Transcript Kant
Kant Background • Immanuel Kant was an influential philosopher of the 17th and 18th centuries. • Reason imposes its own abstract, formal laws on our actions. Morality ultimately rests, not on sense experience or feelings, but on reason. • These summaries and problems deal with Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Kant on Free Will • For a will to be considered “free,” we must understand it as capable of affecting casual power without being caused to do so. But the idea of lawless free will, that is, a will acting without any casual structure, is incomprehensible. Therefore, if free will must be acting under laws that it gives to itself. Continued…… • Kant remarks that free will is inherently unknowable. • Since even a free person could not possibly have knowledge of their own freedom, we cannot use our failure to find a proof for freedom as evidence for a lack of it. • The observable world could never contain an example of freedom because it would never show us a will as it appears to itself, but only a will that is subject to natural laws imposed on it. • But we do appear to ourselves as free. Therefore he argued for the idea of transcendental freedom — that is, freedom as a presupposition of the question "what ought I to do?" This is what gives us sufficient basis for ascribing moral responsibility: the rational and self-actualising power of a person, which he calls : "the property the will has of being a law unto itself." • Source: Not from Wikipedia Good will, Duty and the CI • Since considerations of the physical details of actions are necessarily bound up with a person's subjective preferences, and could have been brought about without the action of a rational will, Kant concluded that the expected consequences of an act are themselves morally neutral, and therefore irrelevant to moral deliberation. The only objective basis for moral value would be the rationality of the, expressed in recognition of moral duty. Conclusion • Absolute Genius • We are not completely free, there are still casual laws. (Determinism) • Freedom is difficult to conceive • Ought implies can • Even though we do have control over our own actions, consequences play over in our minds and act as a limitation to our freedom.