The Ethics of Kant - Essay Example

«Kant's Ethics»

The most notable of Immanuel Kant’s works revolved around ethics and knowledge. He differed from previous philosophers in his approach as opposed to existing views of the rationalists and empiricists and developed his own model to explain the theory of knowledge viz., deontological ethics. The empiricists were philosophers who believed that knowledge arises from experience. The rationalists believed that knowledge arises from reason. So a person’s action in any situation is borne out of his previous experiences or out of his sense of reasoning. But Kant postulated that a person’s ethics, his course of action was guided by duty. He argued that a person may misapprehend a situation if he were acting out reason alone and that if he were acting out of an experience only then it would be prejudiced if not supported with a proper reason. (Sullivan, 1994)

Kant devised a singular moral obligation or categorical imperative which in turn is borne out of duty to explain his postulates. An imperative is a command that forces a person to exercise his will. A hypothetical imperative is a conditional command, that is, a person might be doing something to achieve some desired end. His actions are therefore conditional. Kant argued that morality required an unconditional assertion of a man’s duty and hence postulated that reason decrees an unconditional or categorical imperative. The three formulations of the Categorical Imperative are

"Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." (Kant, 1993)

"Act as though the maxim of your action were by your will to become a universal law of nature." (Kant, 1993)

“Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only." (Kant, 1993)

 What the first formulation achieves to prove is that any deed cannot be moral if it is committed keeping an end result in mind. To establish a good deed the action has to be carried out without keeping the end result in mind. So to act in any situation one must exercise his will in the way he expects others to. The second formulation says that when faced with a moral situation one must think about what others would not do in a similar situation. So if naturally no one does it, one must not do the same. The third formulation summarizes the whole of the Kantian moral philosophy by explaining that an act should be conducted under rationality. A rational will can exercise his will morally simply because the person can act without attaching any conditional worth to his actions. (Teale, 1951)

He treats humanity not merely as means to an end but as the end only. That is he commits an act out of a sense of duty rather than trying to achieve some other hidden propaganda through this deed. Thus he was able to prove that adherence to Categorical Imperatives ensures autonomous ethical choice because the rational will is always autonomous and Kant puts rational will at the core of his postulates. This was based on Kant’s own arguments for autonomy of the will against heteronomy of the will. He came to the conclusion that when a person acts out of his reasoning as opposed to some external law or command his actions would be more moral.

Though the arguments seem plausible one cannot discount the fact that the autonomous will of a person may inherently be negative.  What if the will of a person and others around him are also corrupted? What can then act as an impulse for the actions of that person? Kant seems to; as did Rousseau, believe in the basic goodness of humans. What moral code guides the acts of terrorism as it manifests themselves in today’s world? The killing of innocent lives may be immoral to the larger section of society but the terrorists committing these acts may well be borne out of a sense of duty.  (Sullivan, 1994)

Kant himself answers this question. He argues that a rational will cannot act “except under the idea” of its own freedom. He says that there is no basis for believing that a person’s rational will is free. Once a set of governing directives of moral conduct has been established the rational will of a person tries to hold onto them. This is because a rational action operates on grounds of established directives, and so a rational mind is free of any negativity and negative minds are devoid of any rationality. (Teale, 1951)