Transcript Kants ethics and suicide show

Kantian ethics (& suicide):
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).
A German philosopher.
• Ought implies Can
• Maxims
• Categorical Imperative
• Means not ends
• Applied to suicide
A moral action is performed out of duty
rather than inclination, feeling or reward.
The motive for an action is therefore
more important than the action itself or its
consequences
Question: What motives might
someone have in giving money to
charity?
Most moral philosophers would agree with
Kant that self interest is not an appropriate
motive for a moral action.
But many would disagree with his claim that
whether or not someone feels an emotion
such as ‘compassion’ is irrelevant to our
assessment of moral actions.
For Kant the only acceptable motive for
moral action was a sense of duty.
Ought implies can
Kant claimed that motives were more
important than consequences because he
believed that all people could be moral.
Since we can only be held morally
responsible for things over which we have
some control (ought implied can) and since
we have little control over the consequences
of our actions, consequences cannot be
crucial to morality.
Maxims
Kant described the intentions or general
principle behind an action as the maxim.
• The Good Samaritan could have been
acting on the maxim:
Always help those in need when you are
likely to be rewarded
or
Always help those in need when you feel pity
or
Always help those in need because it is your
duty to do so
The Categorical Imperative
These are absolute and unconditional
duties such as ‘You should always tell the
truth’. They apply whatever consequence
may follow from them. Morality is a system
of categorical imperatives.
‘Hypothetical imperatives’ are duties which
tell you what you ought or ought not to do if
you want to achieve a certain goal.
There is only one basic categorical
imperative:
‘Act only on maxims which you can at the
same time will to be universal laws’.
(‘Will’ in this context means ‘rationally want’.)
In other words, act only on a maxim (belief /
principle) that you would want to apply to
everybody.
This is the principle of Universalisability.
An important way of testing maxims to see if they
are moral or not is by testing them to see if they
make logical sense.
You can universalise the maxim ‘don’t return books
to libraries’ but it has the consequence of making
the notion of libraries nonsensical (because
eventually there would be no books left so there
would be no libraries to not return books to)
This would be rejected as not being a categorical
imperative.
Think of...
Other possible maxims that might be rendered
illogical if Universalised.
Means and Ends
Another version of the categorical imperative
is:
‘Treat other people as ends in themselves,
never as means to ends’.
This is another way of saying that we should
not use people, but should recognise their
humanity; the fact that they have wills,
desires and interests of their own.
In ‘The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of
Morals 1785’ Kant discusses suicide.
He argues that someone contemplating suicide
imagines universalising the maxim:
From self love I make it my principle to shorten my
life when its longer duration threatens more troubles
than it promises agreeableness'.
Universalising this entails a logical contradiction
which makes it rationally indefensible and therefore
morally wrong according to Kant.
The contradiction:
The drive to further life, which is the drive to
enjoy more things would become the drive
to end life.
It is this kind of logical contradiction that
Kant uses to identify those things that
cannot be accepted as categorical
imperatives.
Suicide; means and ends
Kant applies his second formulation of the
categorical imperative to suicide:
So act that you use humanity, whether in your own
person or in the person of any other, always at the
same time as an end, never merely as a means.
Someone contemplating suicide proposes to use
themselves merely as a means to the end of
reducing pain and suffering. They are not using
themselves as ends but as a means to maintain a
tolerable condition up to the end of life.