My first post is going to be about Kant and his view on
morality. Kant believed morality had nothing to do with how you felt, whether
that was sympathy, compassion or any type of emotion. He believed that to act
moral one had to do what was right because it was their duty. If someone was to
help a victim of some crime because they felt sorry for them, then Kant would
say they did not act morally. However if someone helped that same victim out of
a sense of duty then he would say that person acted morally. I think Kant
thought this because if the person that helped the victim out of sympathy or
some type of emotion; did not have that emotional push to do so, then they
would not help the victim. The person that has no emotional drive to help the
victim is fighting emotions which can be very hard because I think most of
people’s decisions are based on how they feel. I kind of agree with Kant on
this certain scenario, but I think the person that acted out of emotion is still
moral because their heart, as one might say, is good. They actually have
feelings for the people around them. I also would give equal praise to the
person that fought their feelings to go out of their way and help someone because
that takes some self-discipline.
Kant’s view
on intentions I disagree with because it is too extreme. In A Little History of
Philosophy there is a scenario of your friend being chased by a killer comes in
your home and you are faced with the choice to lie to the killer about where
they are, or tell the truth. I do not think that lying in this case about where
your friend is located is morally wrong. The excuse was because you cannot make
the generalization that everyone should lie when it benefited them. This is a
little different from lying about doing your homework and telling a lie that
will save a life. In this case I believe you should tell the killer a lie because a life
is much more precious than breaking Kant’s rule of never lying. I would think Kant would understand this because he himself believed that the difference between animals
and humans was our ability to think about the consequences of our choices.
Overall I think Kant had a very good argument about moral
philosophy and if you could imagine a society where his principles were in
place and everyone followed them it would be a nice place to live. However people
might start to lose their feelings toward other people which I think would be a
sad world but that is just a guess. He did make it available for everyone, no
matter how mean and cold you are, to be able to act morally. The philosopher that
I will compare to Immanuel Kant will be Jeremy Bentham.
Preston Wilkey
"Kant would understand this because he himself believed that the difference between animals and humans was our ability to think about the consequences of our choices" - yes, but... he didn't trust us to make the right moral decisions when thinking about consequences.
ReplyDeleteI guess I agree, if we were all consistent Kantians doing our duty we'd create a nice world. But what if we misperceive our duty? In that case, isn't it good to have emotion and inclination to fall back on? THink about Huck Finn and his friend the runaway slave Jim. "Alright," said Huck, who misperceived his duty and thought he was doing WRONG to help Jim but did it anyway. "I'll just go to hell." Unfortunately most of us aren't prepared to do that.