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Discussing The Metaphysics Of Kant's Moral Law

1476 Words6 Pages

Iqra Polani
PHIL 130
Professor Park
31 March 2017
Paper 2: Discussing Kant’s Moral Law In Immanuel Kant’s The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, he works to establish a moral philosophy that he considers to be pure due to its separation from all things empirical. Kant creates a distinction between behavior and reasons or motivations for actions in his work. As a deontological (duty-based) philosopher, Kant believes that morality is based on duty and respect. He emphasizes rationality as the only significant fact relevant to morality. His formulation of the categorical imperative serves to launch his argument regarding what it means to be truly moral and what it takes to universalize a moral law.
The aim of Kant’s work was to establish …show more content…

Fundamentally, actions done based upon inclinations have no true moral worth. A sense of duty is based upon good will, which is unchanging. Kant provides four cases to illustrate the relationship between duty and inclination. If an action is clearly inconsistent with duty, it is not moral. An example of this case would be if someone were to randomly kill an innocent person. If an action conforms with duty, but is done for prudential reasons, it is not moral. Kant’s example of this is in the case of the cautious shopkeeper does not overcharge people not because it’s the moral thing to do, but rather because he wants to maximize his own profits—a decision based on empirical reasons. If an action conforms with duty, but is done out of inclination, it cannot be considered moral. The example Kant provides is through the case of the sympathetic philanthropist. Being generous or beneficent can only be considered if the action is done out of morality, not inclination. If someone likes to do volunteer work to help the impoverished because they enjoy it, when they are volunteering, they are actually doing it out of self-interest (inclination) rather than for the purpose of being moral. It is merely a coincidence that their inclinations align with what can be normally considered morally correct. Kant’s second proposition states that moral worth is derived from the maxim by which it’s determined, rather than from the …show more content…

This formulation basically states that you should respect humanity as an end. He says that you should “not merely [treat others] as a means,” (Kant 491) by which he means that you should not treat others as a tool or object to get what you want. Rather, you should respect other people as rational beings that are valuable and do not simply exist for your use. People should always be treated as an end, and never as only a means. Kant considers this formulation to be a restatement of his first principle because it goes along with his reasoning for why it is wrong to follow a maxim that cannot serve as a universal

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