Their intention is all that matters. Kant focuses on what should be done, rather than doing things for their outcome. This means that even if something terrible happens as the result of a morally good action, it is still morally right. Kant had an absolute view that the right moral action must always be done. Kant tried to make moral ethics scientific through universalisation.
Do we have Free Will? In this essay I will discuss the three positions of Free Will, Libertarianism, Soft Determinism and Hard Determinism. Libertarianism states that free will exists. Robert Kane (2011:24) states: Soft determinists are compatibilists who insist that determinism does not undermine any free will or responsibility worth having, whereas hard determinists are incompatibilists who take a harder line: Since determinism is true, free will does not exist (Kane, 2011:24). Libertarianism is the position I wish to defend, and thus will argue that, indeed, we do have free will.
Personality and moral self explain how and why human beings make free choices. The libertarianism theory has been explained by CA Campbell, who said that human beings see themselves as free agents and therefore accept moral responsibility for their actions. Humans must accept responsibility for these actions and face any consequences that may come their way. John Stuart Mill - an influencal figure in Liberatarianism – believe we are free and morally responsible for all our actions. Mill believed it was extremely important that an indivduals free will should not be crushed by society.
The Naturalistic Fallacy is one of the main criticisms of Ethical Naturalism and would therefore suggest that ethical language is meaningless as it cannot be correctly defined, given that one cannot derive any moral statements from natural facts. Moore believed there are moral properties, so ethical language is not completely devoid of meaning but it is limited as ‘good’ is a non-natural property which cannot be
G.E Moore argued against Ethical Naturalism as he believed that defining concepts such as ‘good’ are impossible and any attempt to define ‘good’ is to commit The Naturalistic Fallacy. The Naturalistic Fallacy is one of the main criticisms of Ethical Naturalism and would therefore suggest that ethical language is not very meaningful as it cannot be correctly defined. Moore believed there are moral properties, so ethical language is not completely devoid of meaning but it is limited as ‘good’ is a non-natural property which cannot be defined. Moore disagreed that ethical language could prove whether something is moral or
Kant devised two different types of imperatives which allow us to make our decisions, hypothetical imperatives are the rules that we follow to attain a personal outcome or a selfish wish whereas categorical imperatives are intrinsically right. His first categorical imperative was meant to establish that humans should only act according to a law that can be universalised. ‘’Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law’’ – (Kant the moral order). The second of the imperatives is that we as humans should never use another human as a means to an end, treat them all with value. ‘’Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end’’.
Since every ethical system should evaluate itself as the best and only moral system, and every other system is flawed and immoral, it is assumed that moral judgements about ethical systems are meaningless. Moral Relativism rests on the belief that values are subjective. It is holds the belief that there is no objective morality, that there is no such thing as right or wrong, good or evil. Only that, moral systems are just made up and supported by the circumstances of the action. Moral Relativism cannot and does not accept the idea that an objective moral system exists.
As a further definition, Mackie posits that an objective moral value has the quality of ‘ought-to-be-pursued-ness’, it is something one should or ought do because it contains an inherently normative aspect. If Mackie’s argument is to succeed, it must prove that this supposed normative aspect has no existence within any act in itself, but has its origin in the agent of said act, and as such, all moral claims are false. Mackie’s exposition of moral relativism comes in the form of two main arguments, the first being his ‘argument from relativity’, the second, his ‘argument from queerness’. It is with the argument from relativity that I shall be here concerned. The argument from relativity is based around the purely ‘descriptive’ idea that it is an empirically observable fact that there seems to be
From this Moore claimed that it is impossible to derive an ‘is from an ought’. This criticism became known as the naturalistic fallacy. In addition to this G.E Moore claimed that naturalism was not able to stand up to the open question argument. ethical naturalism claims to be based on moral facts, it would therefore seem logical that these facts should stand up to scrutiny. Yet, if we observe that pleasure is good, we should be able to ask is good pleasure.
Because it engages the whole self without a fixed yardstick it can be called a personal reflection…. [I]n this reflection the self is in question; what is at stake is the definition of those inchoate evaluations which are sensed to be essential to our identity (117). Taylor makes this claim about responsibility for self in opposition to Sartre’s characterization of the human condition as nothingness and absolute freedom. Sartre derives from this condition an understanding of freedom as the radical, infinite openness of the freedom of our choices and concludes that it is this freedom that characterizes our fundamental moral dilemma. Taylor argues that it is not the weight of the openness that defines our moral selves or the moral dilemmas we face, but the fact that various choices necessarily blind and pull us in different directions.