Mastery Education Centre (Tung Chung)

English Comprehension
Chapter 5: Immanuel Kant / On motive (4)

1 The first involves the duty, as Kant sees it, to preserve one’s
2 own life. Since most people have a strong inclination to continue
3 living, this duty rarely comes into play. Most of the precautions
4 we take to preserve our lives therefore lack moral content.

5 Kant acknowledges that it is often difficult to know what

6 motivates people to act, and he recognizes that motives of duty
7 and inclination may both be present. However, his point is that
8 only the motive of duty confers moral worth of an action.

9 For example, most people go on living because they love life

10 or fear death, not because they have a duty to do so. Kant offers
11 a case where duty comes into view: imagine a hopeless,
12 miserable person so filled with despair that he has no desire to
13 go on living. If such a person summons the will to preserve his
14 life from duty, then his action has moral worth.

15 Kant does not maintain that only miserable people can fulfill
16 the duty to preserve their lives. It is possible to love life and still
17 preserve it for the duty to do so. The desire to go on living doesn’t
18 undermine the moral worth of preserving one’s live from duty, if
19 one does so with this reason in mind.

The moral misanthrope

20 Perhaps the hardest case to accept, Kant has a unique view

21 on our duty to help others. Some people are altruistic. They feel
22 compassion for others and take pleasure in helping them. But
23 Kant maintains that good deeds out of compassion, “however
24 right and however amiable it may be”, lacks moral worth. This
25 may seem counterintuitive. It should be good to be the kind of
26 person who takes pleasure in helping others, and Kant agrees
27 with that. But he distinguishes between this motive – doing good
28 deeds give us pleasure -- and doing good deeds for they are good.
29 For Kant, the compassion of the altruist “deserves praise and
30 encouragement, but not esteem.”

31 Kant offers a scenario to show the requirements for a good

32 deed to have moral worth. Imagine an altruist suffers a
33 misfortune and lost all love for humanity. He becomes a
34 misanthrope who _____________________________. But if this cold-
35 hearted soul take himself out of his indifference and aid his
36 fellow human beings, lacking any inclination, he does so “for the
37 sake of the duty alone”. For the first time, his action has moral
38 worth.

39 This seems an odd judgement. Does Kant mean to valorize

40 misanthropes as moral exemplars? No, not exactly. Taking
41 pleasure in doing the right thing does not necessarily undermine
42 its moral worth. What matters, Kant tells us, is that the good
43 deed be done because it’s the right thing to do – regardless of the
44 pleasure it gives us.

The spelling bee hero

45 The national spelling bee is a spelling competition hold every

46 year in Washington D.C. One year, a thirteen-year-old boy was
47 asked to spell echolalia, a word that means a tendency to repeat
48 whatever one hears. He misspelled the word, but because the
49 judge misheard him, he was allowed to advance. When the boy
50 learnt that he misspelled the word, he went to the judges and told
51 them the truth. He was eliminated after all, but the next day
52 newspapers proclaimed him a “spelling bee hero”. His photo even
53 appeared in The New York Times. “The judges said I had a lot of
54 integrity,” The boy said, with remarks on his motive, “I didn’t want
55 to feel like a slime.”

56 What would Kant think of this? Not wanting to feel like a

57 slime is an inclination, of course. If that was the motive for telling
58 the truth, it would seem to undermine the moral worth of his act.
59 This seems too harsh. It would mean that only unfeeling people
60 could ever perform morally worthy acts. This is unlikely to be
61 what Kant thinks.

62 If the only reason the boy told the truth was to avoid feeling
63 guilty, or to avoid bad publicity should his error be discovered,
64 then his act would lack moral worth. But if he told the truth
65 because he knew it was the right thing to do, then his act has
66 moral worth regardless of the pleasure or satisfaction that might
67 follow. As long as he did the right thing for the right reason,
68 feeling good about it should not undermine its moral worth. We
69 should, after all, only look at his motive.

70 The same is true for Kant’s misanthrope altruist. If he comes

71 to the aid of other people simply for the pleasure it brings, then
72 his action has no moral worth. But if he recognizes helping one’s
73 fellow human beings is a duty and acts according to that, then
74 the pleasure derived from it does not tarnish the moral value.

75 Kant acknowledges that in reality duty and inclination often

76 coexist. He also knows that it is very hard to sort out one’s own
77 motives, let alone know for sure other people’s motives. He
78 doesn’t think that only a kindhearted misanthrope can perform
79 morally worthy acts. The point of his example is to isolate the
80 motive of duty – to see it unclouded by sympathy or compassion.
 81 And once we glimpse the motive of duty, we can identify the
82 features of our good deeds that give them moral worth – in their
83 principle, not their consequences.

The Supreme Principle of Morality

84 In Kant’s view, morality means acting from duty. But we still

85 don’t know what duty requires. To know this, for Kant, is to know
86 the supreme principle of morality. But then again, what is that?
87 Kant tried to answer this question in groundwork.

88 We can comprehend Kant’s answer by seeing how he

89 connects three big ideas: morality, freedom, and reason. He
90 explains these ideas in a series of contrasts or dualisms, as
91 follows:
92 Contrast 1 (morality): duty v. inclination
93 Contrast 2 (freedom): autonomy v. heteronomy
94 Contrast 3 (reason): categoricalv. hypothetical
95 imperatives

96 We have already explored the first contrast between duty and

97 inclination, and touched on the second. To explain further, the
98 second contrast describes two different ways that my will can be
99 determined – by a law given by myself, or by a law given outside
100 myself. Again, we often think of freedom as being able to do what
101 we want, to pursue our desire without impediment. But Kant
102 poses a powerful challenge to this way of thinking: If you didn’t
103 choose those desires freely in the first place, how can you think
104 of yourself as free when you’re pursuing them? Kant captures this
105 challenge in his contrast between autonomy and heteromony.

Part 1 (Lines 1-29)

1. Why is the first duty (to preserve our own lives) often not

being used?

________________________________________________________________________

2. Refer to paragraph 3. Why does the person have to be

“hopeless, miserable and filled with despair” in order to have

moral worth when preserving his own life? You can read

paragraphs 2-4 for help.

________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________

3a. In paragraph 5, why are good deeds out of compassion not

morally worthy in Kant’s view of morality?

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

3b. Following the above question, why does the author claim this

judgement to be “counterintuitive”?

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

4. After reading paragraph 5-6, suggest a possible meaning of

“misanthrope” by filling the gap in line 29.

He becomes a misanthrope

who________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

5. Consider the following scenarios:

i) a P3 student prepares his dictation well in order to get my
compliment and stamps (for presents)
ii) another student prepares his dictation well, so I praised him
and gave him stamps. He was joyful.

Is there any difference in moral worth in their actions, according

to Kant’s theory of morality? Why?
_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

6. In paragraph 8, the spelling bee participant claimed he didn’t

want to be a “slime” (line 46). The literal meaning of slime is
shown as follows:

slime
noun [ U ]

a sticky liquid substance that

is unpleasant to touch, such as
the liquid produced by fish and snails and
the greenish-

Using the above definition and the article, deduce what he

really meant by using the word “slime”.
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

7. After reading paragraph 5-10, I deduced that “For the majority

of the society, morality comes from emotions i.e. compassion. For
Kant, morality comes from reason. Hence those that are
unaffected by emotions are more likely to act with moral worth”.
Do you agree? Explain briefly.
_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

8. Kant’s morality theory is very difficult to be applied to daily

life, yet it is a very compelling and powerful criteria to judge
whether an act is moral. Here are some quotes from news
reports:
i) “I just want somebody’s day to be better,” Catharine Knight
told CBS News. “I really just want to make the world a better
place.”

ii) A candy company decided to hide free tickets for a factory

visit in their candies when the owner retires: “With The Gold
Ticket Treasure hunt, our goal is to get people out and about with
their families. Grandma and Grandpa can even join with the kids
and grandkids,” said the owner.

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________

9. After reading paragraph 13-15, I claimed “I did not choose to be

born in this world. Does that mean I have no freedom from the

start of my life?”

What is your comment on this?

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

10. Find a word from the article that is similar in meaning to the

words below.

i) measures (paragraph 1)

__________________

ii) grants(paragraph 2)

__________________

iii) weaken (paragraph 4)

__________________

iv) selfless (paragraph 5)

__________________

v) pleasant (paragraph 5)

__________________

vi) lack of interest (paragraph 6)

__________________
vii) promote (paragraph 7) __________________

viii) honesty (paragraph 8) __________________

*ix) deteriorate (paragraph 11) __________________