Kant’s Moral Philosophy: Key Concepts and Formalism
1. Terms and Relationships
Duty: The necessity of acting out of respect for the law. Duty is always a priori, meaning it cannot be argued based on any phenomenon.
Soul: Kant considers the immortality of the soul, arguing that the soul is not a phenomenon but a noumenon. A noumenon is the union of all psychic phenomena. The soul is a postulate of practical reason, something that is not provable but must be assumed as a condition of morality. From pure reason, it is a transcendental ideal.
Reason: The ability of human knowledge, which defines man and has autonomy. Kant distinguishes between two uses of reason:
- Practical Reason: Addresses how human behavior should be (concerned with what should be) and makes imperatives or mandates.
- Theoretical Reason: Addresses how things are (concerned with being) and makes judgments.
Phenomenon: A sense impression given in space and time. The phenomenon can be known through human concepts.
A priori: Judgments whose truth can be known independently of experience, since its foundation is not in experience. A priori judgments are universal and necessary.
List of Terms
Duty, the necessity of an act of respect for the law, is always a priori, since its truth can be known independently of experience and is necessary. Duty, as universal and a priori, cannot be argued as a phenomenon, but it can be argued in reason, i.e., the reason that acts through sensible intuition that is the soul.
2. Topic: Moral Formalism
In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant studies the principles and limits of our knowledge to find an answer to the question, “What should I know?” Kant thought he found such a response in transcendental idealism: the limits of our knowledge are in the application of the categories to the data that come from sensible impressions, which occur in space and time. In The Critique of Practical Reason, Kant tries to answer the question, “What should I do?” The fact that there is practical reason implies that in humans there are not two reasons, but reason has two defined functions:
- Theoretical Reason: Deals with knowing how things are (concerned with being).
- Practical Reason: Deals with knowing how human behavior should be (concerned with what should be).
The difference between them is manifest, according to Kant, in the totally different way in which they both express their principles or laws:
- Theoretical Reason: Makes judgments (e.g., “Heat expands bodies”).
- Practical Reason: Makes imperatives or orders (e.g., “Do not kill”).
Kant’s ethics are an innovation in the history of ethics. Kantian ethics are formal, in contrast to material ethics. Material ethics are those in which the goodness or badness of human behavior depends on something that is considered the highest good for man. Acts will be good when they approach achieving the highest good, or bad when they depart from it. Thus, there are two elements in any material ethics:
- Any material ethics has a property, good things for mankind, and therefore begins by determining what the ultimate good or ultimate end of man is.
- Once the supreme good is established, ethics lays down rules for its attainment.
Kant rejected materialistic ethics because they had the following shortcomings:
- First, material ethics are empirical, i.e., a posteriori: the content is extracted from experience. Kant did not accept these empirical ethics because principles drawn from experience cannot be universal. He intended, on the contrary, an a priori ethics.
- Second, the provisions of material ethics are hypothetical or conditional: they are only valuable conditionally as means to an end.
- Third, material ethics are heteronomous (they receive the law from outside the actual reason). Material ethics are heteronomous, according to Kant, because the will is determined to action.