Republic of the Philippines

Bohol Island State University

Main Campus
Tagbilaran City
VISION: A premier S & T university for the formation of a world class and virtue-laden human resource for sustainable
development of Bohol and the country

MISSION: BISU is committed to provide quality higher education in the arts and sciences, as well as in the professional and
technological fields, undertake research and development and extension services for the sustainable development of Bohol and
the country.

Name: Lorelyn Mae Torrenueva

Year & Section: BSEd-Social Studies 3-2
GE 8 Ethics
Lesson 7: Activity #8
              Present a critique/analysis of Kant's concept of morality. If you want, make an
evaluation on Kant's concept of morality with at least 4 paragraphs consistent of correct
grammar and substantial content. This is good for 30 points.
Duty is higher than anything else, this is the Kant’s concept of Ethics and Morality, it
says we should always follow a set of moral principles no matter what the situation is or what the
outcome will be. He did not believe the term good was linked to happiness because what might
make some people happy could be an evil act. Also, Kant did not agree that good was dependent
on an outcome because the particular outcome might have been brought about by evil acts. The
only good in his concept of morality is goodwill and this goodwill to Kant is for rational beings
to follow their duty and act in accordance with moral law. He saw human beings as rational
beings which possessed reason thought or the ability that allows people to follow their duty and
act towards moral law. According to Kant, the central construct of moral law is the categorical
imperative and this imperative is something you must do. He presented two types of imperatives,
categorical and hypothetical. A hypothetical imperative is something you must do in order to
achieve something else. Such as when going to school, if you want to be on time, you must leave
early and if you want to stop your hunger, you must eat. While, a categorical imperative is
something you must always do, no matter what the situation is, no matter what you want to
achieve or what your desires are. This is universal laws and that we humans as rational beings
must always follow.

More so, Kant has three ways of formulating categorical imperatives. The first was
playing upon the idea of universe ability. Kant states "act only according to that maxim whereby
you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. " By this, he means you
should only act in a way whereby you would want everyone else in the world to act in the same
way and by that basis, you should refrain from doing things that you would not want everyone
else to do. So, Kant would argue that an act is permissible if you're willing for that action to be
universalized, if you are not then this cannot be moral law. If your actions would cause
contradictions in your will when universalized then these are actions that you should not do.
Let’s look at the example of lying, if you're in a situation where you are about to lie, ask
yourself, what would happen if everyone lied all the time, if lying was permissible for everyone
in the world, truth would become meaningless, no one could be trusted, it will result in chaos, no
rational person would want this type of world so we conclude that you should never lie, it now
becomes out duty and we should always obey this no matter what. The second formulation of
categorical imperative is to treat humanity as an end in itself and never simply as a means. So, a
rational or reasonable being should never be used by someone else to fulfill another end rather
they should be considered ends themselves. They should be treated as people. The third
formulation is the kingdom of ends, only act in a way that your will to be universal, never treat
human beings as a means to an end and always act and remember of the Kingdom of ends. So
human beings to be acting through goodwill means they are following their duty of the
categorical imperative and all beings should follow this duty at all times.

So, in the concept of Morality according to Kant, we can see lot of positive reasons and
moral actions to follow so its straightforward to grasp and live by. However, there are also some
big ethical problems within his teachings. As understood, Kant’s ethics is so focused on duty, it
completely disregards the outcome of the situation. I agree that we shouldn't be completely
focused on outcome on the other hand, we shouldn't also completely dismiss outcome in favor of
duty because if we do, this can lead to morally questionable situations. Let's use the lying
scenario, we are bound by the duty to never lie, we thought about making lying universally
permitted and this contradicted our rational will. For an instance, you're at your house and a
group of people who have personal grudge to your older cousin storms at your house with a gun
and they are looking for your cousin, these people then confront you and ask if your cousin is in
your house. In this situation, you are bound by duty to never lie, you must then tell these people
the truth knowing that your cousin is going to be murdered inside your house. According to
Kant, the moral choice is to tell the truth even though in this situation, the moral choice will lead
to murder. We can see that Kantian ethics does not definitely help in this moral dilemma. In the
case of the lying, lying is in order to save a life so it is a better exercise of goodwill. But
obviously, it goes against the concept of the categorical imperative because then our duties are
no longer categorical and they can be broken when we think it’s the morally justifiable thing to
do. This will slowly lead us to a utilitarian approach to ethics or we are now concerned with the
consequence of each situation and not the duty. Each action then relies on the good we believe it
will generate and duty would eventually become meaningless.

The problem with this argument is that we can lie without simply following the rule “It is
permissible to lie.” Instead, we might be following a rule that pertains only to specific
circumstances, like “It is permissible to lie when doing so will save a life.” This rule can be
made a universal law without contradiction. 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. There appears to be nothing problematic with the rule “It is
permissible to kill when doing so is the only available means of defense against an attacker”.
And finally, the idea of duty and a way to act in all situations is unrealistic, no two situations are
exactly the same. Say for an instance, doing action X with situation A maybe right but doing
action X with situation B maybe wrong, just because it is wrong in one situation does not mean
it’s wrong in all situations. It seems Kant give us blanket ban to actions that could be conceived
of as wrong in one situation even if they are right in other situations. Every situation is unique
and so moral actions cannot be absolute.