Kant

1. Kant Moral law, good will and duty, the categorical imperative and freedom

2. Definition of morality • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - First published Wed Apr 17, 2002; substantive revision Mon Mar 14, 2011 • The term “morality” can be used either • descriptively to refer to some codes of conduct put forward by a society or, • some other group, such as a religion, or • accepted by an individual for her own behavior or • normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.

3. Definition of morality • What “morality” is taken to refer to plays a crucial, although often unacknowledged, role in formulating ethical theories. To take “morality” to refer to an actually existing code of conduct put forward by a society results in a denial that there is a universal morality, one that applies to all human beings. This descriptive use of “morality” is the one used by anthropologists when they report on the morality of the societies that they study. “Morality” has also been taken to refer to any code of conduct that a person or group takes as most important. • Among those who use “morality” normatively, all hold that “morality” refers to a code of conduct that applies to all who can understand it and can govern their behavior by it. In the normative sense, morality should never be overridden, that is, no one should ever violate a moral prohibition or requirement for non-moral considerations. All of those who use “morality” normatively also hold that, under plausible specified conditions, all rational persons would endorse that code.

4. Who is he? • Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) • Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg, East Prussia in 1724. He attended the Collegium Fridiricianum at the age of eight, a Latin school that taught primarily classicism. After over eight years of study there, he went into the University Of Königsberg, where he spent his academic career focusing on philosophy, mathematics and physics. The death of his father had a strong effect on Kant, he left the university and earned a living as a private tutor. However, in 1755 he accepted the help of a friend and resumed study, receiving his doctorate in 1756. • He taught at the university and remained there for 15 years, beginning his lectures on the sciences and mathematics, though over time he covered most branches of philosophy. In spite of his growing reputation as an original thinker, he did not gain tenure at the university until 1770, receiving his professorship of logic and metaphysics. He continued writing and lecturing at Königsberg for the next 27 years, drawing many students there due to his rationalist and hence, unorthodox approach to religious texts. This led to political pressure from the government of Prussia, and in 1792, he was barred from teaching or writing on religious subjects by the king, Fredrich William II. Kant dutifully obeyed the injunction until the death of the king five years later, returning to the writing and lecturing of his ideas. The year following his retirement, he published a summary of his views on religion. He died in 1804. • Kant devised a model, an individual epistemology, by examining the basis of human knowledge and its limits. He brought together the ideas of rationalism, influential thinkers such as Leibniz and Wolff, with empiricism as proposed by David Hume. Kant's critical philosophy is presented in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781); the idea of critique is to establish and investigate the legitimate limits of human knowledge. Knowledge of sensible objects must form itself in advance to the structures of the human mind's ability to reason, and therefore all objects conform themselves a priori in such a relation -legitimate knowledge of objects is limited to how they appear for us.

5. The moral law • There is an objective moral law • We know this law through reason • Moral rules exist and they are binding • We know the moral law without reference to any consequences

6. What kind of statements are moral statements according to Kant? • A priori = knowable without reference to experience • A posteriori = knowable through experience • Examples intuition