Kantian Moral Philosophy The Pursuit of Autonomy.

Kantian Moral PhilosophyThe Pursuit of Autonomy

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

• Key figure in the European Enlightenment.

• Enlightenment: A period where thinkers of all kinds looked to Reason to guide their lives. Kant thought it was part of humanity’s growing up that they learned to “Think for themselves!”

• In his 50s, he was inspired by people like David Hume to look at the limits of Reason and Jean Jacques Rousseau to rethink morality in terms of the moral equality of everyone. This is what began his critical phase, when he wrote his greatest works.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

• Prussian)

• Pietist upbringing.

• Looked for the scope and limits of Reason.

• Critical of both empiricists and rationalists.

• Think for yourself! His motto for the Enlightenment.

Kant’s Critical Works

• Key Works:

• Critique of Pure Reason (1781) – epistemology & metaphysics

• Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) – foundations of ethics

• Critique of Practical Reason (1788) – further development of his ethical theories

• Critique of Judgement (1790) – sources of hope that we will be able to make this an ethical world.

• Metaphysics of Morals (1798) – application to a range of cases.

Kant: Critique of Practical Reason

• Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Kant: “What is Enlightenment?”

• Enlightenment is man’s emergence from self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of others. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of…courage to use it…The motto of the Enlightenment is therefore Sapere aude [Dare to be wise!] Have the courage to use your own understanding.

Kant’s Four Questions

• What can I know? - Epistemology

• What ought I to do? - Ethics

• What can I hope for? - Creating a Just World

These are all answered by Kant’s account of autonomy.

Autonomy: Kant’s Central Idea

• ‘Autonomy’ comes from the Greek autos – self and nomos –law. An autonomous person is the creator of the laws they live by. But Kant insists that we are only autonomous believes when we act rationally. The other choice is to be pushed and pulled by whatever desires you happen to have.

• In morality, Kant believes we are radically free to at each moment choose to live by the Moral Law and construct our own plan for a good life, or to ignore that freedom and to follow authority, tradition, or to mindlessly try to satisfy our desires.

Kant’s Epistemology

• When it comes to knowledge, Kant believes that we autonomously impose certain metaphysical concepts (causation, space/time, the self, etc.) on our experience in order to be able to make sense of a world outside us and to make judgements about it.

• We apply these concepts to our experiences to construct a meaningful world.

• These concepts only apply to objects as they appear to us. We cannot know how they are in themselves.

• Because they must apply to our experience for us to experience a world, we can know about them a priori.

Kantian Deontology

• Moral worth must come from something intrinsic to the act itself, not its actual consequences.

• Moral rightness of an act is determined by how we will an action.

• We are to act in the way that a person with a good will chooses to will.

Kant’s Moral Project

• Kant’s moral project is to do for moral philosophy as he did for Epistemology

• To develop a ‘metaphysics of morals’ – a way of understanding how we should behave that is known ‘a priori.’

• We will examine the notion of a Good Will a priori, and determine which principle a person with a Good Will would act upon.

• This will then be the fundamental moral principles.

The Good Will

• To discover what principles we should act on, we should look at persons who display a Good Will.

• A person with a Good Will acts on moral principle; they do their duty for duty’s sake.

• When we look at the notion of a duty, we see that:

• It is something experienced as a categorical demand on us – something we must do, period.

• It is something that applies to everyone.

Why the Good Will?

• All other “virtues” and other good traits of ours are only good if used in the right way.

• Only the Good Will is good without qualification. Even if someone with a good will were to will something that happens to cause bad consequences, their action would still be right.

• So, we will only find out the nature of duty by looking at the rules a Good Will wills by.

Categorical Imperatives

• Kant claims duties are Categorical Imperatives.

• An imperative is an order – like “I must save the drowning child.”

• A categorical imperative is an order that you must follow, irrespective of your other desires –”I must save the child, whatever the cost.”

• A hypothetical imperative is an order that you must follow to achieve some goal of yours. – “I must save the child to make to get my 15 minutes of fame.”

Kantian Psychology

• We aren’t just puppets pushed and pulled by our desires. We are autonomous.

• This mean that reason is able to motivate us, irrespective of our desires. This is the Fact of Reason. We have the capacity to rationally choose how to live. This is what makes our actions free.

• Even when we act to get what we desire, we must choose to act on that desire.

• When we do this, we adopt maxims:

• I will do x in order to achieve y.

Categorical Imperative

• What principle does a Good Will act on?

• Kant claims that all duties have a general form – they are meant as universal laws – to apply to everyone without exception.

• If you have duty to save a drowning child, then anyone in your situation must do the same thing. We are all free and equal moral persons.

• The Universal Law Formulation of the Categorical Imperative:

• “Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

Testing Maxims

1.Specify the maxim of the action (the motivating principle behind it, e.g. "I shall lie when it's necessary to gain access to essential resources").

2.Try to universalize the maxim ("Everyone may lie when it's necessary...").

3.Ask whether the result of 2 is possible (or possible to will, in the case of imperfect duties).

4.If the answer is negative, the act is wrong, i.e. not in accordance with duty, so you ought not to do it.

5.Otherwise, the act is right, i.e. permissible.

Types of Contradiction

• Contradiction in conception: If we try to conceive of a maxim as a universal law, it would be impossible to act on it. For example, lying to get a job. If everyone did this, no one would trust me, and so lying would never get me a job.

• Contradiction in the will: We can universalise the maxim, but doing so would contradict our other ends. For example, if I had to maxim to help no one ever, this is universalisable, but everyone needs help sometimes, so if it was a universal law that no one helped anyone, I wouldn’t get the help I need. So, I couldn’t will that everyone act on my maxim.

Perfect Duties

• A perfect duty is a duty you must always carry out. For example, the duty not to kill innocent persons is a duty that must always be carried out.

• In the case of Kant, perfect duties arise when a maxim has a contradiction in conception. For example, if you cannot universalize lying in order to get a job, then you have discovered that you have a perfect duty not to lie in order to get a job.

Imperfect Duties

• Contradictions in willing lead to imperfect duties. An imperfect duty is one that you do not always have to perform, but you must perform it often. Consider the imperfect duty to aid others in distress.

Imperfect Duties, Cont.

• Take the maxim of never contributing to others’ well-being (but not interfering with it, either).

• Kant grants that it would be possible for everyone to act on that maxim.

• However, it impossible to will that everyone act on that maxim, since he takes a desire for the support of others when in distress to be a necessary element of a rational will.

The Visiting Axe Murderer

• An axe murderer comes to you and asks you for the whereabouts of your friend, whom he intends to kill.

What do you do?

- What would the CI require us to do?

Kant’s Position on Lies

• ‘On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives’

• Must be truthful to murderer – the action is of value in itself• Actual consequences irrelevant

• Lying treats murderer as a means to an end

• Cannot predict what he will do

Kant

• Strengths• No problem of worrying about the actual

consequences

• Treats motives as central to the rightness of actions.

• Makes reasoning about what to do central.

• Sees making an exception for yourself as central to immorality.

• Justice & equality

Kant

• Weaknesses• No consequences?

• Can’t know people’s actual motives.

• How to we specify maxims to test them?

• Is acting for the sake of duty the most morally important motive? (what about sympathy, compassion, kindness etc?)

• Does the CI lead to conflicting duties?

Autonomy and the Second Formulation

• Act only in such a way that you treat the humanity in yourself and others always as an end, never merely as a means.

• We are to respect everyone’s humanity by treating them as ends, never merely as means to our ends.

• A person’s humanity consists in their being an autonomous person, with their own individual set of ends – a conception of the good life- that they should pursue, consistent with respecting everyone else’s humanity.

• Treating a person as a mere means is treating them as a thing – literally objectifying them.

Autonomy vs. Heteronomy

• Kant believes that we find ourselves with different inclinations. They may come from some human nature, or from society, or your family. As a rational agent, you have a choice:

• 1) To use your Reason to decide which inclinations to endorse as your ends, or even to act against all of them in morality requires it. This is to be autonomous – to be the source of your own “laws.” It is what, for Kant, gives you your dignity as a person.

• 2) To refuse to choose for yourself. You can let your Will (your choices) be governed by your inclinations, and so let other people, or your desires, dictate your life. This is to be heteronomous. For Kant, this is to deny your own humanity and to treat yourself like a simple non-human animal, pushed and pulled by its inclinations.

Generating Duties with the Second Formulation• Should you ever lie?

• Is it ever permissible to kill an innocent person to save many lives?

• Should you develop your talents?

• Is it ever permissible to end your life (say to avoid chronic or terminal pain)?

The Third Formulation

• If you do respect others as ends, not merely as means, you quickly realise that morality demands we find a way to act together as rational beings.

• What we must do is construct a system of laws that enable us to live as free and equal rational beings – to live together with dignity.

• It follows that we must conceive of ourselves as part of a community (Kant says “Kingdom” or “Realm”) of ends. We must find a consistent set of rules to live by in this community.

• The answers are not just there for us to find. We have to construct them together.

The “Kingdom of Ends” Formulation

• “Every rational being…must regard himself as giving universal law through the maxims of his will” as a member of a “realm of ends.”

• The realm of ends is the “systematic union of various rational beings through common laws.”

• Paul Guyer’s Interpretation: Act only on those maxims that could be given by all human wills as part of a complete system of maxims.

Kant’s Legacy: Modern Kantians

• Contractualism: The view that solutions to problems in moral and political philosophy are to be found by looking at what rational agents would accept when deliberating together.

• Constructivism: The view that facts in morality are determined by what rational agents would will, not by looking at what happiness is and trying to maximise that.

• Intentions matter: The badness of an act isn’t just determined by its consequences. At least part of it comes from the intentions behind the action.

Deontology Essay

• Discuss and evaluate the deontological position, with reference to Classics p139-146 and Basics p42-47.

750 words