It remains to be seen whether, on this complicated interpretation of Kant, it sufficiently allows for the possibility that one can knowingly and willingly do wrong if the will is practical reason and practical reason is, in part, the moral law. Thus, rather than treating admirable character traits as more basic than the notions of right and wrong conduct, Kant takes virtues to be explicable only in terms of a prior account of moral or dutiful behavior.
He does not try to make out what shape a good character has and then draw conclusions about how we ought to act on that basis. He sets out the principles of moral conduct based on his philosophical account of rational agency, and then on that basis defines virtue as a kind of strength and resolve to act on those principles despite temptations to the contrary.
Moreover, the disposition is to overcome obstacles to moral behavior that Kant thought were ineradicable features of human nature. Thus, virtue appears to be much more like what Aristotle would have thought of as a lesser trait, viz. Third, in viewing virtue as a trait grounded in moral principles, and vice as principled transgression of moral law, Kant thought of himself as thoroughly rejecting what he took to be the Aristotelian view that virtue is a mean between two vices.
The Aristotelian view, he claimed, assumes that virtue typically differs from vice only in terms of degree rather than in terms of the different principles each involves MM , They differ in that the prodigal person acts on the principle of acquiring means with the sole intention of enjoyment, while the avaricious person acts on the principle of acquiring means with the sole intention of possessing them. Fourth, in classical views the distinction between moral and non-moral virtues is not particularly significant.
A virtue is some sort of excellence of the soul, but one finds classical theorists treating wit and friendliness alongside courage and justice. Since Kant holds moral virtue to be a trait grounded in moral principle, the boundary between non-moral and moral virtues could not be more sharp.
Even so, Kant shows a remarkable interest in non-moral virtues; indeed, much of Anthropology is given over to discussing the nature and sources of a variety of character traits, both moral and non-moral. Fifth, virtue cannot be a trait of divine beings, if there are such, since it is the power to overcome obstacles that would not be present in them.
This is not to say that to be virtuous is to be the victor in a constant and permanent war with ineradicable evil impulses or temptations. Should all of our desires and interests be trained ever so carefully to comport with what morality actually requires of us, this would not change in the least the fact that morality is still duty for us.
For should this come to pass, it would not change the fact that each and every desire and interest could have run contrary to the moral law.
And it is the fact that they can conflict with moral law, not the fact that they actually do conflict with it, that makes duty a constraint, and hence is virtue essentially a trait concerned with constraint. For instance, he holds that the lack of virtue is compatible with possessing a good will G 6: That one acts from duty, even repeatedly and reliably can thus be quite compatible with an absence of the moral strength to overcome contrary interests and desires.
Someone with a good will, who is genuinely committed to duty for its own sake, might simply fail to encounter any significant temptation that would reveal the lack of strength to follow through with that commitment. Among the virtues Kant discusses are those of self-respect, honesty, thrift, self-improvement, beneficence, gratitude, sociability, and forgiveness.
Kant also distinguishes vice, which is a steadfast commitment to immorality, from particular vices, which involve refusing to adopt specific moral ends or committing to act against those ends.
Although Kant gives several examples in the Groundwork that illustrate this principle, he goes on to describe in later writings, especially in The Metaphysics of Morals , a complicated normative ethical theory for interpreting and applying the CI to human persons in the natural world.
His framework includes various levels, distinctions and application procedures. Kant, in particular, describes two subsidiary principles that are supposed to capture different aspects of the CI.
These principles, in turn, justify more specific duties of right and of ethics and virtue. For example, Kant claims that the duty not to steal the property of another person is narrow and perfect because it precisely defines a kind of act that is forbidden. The duty of beneficence, on the other hand, is characterized as wide and imperfect because it does not specify exactly how much assistance we must provide to others. Even with a system of moral duties in place, Kant admits that judgment is often required to determine how these duties apply to particular circumstances.
It denies, in other words, the central claim of teleological moral views. For instance, act consequentialism is one sort of teleological theory. It asserts that the right action is that action of all the alternatives available to the agent that has the best overall outcome.
Here, the goodness of the outcome determines the rightness of an action. Another sort of teleological theory might focus instead on character traits.
In this case, it is the goodness of the character of the person who does or would perform it that determines the rightness of an action. In both cases, as it were, the source or ground of rightness is goodness. Rightness, on the standard reading of Kant, is not grounded in the value of outcomes or character.
There are several reasons why readers have thought that Kant denies the teleological thesis. First, he makes a plethora of statements about outcomes and character traits that appear to imply an outright rejection of both forms of teleology. This appears to say that moral rightness is not a function of the value of intended or actual outcomes. These certainly appear to be the words of someone who rejects the idea that what makes actions right is primarily their relationship to what good may come of those actions, someone who rejects outright the act consequentialist form of teleology.
Moreover, Kant begins the Groundwork by noting that character traits such as the traditional virtues of courage, resolution, moderation, self-control, or a sympathetic cast of mind possess no unconditional moral worth, G —94, — If the moral rightness of an action is grounded in the value of the character traits of the person who performs or would perform it then it seems Kant thinks that it would be grounded in something of only conditional value.
This certainly would not comport well with the virtue ethics form of teleology. Perhaps the first philosopher to suggest a teleological reading of Kant was John Stuart Mill. In the first chapter of his Utilitarianism , Mill implies that the Universal Law formulation of the Categorical Imperative could only sensibly be interpreted as a test of the consequences of universal adoption of a maxim. And because they are universal, Hare argued, they forbid making exceptions.
Indeed, Cummiskey argues that they must be: Respect for the value of humanity entails treating the interests of each as counting for one and one only, and hence for always acting to produce the best overall outcome. That, she argues, would imply that there would be no reason to conform to them. Instead, Kant thought the principles of rationality taken together constitute rational agency, and rational agency so constituted itself functions as a value that justifies moral action , Guyer argues that autonomy itself is the value grounding moral requirements.
And Wood argues that humanity itself is the grounding value for Kant. While the second Critique claims that good things owe their value to being the objects of the choices of rational agents, they could not, in his view, acquire any value at all if the source of that value, rational agency, itself had no value , ; see also —8.
If their value thereby becomes the source of the rightness of our actions — say, our actions are right if and because they treat that self-standing value in various ways — then her reading too is teleological.
On the latter view, moral demands gain their authority simply because a rational will, insofar as you are rational, must will them. On the former view, by contrast, a rationale is at hand: because your will is, insofar as it is rational, good.
Proponents of this former reading are, however, then left with the burden of explaining how it could be the autonomy of the will alone that explains the authority of morality. One might have thought that this question is quite easy to settle.
At the basis of morality, Kant argued, is the Categorical Imperative, and imperatives are not truth apt. But, in fact, the question is not at all easy. Thus while at the foundation of morality there would be an imperative which is not truth apt, particular moral judgments themselves would describe what that imperative rules out and so would themselves be truth apt.
Philosophers such as R. Objectivity, according to Hare, is to be understood as universality, and the Categorical Imperative prescribes universally. A second issue that has received considerable attention is whether Kant is a metaethical constructivist or realist. Constructivism in metaethics is the view that moral truths are, or are determined by, the outcomes of actual or hypothetical procedures of deliberation or choice. Autonomy, in this sense, means that such agents are both authors and subjects of the moral law and, as such, are not bound by any external requirements that may exist outside of our wills.
Instead, we are only subject to moral requirements that we impose on ourselves through the operation of our own reason independently of our natural desires and inclinations. The common error of previous ethical theories, including sentimentalism, egoism and rationalism, is that they failed to recognize that morality presupposes that we have autonomy of the will. On these interpretations, Kant is a skeptic about arbitrary authorities, such as God, natural feelings, intrinsic values or primitive reasons that exist independently of us.
Only reason itself has genuine authority over us, so we must exercise our shared powers of reasoned deliberation, thought and judgment, guided by the Categorical Imperative as the most basic internal norm of reason, to construct more specific moral requirements.
Kantians in this camp, however, disagree about how this rational procedure should be characterized. Other commentators interpret Kant as a robust moral realist Ameriks ; Wood ; Langton ; Kain The moral law then specifies how we should regard and treat agents who have this special status. Autonomy of the will, on this view, is a way of considering moral principles that are grounded in the objective value of rational nature and whose authority is thus independent of the exercise of our wills or rational capacities.
Some interpreters of Kant, most notably Korsgaard , seem to affirm a kind of quietism about metaethics by rejecting many of the assumptions that contemporary metaethical debates rest on. For example, some of these philosophers seem not to want to assert that moral facts and properties just are the outcomes of deliberative procedures.
Rather, they seem more eager to reject talk of facts and properties as unnecessary, once a wholly acceptable and defensible procedure is in place for deliberation. Once we are more sensitive to the ethical concerns that really matter to us as rational agents, we will find that many of the questions that animate metaethicists turn out to be non-questions or of only minor importance.
Most translations include volume and page numbers to this standard Academy edition. Citations in this article do so as well. The following volumes of that series are especially relevant to his moral theory:. There have been several comprehensive commentaries on the Groundwork that have been published recently, some of which also include new English translations.
Aims and Methods of Moral Philosophy 2. Good Will, Moral Worth and Duty 3. Duty and Respect for Moral Law 4. Categorical and Hypothetical Imperatives 5. The Formula of the Universal Law of Nature 6. The Humanity Formula 7. The Autonomy Formula 8.
The Kingdom of Ends Formula 9. The Unity of the Formulas Autonomy Virtue and Vice Normative Ethical Theory Teleology or Deontology? Duty and Respect for Moral Law According to Kant, what is singular about motivation by duty is that it consists of bare respect for the moral law. Categorical and Hypothetical Imperatives Kant holds that the fundamental principle of our moral duties is a categorical imperative.
The following volumes of that series are especially relevant to his moral theory: Practical Philosophy , translated by Mary Gregor, Schneewind, Booth tr.
Engstrom and J. Whiting eds. Hill, Thomas E. Bagnoli ed. Reason wants all knowledge to form a system of knowledge. Transcendental idealism is a theory about the relation between the mind and its objects. Three fundamental theses make up this theory: first, there is a distinction between appearances things as they appear and things as they are in themselves.
Second, space and time are a priori , subjective conditions on the possibility of experience, and hence they pertain only to appearances, not to things in themselves. Third, we can have determinate cognition of only of things that can be experienced, hence only of appearances, not things in themselves. Hence, transcendental idealism is the theory that it is a condition on the possibility of experience that the objects of experience be in some sense mind-dependent. Kant argues that space and time are a priori , subjective conditions on the possibility of experience, that is, that they are transcendentally ideal.
Kant grounds the distinction between appearances and things in themselves on the realization that, as subjective conditions on experience, space and time could only characterize things as they appear, not as they are in themselves. Further, the claim that we can only know appearances not things in themselves is a consequence of the claims that we can only know objects that conform to the conditions of experience, and that only spatiotemporal appearances conform to these conditions.
One argument has to do with the relation between sensations and space. Hence, the ability to sense objects in space presupposes the a priori representation of space, which entails that space is merely ideal, hence not a property of things in themselves. If geometry, which is the study of the structure of space, is synthetic a priori , then its object — space — must be a mere a priori representation and not something that pertains to things in themselves.
Many commentators have found these arguments less than satisfying because they depend on the questionable assumption that if the representations of space and time are a priori they thereby cannot be properties of things in themselves. There Kant argues that if space and time were things in themselves or even properties of things in themselves, then one could prove that space and time both are and are not infinitely large, and that matter in space both is and is not infinitely divisible.
In other words, the assumption that space and time are transcendentally real instead of transcendentally ideal leads to a contradiction, and thus space and time must be transcendentally ideal. It is a question of central importance because how one understands this distinction determines how one will understand the entire nature of Kantian idealism. The following briefly summarizes the main interpretive options, but it does not take a stand on which is correct. Appearances and hence the entire physical world that we experience comprise one set of entities, and things in themselves are an ontologically distinct set of entities.
Although things in themselves may somehow cause us to have experience of appearances, the appearances we experience are not things in themselves. There have been attempts at interpretations that are intermediate between these two options. After establishing the ideality of space and time and the distinction between appearances and things in themselves, Kant goes on to show how it is possible to have a priori cognition of the necessary features of appearances.
Cognizing appearances requires more than mere knowledge of their sensible form space and time ; it also requires that we be able to apply certain concepts for example, the concept of causation to appearances. The argument of the Transcendental Deduction is one of the most important moments in the Critique , but it is also one of the most difficult, complex, and controversial arguments in the book.
Hence, it will not be possible to reconstruct the argument in any detail here. Kant takes it to be uncontroversial that we can be aware of our representations as our representations. Further, we are also able to recognize that it is the same I that does the thinking in both cases. In general, all of our experience is unified because it can be ascribed to the one and same I, and so this unity of experience depends on the unity of the self-conscious I.
Kant next asks what conditions must obtain in order for this unity of self-consciousness to be possible. His answer is that we must be able to differentiate between the I that does the thinking and the object that we think about.
That is, we must be able to distinguish between subjective and objective elements in our experience. So next Kant needs to explain how we are able to differentiate between the subjective and objective elements of experience.
His answer is that a representation is objective when the subject is necessitated in representing the object in a certain way, that is, when it is not up to the free associative powers of my imagination to determine how I represent it.
For instance, whether I think a painting is attractive or whether it calls to mind an instance from childhood depends on the associative activity of my own imagination; but the size of the canvas and the chemical composition of the pigments is not up to me: insofar as I represent these as objective features of the painting, I am necessitated in representing them in a certain way.
Kant assumed that we have a unified experience of the many objects populating the world. This unified experience depends on the unity of apperception. The unity of apperception enables the subject to distinguish between subjective and objective elements in experience.
This ability, in turn, depends on representing objects in accordance with rules, and the rules in question are the categories. Hence, the only way we can explain the fact that we have experience at all is by appeal to the fact that the categories apply to the objects of experience. It is worth emphasizing how truly radical the conclusion of the Transcendental Deduction is. Kant takes himself to have shown that all of nature is subject to the rules laid down by the categories.
But these categories are a priori : they originate in the mind. Thus the conclusion of the Transcendental Deduction parallels the conclusion of the Transcendental Aesthetic: where the latter had shown that the forms of sensibility space and time originate in the mind and are imposed on the world, the former shows that the forms of understanding the categories also originate in the mind and are imposed on the world.
The Transcendental Deduction showed that it is necessary for us to make use of the categories in experience, but also that we are justified in making use of them.
In the following series of chapters together labeled the Analytic of Principles Kant attempts to leverage the results of the Deduction and prove that there are transcendentally necessary laws that every possible object of experience must obey.
The first two principles correspond to the categories of quantity and quality. First, Kant argues that every object of experience must have a determinate spatial shape and size and a determinate temporal duration except mental objects, which have no spatial determinations. The next three principles are discussed in an important, lengthy chapter called the Analogies of Experience. They derive from the relational categories: substance, causality, and community.
According to the First Analogy, experience will always involve objects that must be represented as substances. One event is said to be the cause of another when the second event follows the first in accordance with a rule. And according to the Third Analogy which presupposes the first two , all substances stand in relations of reciprocal interaction with each other. That is, any two pieces of material substance will effect some degree of causal influence on each other, even if they are far apart.
The First Analogy is a form of the principle of the conservation of matter: it shows that matter can never be created or annihilated by natural means, it can only be altered. Hume had argued that we can never have knowledge of necessary connections between events; rather, we can only perceive certain types of events to be constantly conjoined with other types of events.
In arguing that events follow each other in accordance with rules , Kant has shown how we can have knowledge of necessary connections between events above and beyond their mere constant conjunction. The Postulates of Empirical Thinking in General contains the final set of principles of pure understanding and they derive from the modal categories possibility, actuality, necessity.
The Postulates define the different ways to represent the modal status of objects, that is, what it is for an object of experience to be possible, actual, or necessary. The most important passage from the Postulates chapter is the Refutation of Idealism, which is a refutation of external world skepticism that Kant added to the edition of the Critique.
In the Refutation, Kant argues that his system entails not just that an external that is, spatial world is possible which Berkeley denied , but that we can know it is real which Descartes and others questioned. Where the skeptics assume that we have knowledge of the states of our own minds, but say that we cannot be certain that an external world corresponds to these states, Kant turns the tables and argues that we would not have knowledge of the states of our own minds specifically, the temporal order in which our ideas occur if we were not simultaneously aware of permanent substances in space, outside of the mind.
Accordingly, Kant holds that there can be knowledge of an object only if it is possible for that object to be given in an experience. This aspect of the epistemological condition of the human subject entails that there are important areas of inquiry about which we would like to have knowledge, but cannot. The three most important ideas with which Kant is concerned in the Transcendental Dialectic are the soul, the world considered as a totality , and God.
The peculiar thing about these ideas of reason is that reason is led by its very structure to posit objects corresponding to these ideas. Kant argues that such reasoning is the result of transcendental illusion. A cognition involves both intuition and concept, while a mere thought involves only concept. For instance, consider the question whether we can cognize the I as a substance that is, as a soul.
On the one hand, something is cognized as a substance when it is represented only as the subject of predication and is never itself the predicate of some other subject. On the other hand, something can only be cognized as a substance when it is given as a persistent object in an intuition see 2f above , and there can be no intuition of the I itself. Hence although we cannot help but think of the I as a substantial soul, we can never have cognition of the I as a substance, and hence knowledge of the existence and nature of the soul is impossible.
Antinomies arise when reason seems to be able to prove two opposed and mutually contradictory propositions with apparent certainty. Kant discusses four antinomies in the first Critique he uncovers other antinomies in later writings as well. The First Antinomy shows that reason seems to be able to prove that the universe is both finite and infinite in space and time. The Second Antinomy shows that reason seems to be able to prove that matter both is and is not infinitely divisible into ever smaller parts.
The Third Antinomy shows that reason seems to be able to prove that free will cannot be a causally efficacious part of the world because all of nature is deterministic and yet that it must be such a cause. And the Fourth Antinomy shows that reason seems to be able to prove that there is and there is not a necessary being which some would identify with God. In all four cases, Kant attempts to resolve these conflicts of reason with itself by appeal to transcendental idealism. The claim that space and time are not features of things in themselves is used to resolve the First and Second Antinomies.
Since the empirical world in space and time is identified with appearances, and since the world as a totality can never itself be given as a single appearance, there is no determinate fact of the matter regarding the size of the universe: It is neither determinately finite nor determinately infinite; rather, it is indefinitely large. The distinction between appearances and things in themselves is used to resolve the Third and Fourth Antinomies.
Although every empirical event experienced within the realm of appearance has a deterministic natural cause, it is at least logically possible that freedom can be a causally efficacious power at the level of things in themselves. And although every empirical object experienced within the realm of appearance is a contingently existing entity, it is logically possible that there is a necessary being outside the realm of appearance which grounds the existence of the contingent beings within the realm of appearance.
It must be kept in mind that Kant has not claimed to demonstrate the existence of a transcendent free will or a transcendent necessary being: Kant denies the possibility of knowledge of things in themselves. Instead, Kant only takes himself to have shown that the existence of such entities is logically possible. In his moral theory, however, Kant will offer an argument for the actuality of freedom see 5c below. The Ideal of Pure Reason addresses the idea of God and argues that it is impossible to prove the existence of God.
Reason is led to posit the idea of such a being when it reflects on its conceptions of finite beings with limited reality and infers that the reality of finite beings must derive from and depend on the reality of the most infinitely perfect being. Of course, the fact that reason necessarily thinks of a most real, necessary being does not entail that such a being exists.
Kant argues that there are only three possible arguments for the existence of such a being, and that none is successful. According to the ontological argument for the existence of God versions of which were proposed by St.
Anselm and Descartes , among others , God is the only being whose essence entails its existence. Kant argues that both of these implicitly depend on the argumentation of the ontological argument pertaining to necessary existence, and since it fails, they fail as well. Although Kant argues in the Transcendental Dialectic that we cannot have cognition of the soul, of freedom of the will, nor of God, in his ethical writings he will complicate this story and argue that we are justified in believing in these things see 5c below.
Recall that an analytic judgment is one where the truth of the judgment depends only on the relation between the concepts used in the judgment. Kant, by contrast argued that mathematical knowledge is synthetic. Recall, however, that a judgment can be both synthetic yet a priori.
Like the judgments of the necessary structures of experience, mathematics is also synthetic a priori according to Kant. Surely, this proposition is a priori : I can know its truth without doing empirical experiments to see what happens when I put seven things next to five other things.
If mathematical knowledge is synthetic, then it depends on objects being given in sensibility. And if it is a priori , then these objects must be non-empirical objects. What sort of objects does Kant have in mind here? Recall that an intuition is a singular, immediate representation of an individual object see 2c above. Empirical intuitions represent sensible objects through sensation, but pure intuitions are a priori representations of space and time as such. Kant is not saying that we should look at the intended consequences in order to make a moral evaluation.
Kant is claiming that regardless of intended or actual consequences, moral worth is properly assessed by looking at the motivation of the action, which may be selfish even if the intended consequences are good. One might think Kant is claiming that if one of my intentions is to make myself happy, that my action is not worthy.
This is a mistake. The consequence of making myself happy is a good consequence, even according to Kant. Kant clearly thinks that people being happy is a good thing. There is nothing wrong with doing something with an intended consequence of making yourself happy, that is not selfishness. You can get moral worth doing things that you enjoy, but the reason you are doing them cannot be that you enjoy them, the reason must be that they are required by duty.
Also, there is a tendency to think that Kant says it is always wrong to do something that just causes your own happiness, like buying an ice cream cone. This is not the case. Kant thinks that you ought to do things to make yourself happy as long as you make sure that they are not immoral i. Getting ice cream is not immoral, and so you can go ahead and do it. Doing it will not make you a morally worthy person, but it won't make you a bad person either.
Many actions which are permissible but not required by duty are neutral in this way. It is fine if they enjoy doing it, but it must be the case that they would do it even if they did not enjoy it. The overall theme is that to be a good person you must be good for goodness sake.
His argument for this is summarized by James Rachels as follows:. After all, it is not as though people would stop believing each other simply because it is known that people lie when doing so will save lives. For one thing, that situation rarely comes up—people could still be telling the truth almost all of the time. Even the taking of human life could be justified under certain circumstances.
Take self-defense, for example. Maxims and the universal laws that result from them can be specified in a way that reflects all of the relevant features of the situation.
Consider the case of the Inquiring Murderer as described in the text. Suppose that you are in that situation and you lie to the murderer. This maxim seems to pass the test of the categorical imperative. Procedure for determining whether a proposed action violates CI I am to do x in circumstances y in order to bring about z.
I am to lie on a loan application when I am in severe financial difficulty and there is no other way to obtain funds, in order to ease the strain on my finances. Everyone always does x in circumstances y in order to bring about z. Everyone always lies on a loan application when he is in severe financial difficulty and there is no other way to obtain funds, in order to ease the strain on his finances.
Note: assume that after the adjustment to equilibrium the new law is common knowledge -- everyone knows that it is true, everyone knows that everyone knows, etc. The Kantian evaluation rule is this: we must be able to answer yes to both questions for the maxim to be acceptable.
If we get a no answer to either, we must reject the maxim and try to find another one on which to act. This is the example we have been using in spelling out the procedure. The maxim fails because I must answer "no" to the first question: I could not rationally act on the maxim in the PSW. There are two reasons Kant states for this: 1 promising and 2 the end to be attained by it would be impossible, since no one would believe what was promised him but would laugh at all such utterances as being vain pretenses.
Lying on a loan application would not get us anywhere in a world where everyone always lied when under similar circumstances.
The second part of the test is the "contradiction in the will test. The next example is supposed to illustrate a failure of this test. Here the maxim is something like the following:. In order to advance my own interests, I will not do anything to help others in need unless I have something to gain from doing so.
The PSW will contain a law of nature of the form:. To advance his own interests, everyone always refrains from helping others in need unless he has something to gain from doing so.
And Influenced by experience. I agree with Kant.. One simply should refuse to say anything and leave the listener to make his.. Immanuel Kant — was a transformative figure in modern Western philosophy due to his ground-breaking work in metaphysics and ethics.
The will Kant argued that morality cannot be based on our emotions or experience of the world, because this would leave it weak and subjective, and lacking the unconditional obligation that he believed was central to moral law. The Categorical Imperative Kant drew a famous distinction between different types of commands, or imperatives, which direct us how to act.
Kingdom of Ends Because we are inherently rational agents, we are both the authors and the subjects of the moral law. Ethics in your inbox. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.
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