Kantian Deontology 1

okay welcome back out and now we're gonna start turning to a completely different topic the deontological philosophy of Immanuel Kant and this really brings us into the modern period in philosophy Aristotle was in the ancient period he was alive and writing about four hundred years or three hundred three hundred between three hundred and eighty to four hundred years before the birth of Jesus Christ so a very long time ago Immanuel Kant is writing at the end of the seven eighteenth century so the 1780s and 90s is when he's publishing his work on moral philosophy so that's quite a big jump from four hundred years before the birth of Jesus to seventeen hundred and ninety years after the birth of Jesus a lot has happened in that period and a lot of that has to do with what happens to the views of Aristotle and Plato in the medieval period as they get interpreted by the Catholic Church and by Islam so we're skipping all that stuff and fast-forwarding to the Enlightenment in the 18th century slashed the beginning of the 19th century okay so now you may recall from earlier in these lectures that I mentioned that there was a split between ancient ethical theories and modern ethical theories over what the foundational question of ethics it is is it what makes a person good or is it what makes an action good and it's this second question that console theory is interested in addressing so conce is interested in the question what makes an action good and he's going to then tell us what what a good person is in terms of possessing the thing that makes actions good so remember these two questions are related to each other the only issue is which one is more primary which one comes first so now Conte gives an argument that the what's what in what makes an action good is not its consequences but is rather the motivation or intention of the person who's acting and in particular it's only one kind of motivation that matters for con that's being motivated by one's moral duties now we're not going to at this point we're gonna get into this a lot and bit but at this point I'm not going to say what a moral duty is but it's it's an at least important that we say at this stage that you recognize that this is moral duty it's not just any duty so Boy Scouts have duties but they don't often have moral duties at least not as members of that Club so we mean something very particular by one's actions being motivated by a moral duty and we'll come back to that okay so the basic thing here that Cantor argues for is that there's something that he calls the goodwill and the goodwill is the thing which is intrinsically valuable on Kant's view so what is the will well the will is just that thing which chooses to do something and we've talked already about the issue of will and whether it's free or not whether your choices are determined or whether you have some kind of non-deterministic control non-determined excuse me non determined control over your action so that's the same thing that he's talking about here a good person for cons is one who possesses the good will and the good will is having this kind of motivation that we previously spoke about so a good action is defined as one that's motivated by one's moral duties and a good person is one who has the good will the good will being the thing which is determined by duty so we all have choices to make in our day-to-day lives and the good person is the one whose choices are determined or causally produced by one's moral duties now that's all very quick but that's the basic of Kant's view and if you can understand that you will go a long way towards understanding what his actual theory is so I don't expect that you understanding it right now but keep that in mind that a good person is one whose actions are produced by an explicit recognition of their moral duties now Kant rejects happiness and virtues as intrinsically good or in other words the things that Aristotle postulated as intrinsically good Kant rejects them because for instance he the virtues aren't themselves intrinsically good because whether they're good or not depends on who possesses them so an evil person can be courageous and as the book points out someone who's truly evil but who possesses the virtues of wit and intelligence is much more of a destructive force than someone who doesn't possess those virtues so Kant thinks well no depending on who has the virtues they're good or bad so they're not bad in and of themselves or good in and of themselves excuse me now even happiness what Aristotle thought was the intrinsic good happiness can lead to laziness or sloth could lead to pride and presumption so it to sort of appreciate Kant's point here think about the kind of life that that Aristotle recommends that we pursue well you have a family you you make good money you have time to enjoy the finer things of life discuss philosophy have a respectable respected in the community etc etc but of course oftentimes what happens to people is they become less zealous less apt to do those kinds of virtuous behaviors and they kind of get lacked so you can think of the the success arc of a celebrity and when they're first come on they're working very hard to achieve the things that they want they get to that stage and then they become the kind of fat bloated mess where they become lazy even may be arrogant and somewhat of a quote unquote diva even if it's a male and etc so if the persons will that is if they're not constantly making the right kinds of choices if the persons will isn't good then these things happiness and the virtues can be bleed to bad things so whether they're valuable depends not on themselves says cons but on the will of the person that is a slogan way of putting this that can't often did talk like this actually a slogan a slogan a way of putting it is that look you have to deserve happiness so those with the good will deserve happiness and if and those with who have bad wills they may have that kind of life but we wouldn't want to say that they're good people if they're doing things for the wrong reason or at least that's what Kant thinks amazing argument that that he gives here is sort of a thought experiment about irrational disinterested spectator and so we're gonna come back to that in a second but he says that in the passage in the book if some rational disinterested spectator were looking down at the world the goodwill would shine like a jewel now that's a provocative metaphor and we're gonna come back to it later in these lectures but for now let's talk a little bit more about duty so I mentioned that kind of theory is what's called deontological and that's because the Greek word here D Antos means duty or obligation and so a deontological theory is one that has duty as the central notion and it's a it's a moral theory that's concerned with discovering what the duties of people are and on what foundation they rest now as I was careful to point out earlier not just any duty will do here so it's got to be something that's produced this is cons view um the the moral duties are those things which are produced by some kind of law which is necessary and universal and covers all persons at all times so can't really is an absolutist so he thinks that there is something called the moral law which is a law which governs the universe just like any other law and when he says law like any other what he means is like a lot of logic of the sort that we find as the foundation of logic like that of the law of non-contradiction which claims that no contradictions can be true these are fundamental claims made on rational persons and cons idea the thing that we're going to try to unpack over the next couple of weeks is to get at this idea that it's really this sense of rationality which is the foundation for morality and when he means rationality he literally means this business about contradiction so we're going to talk more about what it means to be inconsistent into for imagine scenarios to be contradictory in nature the upshot of all this is that Khan thinks that the moral laws can be discovered by Riesz about possible scenarios and discovering what's contradictory or not in those scenarios thereby arriving at necessary and universal moral principles which are true for all people across all times so a very different kind of approach than the one that Aristotle was interested in and as we were talking about just a second ago Kai was very unhappy with Aristotle's view because ultimately Aristotle's moral theory boils down to the claim that you should do the right thing at the right time for the right reasons in the right way and contests here seen as suggesting that this is very unsatisfying because we don't know what the white right time is what the right way is we don't know any of that but that's exactly what we need to know now Aristotle says practice and get in there and get your hands dirty and figure it out but can't wants ethics to be a science like logic or mathematics that we can work out just by reasoning without appeal to individual experiences now this again sounds all very complicated and in a sense it is complicated but we're I'm just trying to paint a picture of what it's going to look like at the end we're gonna explain this in a lot more detail so just to illustrate this suppose that you have a duty to be honest Kant does indeed think that truth-telling is one of our duties and the book talks a little bit about why he thinks that we'll come back to that so now suppose that there are these two people right and this is one of Kraus favorite examples he says suppose that there are these two different persons each of them who owns some local bodega so one of the bodegas owners is an honest businessman he's honest though because he realizes that being honest is good for his business so he sort of reasons as follows well you see if I overcharge people or charge one person one price and another person another price then people will find out about this and they will in effect not come back because they know I'll rip them off so the best way to keep my business going is for me to be honest now this should by the way this description of this person should ring some bells for you you should be thinking in your mind aha this person is and yeah if you heard the word egoist in your mind then yes your if you said it then you were right cons here describing the egoist view right so he's sort of targeting egoism here so that's the way the egoist would describe why a person should be honest now suppose that this other person it also owns a bodega in a different neighborhood let's say and this person is also an honest businessman charging fair prices charging consistent prices and so on but suppose that this person is honest not because they think it's going to help their business although that's a welcome byproduct of this but suppose that they're honest because they sort of recognize that they have a duty to be honest so what if this person thinks to themselves you know I own this shop and being honest is an important moral duty and so in my dealings with my customers I've got to be honest and fair and make sure that they get quality products and that they're charged a fair price and that this is consistent over time now according to cons only the second person's action has any moral value the other person is acting selfishly Khan thinks and their action has no moral value at all they do not count as performing a good action see this follows from Kant's our definition of what a good action is of is one that's motivated in the right way namely by a recognition of one's duties and in particular one's moral duties so the the first person although their action from the outside appears to be moral isn't they're faking it they're not acting for the right reasons Khan thinks and therefore don't count as doing anything morally good now again why does he think this well think about a completely rational disinterested spectator so imagine that you were a god-like character who's not interested in either of these persons or their lives you know we're sort of watching this on a TV show or you know from some omniscient point of view like in a movie so you see one person being honest but only because it benefits them and you see that if a they could get away with it if it benefited them in some other way that without being honest that they would but it just so happens that this is the conclusion they've come true there's no other way to get the things that they want and then you see the other person who's being honest because they recognize that they should be honest and that's what duties are encoded in these things that we should do that we ought to do so this person is reasoning that they ought to keep their obligations so they are now this disinterested spectator what's one is going to be the person whom is judged by this spectator to be doing the moral thing well con Phil's very strongly that this rational disinterested spectator is going to be pleased with the person who's acting because of their duties and he's going to be sort of turning his nose up at this other person it's sort of obvious con things that well you can see this guy is faking it and this guy is doing something morally good now not everyone agrees with comment but that's the argument that it gives that this rational disinterested spectator would be interested who could tell the difference would judge one of these to be moral in the other one to be immoral this is the only thing according to Khan which determines whether or not an action is a good action or whether it was motivated by excuse me I'm sorry this is the only thing that determines whether a nap in action is a good action and that's whether it's motivated by a recognition of a moral duty so to oversimplify a bit Kant thinks that there are really only two kinds of motivations there are the ones that are explicit recognition of one's duties and then there are the selfish ones now this includes for instance according to Kant's those people who are motivated to help others because it makes them feel good and remember that this is something we've talked about so yeah contests here sort of responding to the various views that have come before him remember he's writing in the 1790s so he there's been 2,000 years of discussion about ethics and all the stuff that we've been talking about has been happening in that period so there's been Aristotle's view Hobbes was in the 1600 so 150 years before Kahn's so people are talking about egoism social contract theory and that's basically part of the story that counts telling here so the basic point that he wants to make against people who think that helping people and it producing a feeling in you is okay and that was Rachel's argument that's what I sort of lost my train of thought earlier but that was the point I was trying to make is all the people we've been discussing so far I've been in the past before can't accept James Rachel's who is a more contemporary figure but even so we can see Kant as in effect responding to the kinds of considerations that Rachel Springs up so remember the egoist says look you're selfish because you want to help someone and it produces this feeling in you this feeling of pleasure and so all you're trying to do is pursue that feeling of pleasure it makes you feel good and so therefore that action is selfish now Rachel's responds to this argument yeah but it's not really selfish it doesn't really make sense to call it selfish because what makes me feel good is helping other people and it seems weird to scull someone's self issues helping other people so you might think that Rachel's argument responds to Conte but but Kant's making a slightly different point here and that's the arbitrariness of these inclinations or feelings so for instance it might make you feel good to help other people but that's accidental what if it hadn't turned out that way what if you didn't feel good helping other people then you wouldn't have any reason to do it Khan says no actually you would still have reason to do it and if that's true then the fact that you feel good as a as a result or as a result is accidental and in fact Kant often talks this way that real moral actions are the ones that well I don't want to put that put this too strongly but he often toughest talks as though we can see what he's talking about in cases where we have duties that conflict very strongly with what our inclinations tell us to do so he says look imagine someone who just doesn't care about other people because of their dispositional character they just you know they're not moved by the plight of the homeless person as they walk by them on the streets they see the person perhaps you know shivering there with scientists as the homeless vet please help and person just isn't moved by that but this person may recognize they have a duty to help others if they can and they might say okay well I have a duty to help you let me buy you a sandwich or something I have a couple of extra dollars I can afford that so here's a person who doesn't want to help this person it doesn't give them any satisfaction it doesn't give them any joy in fact it might cause them some kind of pain helping them up they might think God why do I have to do this well why is because they recognize that they have a duty to do it now current doesn't think that that's required in order to make helping people or performing any of one's duties moral but it certainly illustrates this distinction that he's trying to make here which is that it's one thing to fill the pool of a duty it's another thing to get pleasure from doing that so it may be the case that most people hopefully all but clearly not but maybe most people feel good about themselves after helping other people after telling the truth after doing the various things that they ought to do that's a wonderful thing and Khan doesn't deny that you can't feel good about yourself after you perform your duties that's fine but he thinks that that's sort of an arbitrary accidental fact about us and if it were different if you didn't feel good in fact even if it produced in you a sense of dissatisfaction you would still have these obligations and you can still see in key instances the pool of an obligation one way in an inclination in the other way and we can really see Khan thinks something that's going to be essential for him the exercise of free rational control over our actions in the cases where we choose to perform our duty even though were not inclined to or don't want to even if it doesn't make us feel good we may nonetheless feel this pull - the duty in that that pool inspires that the force of that pool from the inside from the from the recognition that one has this duty is what prompts Kant to say it fills him with ever-increasing are in fact as much oz staring up into the heavens above he just awestruck by the power that moral commands seem to have over people if someone really recognizes that they have a duty it can pull them it can it can override everything else has this amazing power and that's the what Kant's talking about when he's talking about being motivated by the recognition of one's duties now just to be very very clear about this you can derive pleasure from good action that is perfectly fine in fact it's part and parcel of doing this so in his less theoretical account of ethics Khan talks about how pleasure is going to be a byproduct of performing one's duty in the mode in most cases it's the only claim that he wants to make is that pleasure can't be the reason that you're doing it because then you're doing it for the wrong reason so consider these two scenarios to illustrate and sum up all of these things here suppose that I see a person struggling across the street suppose that I recognize the duty to help them say to myself aha I ought to help other people when I'm able and I could easily carry that bag for that lady across this treacherous street let me assist her you know in compulsion with my moral duties so I spring to her assistance but of course she's not expecting me to help her in these days and times or rarely do people honor their duties with us with such enthusiasm as I am in this instance and she tries to fight me off and in the ensuing fight she falls over and breaks her hip well is my action in this case a moral action Kahn thinks yeah he does he says you were motivated in the right way you felt the compulsion of duty it motivated your action it's not your fault so to speak that the consequences of the action are unfortunate that's you can't be to blame for that your action was nonetheless a good action so that's what I was just saying here and in general this is a theme of this section of Kahn's argumentation so and this is going to be important later when we started to look at the utilitarians who think that the consequences do matter for an action cons here making the argument that the consequences don't matter that the only thing that matters is the motivation of one's action even if the consequences are bad you still count as doing something good and one large part of his argument is this central idea of his that the consequences of one's actions are out of one's control so once you act once it's out there you don't know how things are gonna go there they quickly become out of your reach so to speak so you say something you do something then this happens then that happens and that happens and this happens and very quickly it's no longer you who are in charge of what's going on and Kant thinks that it's just sort of very very odd that you could perform an action that's good or bad but that isn't determined by something that is in you that just seems very strange to him and this is in general I mean think about this as something we'll talk about later but just quickly suppose that you know you go to you see a car coming and there's a person there and you push them out of the way saving their life you think that's good consequences so that's a good action well then what if this person was a murderer so you just saved a mass murderer they go on to kill their next victim so now it's a bad action oh but then you find out that their next victim was a person who had a nuclear device who was going to destroy New York City so you really saved millions of people so now it's a good action again it's none of these things seem to be in your control all that matters are all that can really matter from your point of view is why you do what you do that's all you can really control and if we're sort of judging whether you're good seems like it should be because of something about you that makes you a good person and that makes your actions good actions consequences aren't in that arena now of course the utilitarians disagree and will come to their arguments later towards the end of the semester but just for now this will be important for them by the way so you can come back to this point after our discussion of utilitarianism and this will make a bit more sense okay now just to continue illustrating this point suppose I see the same person okay so suppose this elderly lady is crossing the street hands full of packages now earlier remember I intended to help her out of a recognition of my duty to help suppose instead this time something different I intend to cause her harm I think to myself aha look at this old bat's over here walking across the street I'm gonna have me a bit of fun don't you know and I'm gonna run over there and push her over into the street it's gonna be hilarious her bags will go flying everywhere she'll she'll Yelp in surprise break her hip oh it's gonna be great fun now suppose that's in so doing I accidentally without meaning to push her out of the way of an oncoming bus saving her life did what I do count is morally good well the consequences seemed overall good but Khan says my action itself considered all by itself chopping the consequences off my action doesn't seem like a morally good action because I wasn't motivated in the right way I intended to do harm the good that resulted was accidental I was merely trying to produce a certain feeling in myself pleasure that's what I was aiming for and that cut that I accidentally produced something desirable instead of undesirable is merely an accident of the universe now again it doesn't seem like we should say that this person action was good calm things because if you just think about this person they weren't they're not a good person they're not doing something good sure the consequences of it are good but the action itself is not good and this again you may disagree with content lots of people do that's why the utilitarian theory of morality is going to be discussed next because people enough people disagree with Kant to think that it's worth trying to give a theory in more detail of what about consequences matter so we'll turn to that later but whether you agree with that or not the point here is that for Kant the consequences of an action are completely irrelevant to determining whether or not the action is moral now of course when I say completely irrelevant we're gonna we're gonna have to qualify that later because thinking about consequences of actions do get to play some small role but very very very very small so we'll talk about that later so again just to stress the only thing that matters for cons is whether one is acting out of a recognition of one's duties okay now of course the question that you've probably had already by now is what what are these duties that's what's interesting that's what we want to know sure we can say you know we have certain duties and so on but what are they now generally speaking Kant says duties are the kinds of things which are generated by loss so for instance think about the laws of the states now these aren't moral laws they're legal laws or in other words they mace in some sense try to capture things that we think of as moral or immoral but oftentimes they don't so take just a sort of banal ordinary average law like the speed limit on the freeway 55 miles an hour 65 in some places okay so take the speed limit as being 65 why is it that is it because it's immoral to drive faster well no actually it turns out it has to do with conserving gas and miles per gallon and that kind of issue so in in some countries famously speed limits are different so in Germany on the Autobahn there is no speed limit you can go as fast as you want and people tell horror stories about how fast it is but of course Germans - don't tell horror stories they tell horror stories about how slow Americans are and how they mess everything else we're just not used to driving at those speeds but so back to focus back in on the issue here because of the law to drive 65 miles an hour we who drive have a duty to obey the law issued by the state punishable by fines for those who do not fulfill their duty so now think about those who drive on the highways there are two ways of thinking about these people there are those who drive the speed limit if they do because they are afraid of getting a ticket these people according to cons are not acting out of respect for the law but are acting out of fear of the consequences of not following the law that's very different now there can be those kinds of persons who drive the speed limit because they recognize that they ought to know I've never met such a person but you can imagine somebody saying well the law says you drive 65 and I ought to obey the law that's the law now it doesn't seem as important with issues about the speed but the point here is the one that's important there when you have laws there are the kinds of people who respect those laws and whose actions are guided by the laws themselves because of a recognition of the nature of the law and then are those who obey the laws not because they care about the law but only because of the consequences associated with violating the laws and the the getting rewarded for following and punished for violating them now as I was just mentioning speed limit doesn't seem to be a particularly moral issue in the laws which govern it don't seem to be particularly moral laws but the ones that Conte is interested in are the moral duties and since every duty is generated by some kind of law the moral duties are gonna be generated by moral laws but of course the obvious question here but of course the obvious question here is what is this moral law that we're talking about well in general Kant thinks there are two kinds of laws and so what he wants to do is to talk about the two different kinds of laws that there are the types that there are to generally identify what type of law the moral law would have to be if there were one and then he's going to try to deduce the actual moral law just from the concepts of rational agency it's it's quite a feat to behold actually whether you agree with it or not so what follows is a multi-step argument and we're gonna go through it hopefully quite cautiously so you can see the various steps so there are basically two kinds of imperatives now an imperative is just a fancy way of talking about a command so an imperative in particular is a command to act in accordance with some law so you may have heard this expression it's an impaired it's imperative that you be there it means it's important in some sense but that is commanded it's commanded right so we're gonna be talking about imperatives and the kinds of imperatives that there are and they get fancy names for for cons so there's what he calls a hypothetical imperative and there's what he calls the categorical imperative a hypothetical kappa imperative commands under the hypothesis that one wants something so we can use some terminology at this point the thing that you want is the end and the way that you get that is the means so here hypothetical imperative has the form if you want Y then do X and we can say that Y is that end and X is the means now what is the point of this well let's give a common-sense example so this doesn't make as much sense in a in online class but these slides weren't prepared for that apparently so if I told you you should not miss more than five of these classes well you might think well why shouldn't I miss more than five of these classes well its hype pathetically if you wanted to pass this class then you would have some reason to obey this command if not then not so if you don't care about passing the class then this command has no effect on you and sometimes I meet students like this I say here are the requirements and then they don't meet those requirements but they still come to the class because they're interested in the topic they're less interested in passing it they think they're gonna have to take it again anyway so this is good studying for them it would be good for them to get it or something like that but so then they can miss as much class as they want if they don't care about passing it now of course hopefully you can sort of think see yourself if you understand what a hypothetical command is why can't thinks that it can't be the kind of command that morality is interested in because whether one obeys these commands depends only on the end that you happen to desire so for instance if you say to one if you want to be happy then you must act virtuously or morally as Aristotle was fond of saying well someone who says or at least thinks that they don't desire happiness has no reason to care about morality so you may say look if you want to be a good person then you should care about telling the truth but what are you supposed to say to the person who says I don't give a crap about being a good person suppose they simply say I'm not interested in being a good person being a good person is a something that the chumps tell you they're trying to make you into a sucker you see I don't want to be a good person well someone who says that suddenly has no reason to obey the rules of morality if they're merely hypothetical excuse me if morality is merely a hypothetical based on an hypothetical imperatives then they have no reason to obey the rules of morality or to put it slightly differently they can opt out of the rules of morality whenever they want to I take the ego is virgin if you want to maximize your own self-interest then be honest well that's fine since in most cases you do want to maximize your own self-interest and so that gives you plenty of good reason to act honestly but of course the problem here is that you can equally well endorse the claim if you want to maximize your self-interest in cases when you can get away with it don't be honest and you can think to yourself that's perfectly consistent so the only reason you have then to follow the rule be honest is if it maximizes your self-interest and so you can opt out of it at any time if it doesn't maximize your self-interest and conscience thinks that the moral rules aren't like that that they're not the kinds of things that you can choose to follow if it pleases you or not to follow if it doesn't please you he thinks that have a completely different kind of nature namely that they're categorical in nature so a categorical imperative is one that binds unconditionally right so hypothetical imperatives are only matter to people who care about the ends that are postulated in the hypothetical situation if you want this thing then here's the way to get categorical imperatives on the other hand have the form simply do this whether or not you want something is not at issue here one just has to obey the command and that's what category means here means that they are should be followed without exception or without qualification and con things that only categorical imperatives could capture the moral law they're the only things that that if there were a moral law which produced the duties that we have the law would have to be something categorical in nature because confuse morality as laws which are akin to those of mathematics and what can't admit of exceptions based on things that you want so for instance if it's a moral law if excuse me sorry I let me put this in the right way if the moral law determines that we have a duty to be honest then in all cases honesty is required even if we don't want to be honest even if it's inconvenient for us to be honest even if it produces harm for us it's nonetheless required and the reason that he thinks this is because he thinks that moral rules are categorical in nature they don't admit of exceptions in exactly the same way as mathematical statements don't admit of exceptions so if it's true that two plus two is four then is true in all cases even in cases where it's inconvenient for you imagine you only had three dollars and you brought up two items each of which were two dollars suppose the cashier rang that up and said it's four dollars please two dollars plus two dollars to chain four dollars suppose you said oh but I only have three dollars that's terribly inconvenient for me I want these things and I don't have four dollars so can't we just say that on this one occasion two plus two is three that would be really convenient for me if we could do that well of course that's absurd the cashier would respond that's crazy talk who cares if it's inconvenient for you two plus two is four you have this thing it's two dollars you have this thing it's two dollars so therefore it's four dollars either put one of these back or go away silly person but please don't ask me to change the fact that two plus two is four well the same thing is true for murdering for instance if the moral law determines that we have a duty not to murder then it doesn't matter if murdering would be convenient for us or would help further our goals if it's wrong then it's wrong the fact that it's convenient for you or inconvenient for you is frankly current things irrelevant so the moral law is binding according to count on all persons it's just like the law of gravity and just like you can't object as you're falling from a fourteenth floor window wait I don't like this I don't want to be falling anymore you can't object to that you can't exempt yourself from the law of gravitation neither can you exempt yourself from the moral law Khan thinks now you may think it doesn't apply to you but that of course is irrational just like the person thinks that the law of gravity are that mathematics don't apply to them is irrational Khan thinks the moral law is there it's Universal in nature any rational being can verify for themselves that it's there and that it's true simply by reasoning in the appropriate way just like any person can sort of check for themselves that two plus two is four by reasoning about two and two and four I mean basically in shorthand the process would be like this how could it be anything besides four what would that even mean try to imagine a scenario where two plus two is not for you can't you can't really imagine what that scenario would look like how it would play out so to con things that if you're careful and you reason in the appropriate way you can see certain things are required by morality that are necessary and universal and ultimate of exception and now what he's done so far is just to give an argument that if there were a moral law it would have to be categorical in nature that is hypothetical imperatives are not interesting they won't work they depend on the inclination of the person we've already done a lot of arguing trying to show that that's not good we don't want moral rules to be the kinds of things that you can opt out of we don't want it to be the case that we can say yes I know that generally speaking torture is wrong but I don't care about that right now I need to torture this person in order to get the information that I need Kant thinks that if torture is wrong it's always wrong to torture end of story and there are no those circumstances under which torture will become right okay so but we haven't yet done anything to say what the moral law is we've just said well it will have to be of a form of a categorical imperative right but what what what kind of imperative what's the content what does it command us to do well can't things that you you've got to have something the moral law that is there's got to be something which any rational creature could reflect on and see was something that required respects and that one should base one's actions on it now a lot of people say things like well do unto others that's sort of if you reflect upon it you would want people to treat you in certain ways so you should treat them in certain ways the basis for our moral views then should be that we want to be treated in certain ways so therefore were obliged to treat other people in certain ways now of course Khan thinks that is an important truth there the golden rule is of course golden for a reason but it doesn't capture all the truths about morality and the book points out a couple of interesting ways that Kant thinks it doesn't capture all the rules of morality for instance duties to one's self we'll talk more about that later but here we can just note that it doesn't capture what what seems intuitively right and what we ought to say to a person who doesn't share our basic views so imagine again the uncaring person they just don't care about other people they say you say to them do unto others as you would have them do unto you and this person thinks well I would have others do unto me this way leave me alone stay out of my business don't help me and I won't help you just piss off thank you very much now of course this person will then have a completely solid seeming justification for not helping other people or carrying about are carrying about the welfare of other people so to a person may think do unto others well you know I don't really care if people tell me the truth about stuff who cares so I don't care if I you know I wouldn't want someone to tell me I look fat in my jeans so I'm gonna not tell them they look fat in their jeans and I wouldn't want someone to hurt my feelings by telling me they had cheated on me so I'm not gonna tell you I cheated on you etc well these clearly seem ridiculous so do unto others is not the kind of law which we can reflect on and then come to respect because we see well sure it's a good rule of thumb for people who already have the right kinds of inclinations but what about the rest of them doesn't tell us what's the nature or what the reason for these morally valuable actions attaining that status because they certainly can't simply be that I feel certain way about them because as we've seen ad nauseam people feel all kinds of ways about these things so what are we supposed to do then well still there's something about do unto others which is Right con things namely as you think about the way actions can be consistent or inconsistent so he says look what we want here as some kind of general law a law which if a rational person reflected on it and really understood what it meant they would say AHA that's right that's the kind of thing which in all these circumstances could produce an overwhelming feeling of awe and respect in the person who fully came to truly understand its nature and do unto others doesn't do that now it also has to be the kind of law which doesn't make reference to any particular character traits since those can be good or bad depending on whether one is subject to the moral law so we can't include those in the content of the moral law can't say thou ought to be honest thou ought to be brave it's got to be something completely general which we can use to generate our specific duties and the only thing that can really command the respect of irrational person con things is the concept of a universally binding moral law so it's only when you kind of go oh see the moral law has to be something which every person could accept has to be something which rational persons are really impressed by something that they recognize just by reasoning that it's valuable and commands that you do these actions well what kind of thing could do that with a universally binding moral rule a moral law well let's formulate it this way then Khan says this is something that has to do with actions but no particular actions only the concept of action so we don't include a particular action there but only that the command that one not so to act in such a way that one's actions could be done by all persons without contradiction or a bit more formally act only on that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal moral law now you may not fully understand what that means but Khan thinks if you do if you reflect on it then you'll see that this is the kind of rule which every person ought to obey namely that their actions should be non contradictory non self contradictory and the reasoning is really by analogy to the way we think about logic so if you think about certain forms of reasoning and logic for instance if you think about the general pattern of reasoning all men are mortal Socrates is a man therefore Socrates is immortal which is exemplified symbolically by the by the form in syllogistic logic all a's RB s is an a therefore s is a B now if you're just sort of reason about that form you can see well anything you put in in the place of a and B and s there you're gonna get something which is true and something which is truth preserving I'm sorry something which if the premises were true then the conclusion would have to be true all dogs are mammals Frankie is a dog so Frankie is a mammal right you can see you can do this all day long filling in the various A's B's and SS and you're gonna get something which you can go yes when when a reasoning I should follow this rule this produces good patterns you do now you can't give an argument for that you just sort of have to reflect on it and see that yes it avoids contradiction it that's what's guiding me here and in something like that the categorical imperative con things when you reflect on it on the rule one sees that non contradiction is guiding one's reasoning process here and what one is doing again is thinking look if my proposed course of action we're suddenly to become a law like the law of physics or the laws of logic so everyone had to do this without choice what would be the case would there be a contradiction in such a case if there is a contradiction then the action is immoral

Channel: Richard Brown

Views: 11,975

Rating: 4.9008265 out of 5

Keywords: Immanuel Kant (Author), Deontological Ethics, Philosophy (Professional Field), Ethics (Field Of Study)

Id: 3jY4IEgwm7A

Length: 58min 49sec (3529 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 31 2013