Kantian ethics

Kant on sex gives most philosophers the following associations: a lifelong celibate philosopher; a natural teleological view of sexuality; a strange incorporation of this natural teleological account within his freedom-based moral theory; and a stark ethical condemnation of most sexual activity. Although this paper provides an interpretation of Kant’s view on sexuality, it neither defends nor offers an apology for everything Kant says about sexuality. Rather, it aims to show that a reconsidered Kant-based account can utilize his many worthwhile insights and that by making Kant’s account of sexuality more consistent with his own basic philosophical commitments, the result is a compelling approach to the complex and complicated phenomena of sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation.

Open access link here:
https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/fpq/article/view/3116

After World War II human dignity successfully made its way into many constitutions and international treaties, as well as EU law. Yet, since it was not an entirely new concept, it should not be taken for granted that before 1945 it was quite irrelevant to Law. Its original roots can be found in the Judeo-Christian tradition, while its recent development comes mainly from the influential Kantian vision. Besides that, the latest philosophical and anthropological trends, the recent ‘politicisation’ of the human being, along with some developments in biotechnology, have brought dignity to the fore. However, we suggest that writing down dignity into legal texts, even in constitutional texts, does not fully settle the problem, as some relevant judicial decisions show.

One of the central features of Kant's moral theory is the sharp distinction he draws between the moral Tightness (legality) of actions and their moral worth or goodness (morality). As we know from the first pages of the Groundwork, the rightness of an action is determined by the conformity of the agent's maxim to the categorical imperative; the moral goodness or worth of an action is determined by the agent's motives, by whether the agent acted from the motive of duty or from some other (non-moral) empirical motive. Morally good actions must be morally right, according to Kant, whereas morally right actions are not necessarily morally good.

Aquí va el prólogo a Praxis. Una introducción a la moral, la política y el Derecho, Atelier, Barcelona, 2017. Refleja y amplía la introducción que he venido dando a mis estudiantes de teoría política y filosofía del derecho en la Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Sociales de Toledo. Bajo el presupuesto de la unidad o no fragmentación de la razón práctica tomo como punto de partida la disputa metodológica entre hermenéuticos y analíticos a los fines de partir de ese contraste algunas distinciones analíticas (ser/deber; niveles de lenguaje; juicios analíticos/sintético; contexto de descubrimiento/justificación) para ver su utilidad para el estudio del discurso moral. Por tanto se estudia metaética como paso previo a un estudio de ética normativa mediado por un capítulo de trolelogía (trolley problem philosophy) que da pie a describir el utilitarismo, luego el deontologismo y finalmente el constructivismo kantiano en las versiones de Rawls, Habermas y Nino. En los epígrafes Q se tratan cuestiones quodlibetales, que posibilitan una aproximación, si se quiere, más heterodoxa a los problemas estudiados.

In this review I critically digest the main themes of Shiffrin's arguments, with a focus on the question of whether her "thinker-based" theory of free speech has different, or more ambivalent, practical implications for free speech policy than she allows.

The Genesis of Kant`s Ethics: the moral precritical development in its relation to Theodicy

Abstract:


Kant‘s moral philosophy is one of the great cornerstones of the Western ethical reflection. The little that is known is that the basic conception on which Kantian ethics was built – videlicet, the concept of autonomy of the will – was developed from the attempt to solve a set of problems of metaphysical and theological character that could only have been overcome through the adoption of a new practical metaphysics. With this in mind, this research is an attempt at a reconstruction of the Kantian moral thought in its development, having as a higher aim the emphasis on the importance of the problem of theodicy in the genesis of Kant‘s original conceptions of freedom and the moral world, which emerged from the middle of the 1760s and only came to a bloom on the next decade. Such an attempt at a reconstruction will be guided by the chronological sequel of the pre-critical writings and Kant‘s reflections on the Manuscript Legacy, besides his Lectures on Ethics, sources that are temporally circumscribed from the late 1750s and the first half of the 1780 decade. In a first moment, the genesis of the moral problem will be analyzed from Kant‘s critical position – due to the objections that were raised precisely by the theodicy – in front of the intellectualistic comprehension of the concepts of perfection and will such as they were received by the German Scholastic. In a second moment, the beginning of a reformulation directly influenced by Crusius and the British moralists will be highlighted, and it will culminate in a repositioning of the ethical problem, having in mind the roles of reason and feeling. The third moment is marked by the Kantian assimilation of Rousseau‘s thought. Rousseau‘s influence will propel the emergency of a new understanding of the concept of perfection as an inner attribute of the will, enabling support for a new concept of practical philosophy. Indeed, a solution to the ethical problem regarding the conditions of possibility of free actions within the natural world will emerge and, besides that, a path to an adequate answer to the problem of theodicy will rise by means of the concept of a practical rational faith. Finally, the development of the Kantian doctrine of the categorical imperative will be highlighted – by means of the debate with Baumgarten‘s compendium – as the first attempts to lay down a systematic and unified view of morality that will try to establish a connection between the concepts of virtue and happiness – in this contexts, approach from the perspective of the highest Good.

In seiner Kritik der Moralphilosophie der westlichen Tradition gab sich Richard Rorty als humaner, engagierter Aufklärer. Gleichgültig, ob ontologisch, mentalistisch oder linguistisch argumentiert worden sei: Platon, Kant und Habermas hätten auf je verschiedenem Wege behauptet, sie könnten aus der Vernunftbegabung, einem zureichendem Differenzkriterium, Fundamente für moralische Prinzipien ableiten. Das habe Varianten des sittlichen Universalismus hervorgebracht, die heute ein für allemal passé seien. Aus der Perspektive der kritischen Theorie wird im vorliegenden Paper gezeigt, was dabei verloren geht.

For my Introduction to Ethics class at The University of Akron, I use Sandel's excellent chapter to introduce my students, nearly all of whom are non-majors, to Kantian ethics.  I have found it helpful to give the students questions to think about as they read the chapter, and to simply list out terms that they will need to understand to fully understand the reading. We then use these questions as a basis for small-group and large-group discussion in class, and they also serve as a question bank for exams.  I hope that others teaching this text might find them useful.

Though Kant calls the prohibition against suicide the first duty of human beings to themselves, his arguments for this duty lack his characteristic rigor and systematicity. The lack of a single authoritative Kantian approach to suicide casts doubt on what is generally regarded as an extreme and implausible position, to wit, that not only is suicide wrong in every circumstance, but is among the gravest moral wrongs. Here I try to remedy this lack of systematicity in order to show that Kant's position on suicide is more appealing and credible than it seems at first glance. Kant in fact offers three distinct lines of argument against suicide. The first, the chief argument in his Lectures on Ethics, holds that suicide violates the divine will, for in willing our own deaths we usurp God's right to determine the duration of our existence; as God's property, we are not entitled to end our own lives willfully. The second, rooted in the Groundwork, holds that suicide is incompatible with a system of willed ends conceived analogously with a system of nature, so a maxim to commit suicide cannot be coherently willed as a universal practical principle. The third argument, drawn from the Metaphysics of Morals, holds that because suicide obliterates the rational will from the world, and as the rational will is the source of moral worth, suicide cannot be consistently willed by beings subject to moral requirements. To authorize oneself to take one's own life, Kant claims, is to attempt 'to withdraw from all obligation.' We cannot, under the color of morality, seek to cancel the will that authorizes all obligation in the first place. This third argument is demonstrably superior to the other two in being both more philosophically plausible in its own right and more Kantian in flavor.

Redimensionar o problema dos valores na pós-modernidade significa debater com diversas tradições da filosofia
pós-metafísica, o que no Direito faz-se presente a partir da percepção
do mesmo como fenômeno cultural multifacetado, envolto na série
de problemas que representam o desafio regulador da conduta
humana extensivamente livre e complexa, pragmaticamente exercida
numa sociedade que se afasta cada vez mais da Moral e da Religião
e encontra no Direito seu marco normativo de coesão.
A filosofia do direito de Gustav Radbruch introduziu o
debate neokantiano sobre os valores no âmbito jurídico, sendo
importante para a fundamentação dos direitos humanos em meados
do século XX no pós-guerra. O presente ensaio discute os conceitoschave de tal jusfilosofia na esperança de atualizá-los e confrontá-los com os novos teóricos do kantismo jurídico (Alexy, Habermas,
Dworkin, dentre outros), concedendo ao leitor um panorama do
debate sobre os valores jurídicos.
O neokantismo e a ética kantiana dão respostas a um vazio
que o pós-modernismo deixa a descoberto: a ausência de uma
regulação da conduta humana por uma moralidade interna implica
a necessidade de fundamentação da moral a partir do exterior
(intersubjetiva), objetiva, discursiva e em muitos pontos próxima
do Direito, mais próxima da Ética que de moralismos tradicionais e
conservadores.

ETHICS: A PLURALISTIC APPROACH TO MORAL THEORY, FIFTH EDITION provides a comprehensive yet clear introduction to the main traditions in ethical thought, including virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and deontology. Additionally, the book presents a conceptual framework of ethical pluralism to help readers understand the relationship among various theories. Lawrence Hinman, one of the most respected and accomplished professionals in ethics and philosophy education today, presents a text that gives readers plentiful opportunities to explore ethical theory and their own responses to them, using fascinating features such as the "Ethical Inventory" sections that appear at the beginning and the end of the text. End-of-chapter discussion questions, and the use of current issues and movies help students retain what they've learn and truly comprehend the subject matter

L’etica di Immanuel Kant è giustamente considerata ancora oggi uno dei fondamenti della filosofia morale e uno dei vertici dell’intera storia della filosofia. Si tratta indubbiamente di uno degli apici supremi della storia del pensiero. In questo articolo, ci limiteremo a considerare quanto Kant scrive nella Fondazione della metafisica dei costumi, testo edito per la prima volta nel 1785, ovvero tra la prima e la seconda edizione della Critica della ragion pura (1781, 1787) e considerabile come primo testo di una “trilogia”, insieme alla Critica della ragion pratica (1788) e alla Metafisica dei costumi (1797), uno degli ultimi testi pubblicati prima che la ragione e l’intelletto del filosofo di Königsberg cedessero ad una malat-tia neurodegenerativa che gli impedì ogni attività non solo filosofica (per questo si veda la bellissima biografia di Manfred Kuehn). Per chi volesse approfondire la posizione morale kantiana rimandiamo al testo di Sonia Cosio, Il rispetto in Kant (2016) e alla voce della Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The objective of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of the Kantian notion of freedom (especially  the  problem  of  the  third  antinomy  and  its  resolution  in  the  critique  of  pure reason); its significance in the contemporary debate on free-will and determinism, and the possibility  of  autonomy  of  artificial  agency  in  the  Kantian  paradigm  of  autonomy.  Kant's resolution  of  the  third  antinomy  by  positing  the  ground  in  the  noumenal  self  resolves  the problem of antinomies; however, invites an explanatory gap between phenomenality and the noumenal self; even if he has successfully established the compatibility of natural causality and non-natural causality through his transcendental argument. This paper is also devoted to establish the plausibility of the knowledge claim that Kantian reduction of phenomenality has served half of the purpose of the AI scientists on the possibility of Artificial Autonomous Agency.

Table of contents

1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism; 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy; 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a form of life; 4. Epicurus and ethics as care for oneself; 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions; 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism; 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism; 8. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelianism; 9. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism; 10. Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian moral doctrine and Aristotelian ethics; 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry; 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living
13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism; 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality; 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism; 16. Richard Price and intuitionism; 17. Adam Smith and sentimentalism; 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism; 19. Immanuel Kant, the practical use of reason and judgment; 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and a critique of Enlightenment universalism; 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment; 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism; 23. Edmund Husserl and the a priori of action; 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism; 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics; 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism; 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy; 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics; 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics; 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics.

Both the cause and the solution to environmental crisis are parsed in terms that seem intrinsically to sponsor rejection of notions of autonomy.  At the level of metaphysics and of ethics, a discourse of human autonomy is generally seen as part of the problem, not part of the solution.  I sketch the outlines of an argument as to why environmental discourse, and in particular our capacity to adequately handle and correctly use the notion of environmental crisis, depends on redeeming autonomy; yes from some of its history, but also from an environmental movement that is captivated by an oversimple account of both cause and response to environmental change.  This examination allows us to notice, first, how much is at stake in the way we conceptualise that change; second, that we need to pay attention to the moral architecture our  conceptualisations presume and require; thirdly, how pervasive is the foundational philosphical problem of environmental discourse – namely that accounts of what it is to be a human person, and accounts of the natural, cannot at all be separated.

What is it to have a reason to do something? is one sort of question; what is it we have reason to do? is another.  These questions are often explored separately.  But our answers to them may not be independent:  what reasons are may have implications for what reasons there are.  So the door is opened to a troubling tension—the account of what reasons are that is most plausible in its own right could entail a view of what we have reason to do that is independently implausible.  In fact, it looks like this is the case.

The first half of this book develops and defends a version of a desire-based, internalist, account of what normative reasons are.  But does that account entail that there are no moral reasons that apply to all of us, regardless of what we happen to desire?  It may look obvious that it does—that a bullet must be bitten somewhere.  If what we have reason to do depends on what we antecedently desire, corrected only for misinformation and procedural irrationalities, and if desires differ from person to person, there seems to be no basis for assuming that everyone has reason to be moral.  But the bullet may yet be avoided.  The second half of this book shows how:  it builds on Kant’s argument for his formula of humanity to provide an internalist defense of universal moral reasons.  In doing so, it provides a more satisfying answer to the age-old question:  why be moral?

Hazing is a widespread moral phenomenon that has attracted little theoretical discussion. Here are my purposes are two fold: First, I provide a characterization of hazing that captures the features relevant to analyzing and evaluating hazing from a moral point of view. Hazing is harmful or humiliating transaction between members of a coveted group and an individual seeking membership in said group where the transaction bears no intrinsic relationship to the group’s mission. Second, I provide an analysis of the moral wrongs of hazing that is broadly Kantian in spirit. The wrongfulness of hazing cannot be captured in terms of familiar categories of wrongdoing wherein individuals are treated as mere means (e.g., deception or coercion). However, hazing has no place in Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, for as a form of social interaction, it exploits and endorses an inequality between the hazer and the hazed that is antithetical to the equality of rational worth characteristic of social interaction in the Kingdom of Ends. In addition, hazing amounts to an invitation for a person to trade their humanity or self-respect in exchange for full inclusion in a group or organization. Issuing such an invitation, I claim, violates a Kantian duty to treat others’ humanity as an end in itself, violating a duty not to “give scandal” by tempting others to act in ways they will later have grounds to rationally regret.

I reconstruct a plot in the twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon ethical discussion. I discuss first the reasons why in the first half of the twentieth  century the claim of a neutral character of metaethics vis-a-vis normative ethics was generally accepted; then I discuss the reasons for a U-turn that took place in 1958, which brought back to the forefront two traditional schools of normative ethics, Kantian and Utilitarian, and the reasons for criticism from the new school of virtue ethics. I end by claiming that intuitionism and Kantian ethics will still be on the agenda for some time.

1. Fog on the Channell
2. 1903-1949: when people believed that philosophy needed to be depurated from cant 2.1. Cognitivism and non-cognitivismo 2.2. The naturalistic fallacy  2.3  Hume’ss law 2.4 Hume’s fork 2.5 Intuitionism, naturalism, emotivism
3. 1949-1958: when ethics was depurated from the ‘third person’
3.1 Hampshire’s diagnosis  3.2. Criticism to the The naturalistic fallacy  3.3. Criticism to Hume’s law
4. 1958-1980:  Kantian elements
4.1 The Kantian element in the good reasons approach: Kurt Baier  4.2. The Kantian element in pragmatism: Clarence Lewis  4.3. The Kantian element in utilitarianism: Harrod, Hare, Brandt  4.4. The Kantian element in post-intuitionism
5. 1971-2002: Kantian normative ethics
5.1 Reasons for the normative-ethics revival5.2 Gewirth  5.3 Donagan  5.4 Nagel  5.5 Kantian constructivism 5.6 Kantian contractualism
6. The recent Kant and Aristotle rediscovery and the forthcoming Price and Whewell rehabilitation
7. Provisional concluding remarks: analytic philosophy from Hume to Kant

My theme is ‘life-writing’, understood as the shaping of one's life through the contemplation of values, although this activity is mostly unreflective. To become an art so that one's life can be shaped in greater accord with clearly held values, this process must become reflective. These values have an inescapably ethical dimension, because as we necessarily poetize our surrounding world, we contribute to our personal and communal ethos the character that arises from the culturally shaping power of guiding ideals. Even the immoralist cultivates life within an ethos where obscure feelings connect with some thing or other, whereby certain aims will then appear more valuable than others.

To understand how we cannot help but shape our lives according to dimly or clearly intuited values, I compare Coleridge’s primary imagination, the ‘shaping spirit’ ‘necessary for all human perception’ with Kant’s ‘blind though indispensible function of the soul, without which we would have no cognition at all, yet of which we are scarcely ever conscious’. With Coleridge, we find in imagination an impulse to connect profound but obscure presentiments and ideas with our surroundings. This impulse propels great art and everyday aesthetics alike. Whether we pursue merely what attracts us, or seek value beyond this, all lives are freely shaped, without excuses, as the existentialists say, but not always in the most pellucid consciousness. Our choices inevitably engage us in the poetic art of life-writing. Cast in medias res, we necessarily improvise. But this is no argument against lives being moral-aesthetic works, spontaneous compositions in value.

This paper examines the thought that our right actions have moral worth only if we perform them for the right reasons.  I argue against the view, often ascribed to Kant, that morally worthy actions must be performed because they are right, and argue that Kantians and others ought instead to accept the view that morally worthy actions are those performed for the reasons why they are right.  In other words, morally worthy actions are those for which the reasons why they were performed (the reasons motivating them) and the reasons why they morally ought to have been performed (the reasons morally justifying them) coincide.  I call this the Coincident Reasons Thesis, and argue that it provides plausible necessary and sufficient conditions for morally worthy action, defending the claim against proposed counterexamples.  I end by showing that the plausibility of the thesis, which I argue is largely independent of any particular ethical standpoint, gives us some reason to doubt a class of ethical theories that includes utilitarianism.

Kant's most prominent formulation of the Categorical Imperative, known as the Formula of Universal Law (FUL), is generally thought to demand that one act only on maxims that one can will as universal laws without this generating a contradiction. Kant's view is standardly summarized as requiring the 'universalizability' of one's maxims and described in terms of the distinction between 'contradictions in conception' and 'contradictions in the will'. Focusing on the underappreciated significance of the simultaneity condition included in the FUL, I argue, by contrast, that the principle is better read as requiring that one be able to will two things simultaneously without self-contradiction, namely, that a maxim be one's own and that it be a universal law. This amounts to a new interpretation of the FUL with significant interpretive and philosophical advantages.

Provides a brief, but relatively systematic introduction to the basic elements of Kant's critical methodology. Begins by discussing how Kant conceives of the proper ends of rational inquiry, and how those ends inform his conception of the proper methodology for philosophy. Then discusses the foundational role that self-conscious capacities play within Kant's philosophical system. Concludes by discussing Kant's famous claim that the philosopher - unlike the mathematician - must be a legislator, and not an artist, of reason.

El entorno religioso de nuestra imputabilidad moral y la fe reflexionante del auténtico credo kantiano (Presentación al texto de Kant Sobre el mal radical) The Religious Environment of Our Moral Imputability and the Reflective Faith of Kantian Genuine Creed (Presentation to Kant's Text On Radical Evil) ROBERTO R. ARAMAYO • Instituto de Filosofía del CSIC, Madrid / España Resumen Aquí se presenta la primera traducción española del texto kantiano Sobre el mal radical tratado como el artículo que fue originalmente publicado en una revista y, por consiguiente, no tanto como el primer capítulo de La Religión dentro de los límites de la sola razón. Se intenta hacer ver que, tal como cuando trata el argumento moral sobre la existencia de Dios, Kant nos habla del ateo virtuoso como héroe moral de su formalismo ético, aquí la religión sólo sirve para dibujar mejor los contornos de las piezas claves del pensamiento ético kantiano: la libertad y la responsabilidad o imputabilidad moral, que constituyen el auténtico credo kantiano y sólo se dejan asociar con una fe "reflexiva". Palabras clave Kant; Mal radical; Imputabilidad moral; Fe reflexiva, Religión. • Profesor de Investigación en el IFS del CSIC. E-amil de contacto: aramayo@ifs.csic.es https://www.con-textoskantianos.net/index.php/revista/article/view/279/341

Although material value-ethics was introduced into philosophy at least a century ago, confusion still persists as to what it implies. This article offers some clarification. It states how material value-ethics stands opposed to formalistic ethics, commonly – though perhaps wrongly – attributed to Kant. The resulting analysis allows us to establish a combination of features that give material value-ethics an advantage over deontological, consequentialist and other perspectives, regardless of the hermeneutics issue.

Famously, in the second Critique, Kant claims that our consciousness of the moral law provides us with sufficient grounds for the attribution of freedom to ourselves as noumena or things-in-themselves. This much should be uncontroversial. What is much more controversial is the precise kind of cognitive relation to things-in-themselves that Kant believes is possible from a practical point of view. Traditionally, interpreters have tended to regard such “practical cognition” of things-in-themselves as (at best) a poor step-cousin of its theoretical counterpart – as a sort of mere “rational faith” unworthy of serious comparison with genuine theoretical knowledge or cognition. But this seriously underestimates the degree to which Kant believes we can achieve “practical cognition” of things-in-themselves from a practical point of view – or at least, it does so insofar as we focus on our practical self-understanding as noumenally free agents. At least in this case, far from representing an impoverished cousin of theoretical cognition and theoretical knowledge, our practical awareness of ourselves as free possesses all of the central marks of cognition and knowledge in Kant’s sense of these two terms – albeit on distinctively practical grounds.

Kant takes the idea of autonomy of the will to be his distinctive contribution to moral philosophy. However, this idea is more nuanced and complicated than one might think. In this chapter, I sketch the rough outlines of Kant's idea of autonomy of the will while also highlighting contentious exegetical issues that give rise to various possible interpretations. I tentatively defend four basic claims. First, autonomy primarily features in Kant's account of moral agency, as the condition of the possibility of moral obligation. Second, autonomy amounts to a metaphysical property as well as a normative principle and a psychological capacity. Third, although there is legitimate scholarly disagreement about whether or not autonomy involves self-legislation of the moral law, there is good reason to believe it underwrites an 'inside-out' (as opposed to 'outside-in') conception of the relationship between the will and moral requirements. Fourth, persons have dignity because their autonomy makes them members in the set of beings over whom the categorical imperative requires us to universalise our maxims, not because autonomy is an independently important property.