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Kant's Formalism And Its Emptiness Charge Summary

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Chapter One: Kant’s Formalism and its Emptiness Charge

While Kant’s ethics have been one of the most inspiring in human history, Kant himself says that the C1 is purely formal. The claims associated with Kant’s formalistic view have also generated widespread criticisms and comments since these challengers read relevant texts in Kant’s writings that can be read as merely formalistic expressions. For example, In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant concludes that the source of character of the moral law must derive not from its content but from its form alone., ‘‘for which the mere lawgiving form of a maxim can alone serve as a law is a free will’ and that if a will is free, the law giving form of a maxim is ‘the only thing that can constitute …show more content…

Non-formalist have held that formalist reconstructions including the Categorical Imperative are not designed to achieve logical consistency nor do they possess a formal property of the principle or maxim of action. However my claim is, using the maxims adopted by me for my own purposes, I then need to test these private principles of action with the CI. This still requires another moral requirement for although I have clarified my action into a maxim; it is unclear whether my maxim passes the test of the CI procedure. How do I know if my maxim can take on the form of law? This is the first formulation of the CI that enables us to see how a maxim can or cannot be a true law of action. What Kant gives us is the closest in pure structure to the form of law, the Formula of Universal Law.
This characterization of the form of law, which has been simplified here, nevertheless, is confronted with Hegel’s criticism. Hegel thinks that a moral principle needs content in order to choose between two different concrete states of affairs or between different systems of property. But it is clear that the CI is a supreme moral principle not limited by or to any particular world, but instead covers all possible worlds. ‘‘It must hold not only for human beings but for all rational beings as such, not merely under contingent conditions and with exceptions but with absolute necessity’’ (Gr

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