Kant’s Moral Philosophy: Duty, Reason, and the Summum Bonum

Posted on Dec 18, 2024 in Philosophy and ethics

Good Will

For Kant, a will is good when one acts out of duty and respect for duty. No one can speak of good will if the intention is not accompanied by the effort.

Characteristics of the Moral Law

  • A Priori: It comes from practical reason.
  • Formal: It is guided by the rational form of moral consciousness.
  • Categorical: It is necessary and unconditional.
  • Universal: It is absolute, objective, unchanging, and common to all men, as they are all rational beings.

Formulations of the Moral Law

Formulation 1

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” This means that any maxim must be such that the subject might want it to become a standard for everyone.

Formulation 2

“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” This means that the human being is a person and not a thing, and therefore an end in itself and should never be used as a simple means for our own benefit.

The Postulates of Practical Reason

  • Freedom: “It is the condition for the moral law.” If there were no freedom to act, there would be no need for moral law to regulate our behavior and tell us how we should act. Man must be free, but duty is incomprehensible without freedom.
  • Immortality: “It is the condition of possibility of the summum bonum.” If there is a natural tendency to attain the highest good, it can only be achieved in an indefinite and unlimited existence. Man must be immortal, but we could not reward him for his merit with happiness without immortality.
  • The Existence of God: “It is the condition of possibility of the summum bonum.” If there is a natural tendency to attain the highest good, only God can represent the supreme good and ensure its existence. God must exist, but there would be no way to attain perfect happiness without God.

Contexts

Historical

Kant is a man of the 18th century. His philosophy reflects the major political and social changes of his time. It aims to make knowledge and enlightened ideas available to all.

Socio-Cultural

A new way of thinking brought an enormous impact on politics, culture, and religion. This new way of thinking was called the Enlightenment. The gist of this movement is:

  1. Light as Reason: The fight to illuminate unknown aspects of reality.
  2. The Scientific Revolution: Man knows and controls the natural world.
  3. The Ideal of Progress: To improve the living conditions of mankind.
  4. The Secularization of Thought: The emancipation of reason from religion.
  5. Human Dignity: It regards man as the center and end of politics, thought, and science.
  6. The Opposition to Tyranny and Despotism: In favor of the separation of powers.

Philosophical

It is marked by the Enlightenment, but also by the discussion between the sources and foundations of knowledge. Kant was formed due to the rationalism of Wolff, and the reading of Hume taught him to value the experience of true knowledge as a guide.

Influences

  • Plato: Kant takes the concept of a model to which we aspire, the concept of a supreme good, determined by reason, and rejects the Platonic claim of rational knowledge.
  • Rationalists: A priori knowledge must be established by reason but cannot apply to reality itself.
  • Aristotle: Evaluation of sensory knowledge.
  • Hedonism: The moral laws are to be deduced a priori.

Impact

  • Idealism: Deletes the limitation of knowledge of the noumenon, and the subject attempted to demonstrate how not only builds knowledge of the world but also the world’s natural and cultural manifestations. This led to theories such as positivism, Marxism, etc., defending agnosticism.
  • Science: In the field of geometry, it waived intuitive notions of space and time.
  • Nietzsche: Explores the origin of moral ideas, rejects the concepts of duty and obligation.

Intelligible Knowledge: Transcendental Analytic

Its function is to think of objects. It refers to thought, in the activity capable of unifying the plurality of phenomena. This activity is carried out by the understanding, which organizes the phenomena using concepts. This raises the possibility of physics as a science.

Pure Concepts or Categories

The a priori concepts are produced by self-understanding. They are spontaneous and do not come from experience: they are pure. They are of real importance to intellectual knowledge. Kant calls them categories. The categories can only be applied to experience. They do not apply to noumena, as they are outside the realm of sensitivity.

The Possibility of Physics as a Science

Physics is justified as a science because of the trials in which it expresses, are synthetic or a priori, that is, trials that predict how objects act in nature. The categories, as pure concepts of understanding, provide the universal character necessary for science.

Scope of Reason: Transcendental Dialectic

Reason unifies the knowledge of understanding. By means of pure concepts of reason, the unconditioned is to be found.

Ideas of Reason: Soul, World, and God

For Kant, transcendental ideas are concepts that are a priori and pure. They lack any relationship to experience. Kant refers to the whole by the three transcendental ideas: soul, world, and God. We talk about them as if they corresponded to objects.

Failure of Metaphysics as a Science

Metaphysics answered the natural tendency of human reason to go beyond the field of experience.

Errors of Metaphysics

Three errors are distinguished:

  1. No distinction between phenomenon and noumenon.
  2. Incorrect application of categories, as applied to noumena instead of phenomena.