I mistrust the judgment of every man in a case in which his own wishes are concerned. ~ Daniel Webster. To an extent I agree with this quote, but some arguments I have say otherwise. To a degree a man’s judgment can be trusted if his intentions are altruistic ones, but the pervasive issue still remains in that it is human nature to see flaw in others hopes to make a conclusion in which may or may not be true. The purest judgment lies in those who expect no results and thoroughly analyze the conclusion they wish to understand, disregarding judgments about selfishness due to one who’s own wishes are concerned.
If you would not want the rule to be universalised, you should not be completing the action. For example, if you were to lie, you are condoning lying universally so there will be no truth told by anyone, causing disruptions and disagreements. This is an absolutist stance because there are no exceptions to the rule. The Principle of humanity as an end not as a means is the second imperative. The action a person completes should not use another human to achieve a goal, this is because humans have intrinsic value and we have the innate ability to be rational and
That we must recognize. However this in no way suggests we cannot reason about ethics. Rather we should strive for a rational yet relativistic ethic, which emphasizes the exercise of cultivated moral judgment rather than the rote application of extant moral rules. Or so I shall argue I relate to this value system the most because I believe that every culture has a different idea of what they believe is right and wrong. Different religions also have an idea of what is right or wrong.
We must lie to be a moral person, sending our friend to their impending death. It accords with universalizable maxims to treat people as ends in themselves and exercise their will without concerning ourselves with the consequences of their actions. Perhaps we can find a better way to use the CI in order to obtain a moral answer that we accord with our intuition. Firstly we need to break down Kant’s CI to understand how he uses it to determine moral law. The CI has several formula - the first being The Formula Of Universal Law (FUL): “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law” (Wood 2002, xviii).
If you act out of your own desire or for your own means, you are not doing the right thing. To know what is right and what is wrong, Kant devised something called the Categorical Imperative. The Categorical Imperative is a command or act that is truly independent of one’s own desires or ends. In other words, it is a perfect rule that everyone should follow. To check if a maxim (meaning the intention of your action, or your principle of action) can be a Categorical Imperative, a CI test was made.
This means that the only thing that makes and act morally wrong is that God either commands or prohibits it. Whether he will support or be against them, it is entirely up to him. This theory shows that actions can either be accepted or denied based solely upon God’s judgment and whether he agrees or disagrees with what is at hand. If God agrees with certain actions or circumstances, then it is right just because God says that it is right. But on the other hand, if God does not agree with certain actions or circumstances, then it is wrong because God says that it is wrong.
Chuang Tzu believed that how we perceive things are directly related to each of our separate pasts, or our “paths”. Also, that we need to realized that our conclusions and dispositions would be completely different had we experienced another past, even possibly just one single instance. Confucius believed that all things are naturally good. It is only if you haven’t pursued the way that you can turn out evil. He also believed that the most important characteristic of our personalities is created by how we treat others.
“The maxim ‘an unjust law is not a law’, coined by St. Augustine and central to natural law thinking, has been criticized, inter alia, by H.L.A Hart and Hans Kelsen as ‘utterly implausible’ as it suggests that ‘what everyone takes to be laws (i.e. rules possessing validity by reference to the criteria of a positive system of law) are in fact not laws if they are unjust’. (George: 2008) George responds to this critique as follows: ‘It is certainly possible that an unjust law may at the same time be systematically valid and yet morally invalid; this is precisely the state of affairs that is being identified here. But, this fact alone – absent more specific information about the case at hand – does not necessarily militate either for or against one’s obligation to obey the law. On the one hand, one’s prima facie obligation to obey the law remains intact where its injustice is relatively minor and it would be unfair to others if one disregarded the law.
In the philosophical view of determinism with respect to free will, it focuses more on the circumstances surrounding the agent instead of just the individual agent. A strength to determinism is that there is a cause for everything, therefore nothing is left to chance and that there is always a reason to be traced back to. On the other hand, the same theory states that agents are not responsible for their own actions because previous events dictated their behavior, and that is considered by many to be a weakness of determinism. Critics of determinism claim that having a universal view of determinism will lead to moral irresponsibility and moral decay (Nichols and Knobe 664). Compatibilism, also referred to as soft determinism, is “the view that all events, including human actions, are caused.
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’’.