Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724 in Königsberg, the
capital of Prussia at that time, today the city of Kaliningrad in
the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast. He was the fourth of
eleven children (four of them reached adulthood). Baptized
'Emanuel', he changed his name to 'Immanuel' after learning Hebrew.
In his entire life, he never traveled more than ten miles from
Königsberg.
Kant's ethics are deontological, revolving entirely
around duty rather than emotions or end goals. All actions are
performed in accordance with some underlying maxim or
principle,which are deeply different from each other; it is
according to this that the moral worth of any action is judged.
Kant's ethics are founded on his view of rationality as the
ultimate good and his belief that all people are fundamentally
rational beings. This led to the most important part of Kant's
ethics, the formulation of the Categorical Imperative, which is the
criterion for whether a maxim is good or bad.
Simply put, this criterion amounts to a thought experiment: to
attempt to universalize the maxim (imagine a world where all people
necessarily acted in this way in the relevant circumstances) and
then see if the maxim and its associated action would still be
conceivable in such a world. For instance, holding the maxim
kill anyone who annoys you and applying it universally would
result in a world which would soon be devoid of people and without
anyone left to kill. Thus holding this maxim is irrational as it
ends up being impossible to hold it.
Universalizing a maxim leads to it being valid, or to one of two
contradictions — a contradiction in conception (where the
maxim, when universalized, is no longer a viable means to the end)
or a contradiction in will (where the will of a person contradicts
what the universalization of the maxim implies). The first type
leads to a "perfect duty", and the second leads to an "imperfect
duty."
Kant's ethics focus then only on the maxim that underlies
actions and judges these to be good or bad solely on how they
conform to reason. Kant showed that many of our common sense views
of what is good or bad conform to his system but denied that any
action performed for reasons other than rational actions can be
good (saving someone who is drowning simply out of a great pity for
them is not a morally good act). Kant also denied that the
consequences of an act in any way contribute to the moral worth of
that act, his reasoning being (highly simplified for brevity) that
the physical world is outside our full control and thus we cannot
be held accountable for the events that occur in it.
The Formulation Rule of Kantianism:
- Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same
time will that it would become a universal law.
- Act so that you always treat others as an end, and never as a
means to an end only.
Source: Wikipedia
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