1.

Introduction

Description

Module 6 tackles Kantian ethics. Fascinating ethical theories such as Good Will and Nature of
Imperatives serve as the point of discussion. It also tackles Kant’s principle of Rights and other
sub-topics on ethical theories. Legal versus the principle of moral rights posits that “what is legal
is not always moral, and what is moral is not necessarily legal in other countries is also part of
the discussion.

2. Learning Outcomes

Learning Objectives

At the end of this module, the students will be able to

1. Articulate Kant’s ethical theories on morality.

2. Describe Kant's principles about the Categorical Imperative.
3. Examine the Legal and Moral rights principles and their application to man’s life.
4. Asses Kant's theory on moral act
5. Write a reflection paper entitled My Duties as a Student

3. Topic 1: Kantian Ethics- An Introduction

Considered the most significant philosopher during his time, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) a
German thinker, wrote two major books entitled “The Foundation of Metaphysical of Morals,
and “The Critique of Practical Reason, in which he argued that Categorical Imperative (CI) is
considered the fundamental principle that underlies moral reasoning.
As an ethicist, he starts philosophizing using three questions such as:
1) What do I know,
2) What should I do?
3) What am I allowed to hope?

Kant argued that when it comes to morality, simple virtues such as courage, intelligence, can be
used for good or for evil. For this reason, the virtues praised by the Greeks were not a
satisfactory way to distinguish good and bad. According to him, virtues are nice traits to have,
but they are not enough. His ethical theory of moral judgment not only focuses on reason alone,
but it should be coupled with ethical action.
 Morality provides people with a framework of rational rules that guide and prevent certain
actions and are independent of personal intentions and desires. Here are Kant's examples of
arguments: "If I give a homeless person a dollar because I want to help them, my action is
good". "If I give them a dollar because they are making a weird noise and I want them to shut up,
the action is not good". A good action, Kant says, is one where you do it with the intention of
doing a good thing, which he calls it goodwill.
4. Topic 2: Good Will and Moral Duty
Good Will and Moral Duty

Kant argued that in order to intend a good action a rational agent (person) must possess the
goodwill to do the action. This is a measure that deals with whether you are dealing with a
morally "good" individual. Kant went on to say that possessing goodwill is one thing, but the
reason to do a "good" action or "ought to", is the result of a sense of obligation.
Kant says that a person of good will is one who acts from a sense of duty at all times even in the
face of difficulty.

Kant does not agree with many ethicists that happiness is the highest good summum bonum. He
argued that happiness alone can be corrupting or worthless when not combined with goodwill.
For Kant, the goodness of action can not be determined by the consequences or results of the
action, instead, he decided that the intention behind an action is the measure of whether an action
is good or bad.

Duty

For Kant, “duty” is something that is different from what we usually think it means. He further
reiterates that it is not doing something because it’s your duty to follow certain external rules or
orders, but it is by doing something from duty which is the right way to act only when that duty
is towards you own internal moral law that you have figured out by applying careful thinking and
logic.

For example, there are some who are naturally nicer than others, but according to Kant, we
should not trust our natural inclinations as motivations for actions because they were unreliable
and passive. If we take the time to figure out what the moral laws are (see later the categorical
imperative), then we can follow the law from duty in a way that is reliable, consistent, and
immutable. Thus, for Kant, an authentic moral act is one that is done because we understand it to
be our obligation, a command, an imperative.
5. Topic 3: Kant's Categorical Imperative
Categorical Imperative

An imperative is a command of reason which can be classified as hypothetical and categorical. A

hypothetical Imperative is something of a command that is designed to attain specific goals. Here
are some examples of Kant's Hypothetical Imperatives:

1) If you want to stay healthy, eat healthy foods, and exercise regularly.

2) If you don't want to go to jail, obey all laws.

3) A woman who wants to spend a vacation in Mexico, buys a plane ticket. Buying the pale
ticket is a means to her end of vacationing in Mexico.

According to Kant, it is a hypothetical imperative if it "justifies and action as a means of

achieving something else that one will. Hypothetical Imperative simply means an action based
on desires.

But Kant finds his first principle inadequate, and so, his Categorical Imperative was born. The
categorical imperative is a principle that every rational person must accept, which he also
believed and called the supreme principle of morality. In this instance, Kant argued that rational
agents

The Formula of the Universal Law of Nature. Kant's first formulation of the CI states that you
are to “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that
it become a universal law” (G 4:421). If your maxim passes all four steps, only then is acting on
it morally permissible.

6. Topic 4: Kants' on Maxims and Universalizabilty

Universality: Kant thought that the main characteristic of moral principles is that we think they
are “universable” so to speak. If we think that something is right, we think that everyone should
do it (at least if they are in a similar situation, although he thought there were principles that
were valid independent of the situation). When I say, thou shall not kill, I am saying it is wrong
to kill and no one should kill. If I say that it is ok to kill in self-defense I am saying that it is ok
for everyone to kill in self-defense. Claims of right and wrong have this characteristic of
universality. Moral law is by its nature universal for Kant.

Maxims: Maxims are rules that guide our actions. For instance, I can have as a rule “Never lie to
your friends” or “Always respect your parents” or “Always look out for yourself first” or “Never
break a promise.” These are maxims we use when we think we are acting morally. For Kant, an
action is right depending on the maxim that motivates it. In order to know if they are the maxim
that motivates action is a good maxim, we need to know if they can become a moral universal
law, we need to put them through a test. The test to know if a moral maxim is a universal moral
law is very simple: a maxim that can be universalized without contradiction is a universally good
maxim (we will see what he means more clearly in the section about the hypothetical
imperative).

Kant advocates an approach to ethics in which we perform actions that conform universal rules.

· An act is not right because it leads to good consequences or because I feel inclined to act in a
certain way.

· The will is good when and only when it acts out of pure respect for moral law (which is what is
rational for everyone to do) We must treat all rational beings as ends rather than means.

· Our conduct must fall under principles that can be advocated for all humanity, categorically,
and without exceptions.
7. Topic 5: Kant's Right Theory

What is Kant's Rights Theory?

 In law, Immanuel Kant proposes the principle of rights. He said that the government must
approach the making of enforcement of laws with the right intentions in respect to the end goals
of the society that it governs. ("Rights Theory", n.d.)

The principle of rights theory is the notion that in order for a society to be efficacious,
“government must approach the making and enforcement of laws with the right intentions in
respect to the end goals of the society that it governs. Members of society agree to give up some
freedoms for the protection enjoyed by organized society, but governments cannot infringe upon
the rights that citizens have been promised”. (“Rights Theory”, n.d.) .

When applied to war, rights theory states that in order for a war to be deemed morally
justifiable, the intention of entering into war ought to be right in relation to human rights. Kant’s
principle of rights theory thus teaches that it is not merely the outcome of actions that is
significant but also the reasoning behind them, because if the intent is evil, then the outcome, in
all likelihood, is bad as well.

Legal vs. Moral Rights

What is legal is not always moral. And sometimes, what is moral is not necessarily legal in a
particular country. These principles prove, among other things, that being moral and being legal
may be practically related but not one and the same.

The emphasis on rights in the legal theory distinguishes us, each with his own subjective claims,
his own property, and his own purposes. We can all have the same duties, but we cannot all have
rights in the same objects. Duties unite us in a moral community of ends; rights divide in the
concrete community of laws.

What many found so ethically objectionable about apartheid South Africa was its denial to the
majority of that country’s inhabitants of many fundamental moral rights, such as the right not to
be discriminated against on grounds of color and rights to political participation. This specific
line of opposition and protest could only be pursued because of a belief in the existence and
validity of moral rights, with or without recognition of a legal system.

It must be clear, therefore, that human rights cannot be reduced to, or exclusively identified
with legal rights. In fact, some human rights are best identified as moral rights. Human rights are
meant to apply to all human beings universally, regardless of whether or not they have attained
legal recognition by all countries everywhere.

On the other hand, Kant's legal theory derives from the assumption that concrete individuals,
each acting out subjective choices, enter into civil society in order to secure their rightful claims,
as Kant puts it, to "mine and thine." 42 Morality elicits our identity as beings endowed with
univocal reason; the law acknowledges our concrete particularity and seeks to harmonize our
divergent purposes.

Legal rights denote all the rights found within existing legal codes. As such, they enjoy the
recognition and protection of the law. Questions as to their existence can be resolved by just
locating the pertinent legal instrument or piece of legislation.

Legal considerations exist at the scale of society as a whole.

Laws are the most general of all the constraints on behavior. They emerge from whatever the
governance processes are in the society that promulgates them, and they reflect the values or
interests of the most powerful members of the society.

Lawbreakers typically risk punishment but are not always punished. Because punishment inflicts
costs on both the punished and the punishers, law enforcement requires members of the society
who are willing (or are compelled to) bear the costs of enforcement.

There can be instances of moral, ethical, and legal considerations that are in conflict with one
another. Traffic laws provide several good examples because the complex process of negotiating
between moral, ethical, and legal obligations can have counter-intuitive and surprising results
that are not resolved by law. Police officers who enforce traffic laws sometimes will explore the
conflicts between these different scales of behavioral judgment, and exercise discretion in
enforcement that makes allowances for moral or ethical intentions.

But Kant's theory was also criticized by his co-philosophers. Thus, it will bring us to the next
topic of this module.
8. Topic6: Kantian Ethics: An Analysis
An Analysis of Kantian Ethics
Many found Kant’s ethical system sensible and plausible. In fact, when we try to prove that
one’s particular action is unethical and ask him, “What if everybody behaved as you do?”, we are
actually advocating Kant’s ‘universalizability’ formulation of the categorical imperative.

However, we may argue that the reason why Kant’s ethics is appealing is that it is just
another way of stating the golden rule., “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”
and its pr4oscriptive counterpart. Notice that the most famous formulations of Kant’s categorical
imperative, especially the end-in-itself version, instruct us to respect others because that is how
we treat ourselves.

In proposing that we must always do our duties no matter what the circumstances are, Kant’s
view is deemed by some as a rule-bound moral philosophy that puts a premium on rules rather
than on humans. We may suggest that human obligations say keeping promises, telling the truth,
and repaying debts, should be really kept, but provided that no other overriding factors exist.
Ethical rules, some propose, is better construed as generalizations rather than as categorical
commands without any exception.

Another shortcoming of Kant’s ethics is its lack of solution to instances when there is a conflict
of duties. Suppose a person promises to keep a secret and then another person asks him about it.
He cannot tell the truth without breaking his promise. But Kantian ethics inflexibly demands
that he ought to do both always and in all circumstances, which, in this case, is logically
impossible.

As regards motive and consequences, Kant definitely favors the former as having moral
worth. Regardless of consequences, an act is moral if the motive was to act from good will and
out of respect for duty. With good intentions, a medical doctor who operated on a sick person
and accidentally killed him in the process is not considered immoral. We may call him
incompetent, careless, lousy, and the like but not unethical.