Kantian_Ethics_and_Doing_Your_Duty

“People should always do their duty.” a) Explain how Kant understood this concept. b) Assess critically Kant’s claims about the categorical imperative. In Moral Philosophy, doing your duty is categorised as a Deontological form of act-centered ethics. Immanuel Kant was a philosopher that was the major proponent of a kind of deontological morality, namely Kantian ethics. Kantian ethics is based upon a simple factor of universalisability - the Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Of course, there is more to this than just that. Kant’s ethics are based upon duty and are unconditional, are developed through reason alone, and the universalisability of actions which partly help in determining what our duties are. It is important to note that Kant believes, despite being a Christian, that laws do not come from God, as in the Divine Command Theory, another Deontological form of ethics. Kant defines a human as a partially rational and empirical being, God as a wholly rational being, and everything else (animals) as empirical beings, subject to emotions and desires. Kant’s ethical theory involves being bound to your duty. A moral action is only moral if it is done in recognising the duty one has to serve in the situation. It is considered amoral if it is done out of self interest, by emotion or ‘feeling’, or if there is some condition to the doing of the act. This latter factor is important to Kant. He distinguishes between the hypothetical imperative and the categorical imperative, where the word ‘ought’ is being used differently. A hypothetical imperative is a conditional command that usually has a beneficial gain from doing the act. For example, “You ought to eat your vegetables, or you will not get dessert.” Here, the getting the dessert is conditional upon eating the vegetables. Doing these things is a means to achieving some practical or personal end. According to Kant, this is not moral. Moral actions are those done inside the categorical imperative, or the unconditional command. These imply a sense of obligation or duty, and most of the time these duties involve humans, not objects. For example, “You should always respect adults.” There is no conditional to respecting adults here, it must just be simply done. The genuine motive for an action done out of duty, what Kant calls the ‘Good Will’, is for him, the moral act. Secondly, Kant believes that these imperatives need to be derived from reason alone. One can allow maxims to be categorical imperatives, but if at the same time, the motive is not from duty, Kant considers this immoral. For example, “You should always give money to the poor.” If you do this because you feel sorry for the poor people you see, or because you are running for town mayor and you want to make a show of yourself, then this is considered an immoral act, because it is not out of duty, even though the imperative could potentially be categorical. Moreover, Kant argues that if we act according to our emotions we submit our free will, and become slaves to our emotion. We deny the rationality of our being, following our primitive impulses, and the ability to deliberate autonomously how to act. Therefore, exercising our freedom is by acting in the ‘Good Will’, by acting out of a recognition of duty. Thirdly and finally, Kant needs to justify the formulation of the Categorical Imperative. Kant says, “I should never act in such a way that I could not will that my maxim should be a universal law.”1 In other words, what you do is only moral if you think that everyone else in the world can do it. There are two types of maxims failing this test. Firstly, a contradiction in the will means a universalised maxim will be undesirable for the individual. For example, wanting to murder is contradictory, because that leaves you open to be killed by everyone else if the maxim is universalised. Secondly, a contradiction in conception is a maxim that is logically impossible to conceive. For example, breaking promises once universalised leads to everyone breaking promises, and thus the idea of a promise no longer exists. The second way Kant formulates the Categorical imperative is by treating humanity as ends in themselves, and not as means to an end. This means they must be treated equally due to their rational nature (they cannot rationally consent to being used as a means to a end) and thus must be treated simply as an end. A society underpinned with Kantian Ethics seems like a granted utopia, but there are a few issues with this philosophy. Kant does not seem to take into account the consequences of the actions being done out of duty. Whilst Kant has already considered this, stating that the consequences are out of anyone’s control and therefore there is no point in worrying about these, it seems illogical and even a denial of our free will to simply obey duty when instinct tells us that acting in full appreciation of the consequences is most likely a better option to take. He gives the example, almost against himself, about an axe murderer looking for someone whom you have just let into your house. It is your duty to tell the axe murderer where the person is hiding. Kant, however, would probably imagine that in a society dominated by his ethics a situation like this would not arise, due to people appreciating the categorical imperative. Additionally, there may be situations where duty is simply not good enough, for example if killing one person saves a whole million - you have a duty to save that individual, but also to the rest of humankind, so what do you do' Another example is if you have kept a promise, and it is your duty not to lie or to break that promise - but what happens when the duties conflict' What if lying is in keeping with the promise, for example if you tell your girlfriend you will never call her fat, yet when she asks you if she looks fat in a dress, you must lie to keep that promise' This seems to be a flaw in Kant’s argument that he has not assessed. Another issue with this Ethics is the dismissal of emotions. Emotions seem to have some kind of relevance in morality - surely we value compassion and concern, especially for those less fortunate then us. A famous example given by the Ethical Theorist Michael Stocker is of a friend visiting you in hospital, and he is whole-heartedly committed to the categorical imperative. This means that he is visiting you out of duty, not in particular because he likes talking to you, or because he is concerned for your health, but simply because he is your friend, and that is his duty. Is this really a world people want to live in, devoid of emotion and blind obedience to duty' Finally, there is an issue of defining maxims to-be-universalised. A maxim that uses humans as means to an end, for example, lying, may be defined in many different ways, for example, telling a lie to save someone (conflicting duties) or even just “saving a life”. It seems the latter one, and maybe even the middle one, could be universalised, but the first not. In summary, Kantian ethics involves doing your duty, and not doing X to produce Y. It utilises the rationality of human beings in forming its ethical construct, and not using humans as a means to an end, but rather as ends in themselves. There are some criticisms with this, but as said before, in a society totally underpinned with Kantian ethics, Kant would assume that none such of these criticisms would arise, as the conflict between ideals is as a result of previous parties not following the categorical imperative. Kant imagines a utopia, the Realm of Ends, whereby all humans live treating each other as ends in themselves, and it is a lovely dream to hope for, but arguably impractical to implement in this world.