Beth, in contrast, can reflect on the various reasons she has, reasons to care for her sister and the homeless. He eats and plays and sleeps when he desires to do so, there is no reasoning on his part. Spartan’s thinking and actions are driven by his desires and inclination. Spartan’s actions are not moral whereas Beth’s actions are. Now consider my daughter Beth, she performs certain actions like caring for her sister and helping the homeless. He performs certain actions like scrabbling under bed covers, meowing at birds and chasing his tail. There is, however, something intuitive about the idea that morality is based on reason rather than feelings or consequences.
It focuses on our duties rather than our ends/goals/consequences. This means that Kant’s theory is deontological rather than teleological. For example, because lying fails to respect the Categorical Imperative it is wrong and is wrong irrespective of how we might feel about lying or what might happen if we did lie it is actions that are right and wrong rather than consequences. For Kant, actions are right if they respect what he calls the Categorical Imperative. Kant believes that in doing this people will come to recognize that certain actions are right and wrong irrespective of how we might feel and irrespective of any consequences. Yet Kant starts by turning his eyes “inward” to thinking about ethical ideas. We think the study of ethics - unlike say maths - ought to direct our eye to what is going on around us in the world. This is key to understanding his work but also makes his writing on ethics seem a bit odd. This means his general philosophical approach starts by asking what we can know a priori. He thinks that we can gain knowledge from our senses and through our rational capacities.
Kant is a rationalist writing during the Enlightenment (1685–1815). His sentences are full of technical language, are very long, and are incredibly dense. He is one of the most important thinkers of all time, which is even more remarkable by the fact that Kant is a truly awful writer. Kant is famous for revolutionising how we think about just about every aspect of the world - including science, art, ethics, religion, the self and reality. Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg in East Prussia, where he died in 1804. In spite of its horrifying title Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals is one of the small books which are truly great it has exercised on human thought an influence almost ludicrously disproportionate to its size.
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