only then is the psychological source of the action truly something of moral value
  • By being categorical, it takes on an objectivity (and hence a value) that no hypothetically determined motive or action can have
  • Morality cannot be tied to hypothetical motives
  • No moral credit for inclinations

Graphic representation

  • Duty Inclination

Categorical

Hypothetical

The Will

Action

Dr. Ruth vs. Dr. Laura

  • An example of acting from inclination and acting against inclination and from duty
  • Even though the actions are consequentially identical, only one demonstrates a conscious concern with duty
  • Acting against inclination as a test
  • The Kantian moral hero

According to Kant

  • Whatever the dictates of morality are, they have to be framed as absolute imperatives
  • Why?
  • Because if they need not be, then morality would be conditional, but as we’ll see later, this, for Kant, undermines the notions of absolute value, absolute respect, and absolute dignity

For this reason

  • Only categorical imperatives can serve as ‘expressions’ or ‘reflections’ of duty
  • That is, only when the will is determined by duty is one acting morally

Kant argues that there is only one categorical imperative

  • That is, one overarching expression of what is truly your moral duty
  • It can, however, take many forms
  • That is, there are several different expressions of the one absolute form of your moral duty, but these are all inter-translatable

Universal law version

  • Act only on that maxim that you could at the same time will to be a universal law for all rational beings as such
  • Question: what is a maxim?
  • A maxim is a rule that one is consciously following as the psychological source of one’s action

Violations of the categorical imperative

  • Violations of the CI are rational incoherencies
  • That is, violations of the moral law are irrational
  • This is how Kant grounds morality in rationality
  • That is, value, respect, and dignity are founded not on an assertion of some other value, but on the very (non-normative) notion of rationality itself

A digression on this important point

  • Typically, questions of ‘why be moral?’ are only answerable with a direct appeal to yet more values
  • But this just supports one kind of value judgment (morality) with another (think of Mill)
  • But Kant thinks he’s accomplished the breathtaking feat of grounding morality not on more values, but on rationality or coherence itself

So

  • To be immoral is to be irrational
  • And one can’t rationally will to be irrational (cf. Mill’s test)

Kant’s examples of CI violations

  • The violations (i.e., incoherencies) come in two types
  • Contradiction in the maxim
  • Lying
  • Suicide from self love
  • Contradiction in the will
  • Homelessness
  • South Sea islanders

Other formulations: logically equivalent

  • Ends in themselves
  • The second version of the categorical imperative
  • Treat humanity, whether in yourself or in others, always as an end in itself and never as a means only
  • Violations of this version are violations of dignity

Dignity vs. fancy price

  • To say something has a price is to say that it’s value is conditional or hypothetical
  • Once it ceases to serve the purpose for which it was purchased (or some other one since discovered), it no longer has that price
  • To say that something has a price at all is to place it in the realm of means
  • To say something has dignity is to say it exists outside the realm of means completely by having no conceivable price

Respect vs. like

  • To respect something is to treat it with unconditional awe and place it outside the realm of fungible goods
  • To like something is precisely express one’s valuation of something, where this valuation is wholly owing to one’s inclinations
  • Respect is wholly independent of inclination, hence conditioned only on duty itself
  • Hence, something that can be commanded absolutely

So, to use a rational being is to give it a price

  • But to give it a price is to value it as an object of exchange and not an object of respect
  • No one could conceivably wish themselves to be viewed or treated that way
  • Hence any action which did treat others as means only could never pass the universal law version, and vice-versa
  • Hence the two are equivalent

The third form of the categorical imperative

  • Formula of autonomy
  • Only those actions which are justified exclusive of inclination count as actions of which one is the sole author
  • Auto-nomous: giving the law to oneself; being the origin of the law
  • Actions as the result of inclination, if they conflict with duty, are heteronomous

*

Kant’s notion of the moral self

  • For Kant, the center of the moral self is in the faculty responsible for the rational appreciation of duty, respect, dignity, etc.
  • The faculty responsible for the inclinations is, though perhaps psychologically central, morally irrelevant

*

The fourth form of the categorical imperative

  • Kingdom of ends
  • Act as a legislator in the kingdom of ends
  • The moral law as not some dogma imposed from without, but rather as the only justifiable system of treatment when analyzed from within
  • This ties morality to politics as the source of political fairness

So, what is a good will?

  • A will is good that cannot be bad
  • That is, a will that cannot fail to pass the tests for duty contained within the categorical imperative
  • Any will that does not fail that, cannot be bad, and hence, for Kant, must be good
  • What else would it be?

*