Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
In these times, we do not just need to be good, or have a hazy sense of right and wrong but what we actually need is strength and courage to actually act on our beliefs and values. Kant maintained that goodness is something that gives " a positive command to a man, namely to bring all his capacities and inclinations under his (reason's) control and so to rule over himself... For unless reason holds the reins of government in its own hands, man's feelings and inclinations play the master over him." (Kant 1991, 208)
The concept of good will is also closely associated with Kant's theory of goodness. Kant felt that for a person to display signs of goodness, he must work with a good will. Good will is something which doesn't need any verification or additional evidence of it being a good and positive force. He further explained that "the only thing good without qualification is a 'good will'. While the phrases 'he's good hearted', 'she's good natured' and 'she means well' are common, 'the good will' as Kant thinks of it is not the same as any of these ordinary notions. The idea of a good will is closer to the idea of a 'good person', or, more archaically, a 'person of good will'... The basic idea is that what makes a good person good is his possession of a will that is in a certain way 'determined' by, or makes its decisions on the basis of, the moral law. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The altered or modified definition of goodness would thus read...
A person would be said to have goodness if he doesn't let go of his values when they are put to the test. If a person despite being good and virtuous otherwise is unable to act according to his beliefs under odd circumstances, he cannot be said to possess goodness. For example, Sara is a young girl with good moral values and a strong sense of right and wrong. She encounters a tough situation during an examination when she feels that if she resorts to unfair means, she might be able to get the position she has been working very hard for. However she knows that by doing this, she would also be violating the rights of others and not acting according to her values. Now Sara has two options: she can either choose the right but tougher route or wrong but easier path. This is where courage steps in. If she has the courage, she would opt for the latter option and thus be considered someone with goodness. This is what we mean when we say that courage is an important component of goodness.
References
Oxford English Dictionary, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1978 vol. III.
Kant, Immanuel, 1991, the Metaphysics of Morals, M. Gregor (tr.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Kant's Moral Philosophy": Retrieved online May 1st, 2005 at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral
Living authentically "as if" my actions had the force of reason strikes me as very similar to living in deliberate opposition to reason -- which, in a contemporary milieu, often entails structuring a life according to personal experience or even faith. In an era in which the irrational is widely accepted and even embraced -- through the thought of Freud, Kierkegaard, and others in addition to Nietzsche himself --
Kant says "The inherent value of the world, the summun bonum [highest good], is freedom in accordance with a will which is not necessitated to action. Freedom is thus the inner value of the world." How would Nietzsche evaluate this statement? In contrast to the philosopher Immanuel Kant, Frederick Nietzsche often expressed his anger over the ways that pagan and Classical values, as manifest in ancient Rome and ancient Greece, had
In Cultural Ethical Relativism, Universalism, Absolutism (2005), it was mentioned that Kant said that people engage a particular space in creation and morality can be figured out in one supreme directive of reason or imperative that all responsibilities and duties drawn from; Kant described an imperative as any intention which asserts a particular act or inaction to be compulsory; a hypothetical imperative requires action in a particular condition: "if I
The difference resides in the use of the vocabulary. Values can not be decided upon in an arbitrary manner. In his Two Treatises of government, Locke states that it is people's very own nature which endows them with rights. Under these circumstances, civil society can be considered to exist before the birth of the state. It is society which guarantees the legitimacy of the state and which guarantees a principle
Guilt, it seems, is an emotion, and in an a priori, deontological account of morality, emotions do not factor into the judgment. This issue is less pronounced under Mill's view, but still, the issue of guilt seems to be missing from a strict utilitarian calculus (or, at the very least, it does not seem to be of great importance in the judgment). "Crimes and Misdemeanors," draws some inspiration from
Morality therefore comes within but is associated with the results generated within as well: The force of an internal sanction derives from the feeling of pleasure which is experienced when a moral law is obeyed and the feeling of pain which accompanies a violation of it (Denise, Peterfreund, and White, 1996, 202). Kant sees the true nature of the age and stated, Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is