3. Explain why Kant claims that according to the Categorical Imperative, it is wrong to lie even to an ‘inquiring murderer’. Explain the concept of the Categorical Imperative, and how Kant’s answer is derived from it. Discuss whether you think the Categorical Imperative yields the correct moral answer in this case, giving reasons in defence of your view. Immanuel Kant was a deontologist who believed that reason was the final authority for morality, not the consequences of one’s actions as believed by the utilitarians.
Immanuel Kant puts forward an argument from deontological ethics and therefore is an ethical theory considered solely on duty and obligations, where one has an unchanging moral obligation to abide by a set of defined principles. Thus the ends of any action do not justify the means, i.e. if someone were to do their moral duties, then it would not matter if it had negative consequences. Thus, rules come above all else according to Kant. Kant argues that only one fact is undisputable, and that simply is that there is a moral law in existence, which then leads to the existence of God.
The answer to this question will vary. Some people are moral realists and hold that moral facts are objective facts that are out there in the world, these people believe that things are good or bad independently of us. Moral values such as goodness and badness are real properties of people in the same way that rough and smooth are properties of physical objects. This view is often referred to as cognitive language. Those who oppose cognitivists are called non cognitivists and they believe that when someone makes a moral statement they are not describing the world, but they are merely expressing their feelings and opinions, they believe that moral statements are not objective therefore they cannot be verified as true or false.
Explain, with examples, Kant’s theory of the Categorical Imperative. The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), based his ethical theory on the idea that there is an objective right and wrong based on reason. While looking for some sort of objective basis for morality, Kant made the distinction between two kinds of imperatives; non-moral (hypothetical) and moral (categorical). The hypothetical imperative is an action which achieves a goal or result. For Kant, if an action is performed, based on the end goal or result, or based on the outcome, it is not moral.
His belief of going against emotion, goes against moral relativism, as moral relativism is when a morally good act is entirely dependent on the circumstances where said act takes place, instead believing in the necessity of a perfectly universal moral law. Human reasoning was a significant area of ethical study for Kant. Kant’s views were in response to the empiricists and rationalists, with the rationalists beliefs being closer to his than the empiricists. (The rationalists attempted to prove that we can understand the world purely be using our reasoning, while empiricists argued that all of our knowledge comes from experience.) Kant believed that the only way we gain knowledge of the world is through our senses, and that us humans will never experience the true reality of the world as we experience it through our own minds, of which different categories of thought have been built into, which led him to believe that all scientific knowledge discovered, is only facts about our own experiences and perceptions.
However there are very strong weaknesses that go against his theory. It is conceivable that an intuitive conscience could be misleading and therefore seems to have a similarity to Aquinas’ more logical theory, which believes the conscience to be a device that distinguishes which acts are moral and unmoral. Also people’s ideas of morality Aquinas believed that through reason we can use the conscience as a device for distinguishing
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
In searching for what nonconsequentialist believe, I found that it is the opposition of consequentalism. One view that is in opposition to consequentialism is deontology. Alexander describes dentology: In contemporary moral philosophy, deontology is one of those kinds of normative theories regarding which choices are morally required, forbidden, or permitted. In other words, deontology falls within the domain of moral theories that guide and assess our choices of what we ought to do (deontic theories), in contrast to (aretaic [virtue] theories) that—fundamentally, at least—guide and assess what kind of person (in terms of character traits) we are and should be. And within that domain, deontologists—those who subscribe to deontological theories of morality—stand in opposition to
Meta ethics is the study of ethical language; however it differs from normative ethics. Normative ethics determines what is “good” and “bad”, whereas Meta ethics determines the meanings of the terms “good” and “bad”. There are two ethical approaches to Meta ethics, one being Cognitivism. Cognitivism is the view that ethical language can be known and understood objectively, through empirical experience or intuition. The second approach is Non-Cognitivism, this is the view that ethical language cannot be known and understood, due to subjectivity.
Ethics Essay Terence Lord ETH/316-Ethics and Social Responsibility May 5th, 2013 Denise Antoon Ethics Essay Deontology is a moral theory that accentuates one’s obligation to see to certain action just as the action, itself, is intrinsically right and not through any extra kind of shrewdness—such as the penalties of the action. Or in other words, it is the study of what is morally right or wrong. One simply may follow their obligations to another individual or society just because keeping one's obligation is what well-thought-out as ethically correct. However, one flaw of this theory is that there is no foundation or rational basis for determining an individual's sense of duty. For instance, an executive of a company may well choose