Kantian Ethics Immanuel Kant Is

Kantian Ethics Immanuel Kant is one of the most well-known and one of the most effective proponents of deontological ethics, claiming that an action's motives and not its effects determined its moral value. He also believed that morality could essentially be reduced to a fully rational basis, like other moral philosophers before him, but he criticized previous positions on the subject because the actually morality of actions in these systems was dependent on external criteria (Johnson 2008).

This was true in the sense that behaving rationally (and thus morally) was seen as a means to an end with extrinsic benefits: not cheating makes you trustworthy, which makes you more able to earn money through people's business, for example. Kant's version of a rational deontology insisted that truly moral acts must be born out of a sense of duty or good will, an imperative to do that which is good without any additional reward.

Rational behavior was still moral behavior, and vice versa, but the two terms are almost interchangeable in Kant's system simply because rationality, to Kant, means morality. To achieve this notion, Kant insisted that rational will is autonomous -- that is, self-directing. The rational goodwill acts rationally -- and morally -- because that is the way it makes sense to a rational will act. In other words, the will is the creator of the moral law it adheres to; this is autonomy in Kant's theory of morality (Kemerling 2002).

Heteronomy, on the other hand, refers to direction or influence from an outside source, and this is Kant's key complaint with most moral theories that have come before. Heteronomy can still produce the same behaviors that are moral, such as not cheating, but when the act is not autonomous it cannot be a truly moral act; the actor is being influence by factors other than morality, making the action merely one of prudence. The autonomous good will, however, does the good act simply because the act is good.

The categorical imperative is the basis of Kant's theory of morality. This term is essentially tied to the concept of autonomy, as well. Moral action is an imperative because it is a command or compulsion to act in a certain way, and it is categorical because it applies universally to every situation and every person "simply because we possesses rational wills, without reference to any ends that we might or might not have" (Johnson 2008, sec. 4).

Thus, moral action is the way a rational will behaves in all situations, and it behaves in the same way no matter what the situation -- cheating is always wrong, even if the person you're cheating stole his money from you in the first place. A rational behavior that is categorical in its application cannot be influenced by external factors; an act either intrinsically is or isn't moral. This illustrates, in Kant's view, how adherence to the categorical imperative provides for the autonomous morality of the will.

Because the imperative is something that stems from the rational will, adherence to it is really only adherence to the law that the will itself created. The will, that is, is acting as the will tells itself it has to. Due to the circular nature of the will's imperative to behave a certain way, obedience to the imperative is actually obedience to the self, and obeying moral law requires nothing more or less than complete self-direction.

The premise that moral law -- the categorical imperative -- is born out of the rational will is central to Kant's theory of ethics: "each individual agent regards itself as determining, by its decision to act in a certain way, that everyone (including itself) will always act according to the same general rule in the future" (Kemerling 2002). This is why the imerative is categorical, or universal, and at the same time an entirely anonymous creation of each independent rational will.

Though Kant's ability to employ logical and rhetorical devices is far beyond my own, I do not fully trust the conclusions he has come to. more precisely, I do not trust his assertion that the rational will is responsible for creating the categorical imperative, or that morality can be a truly autonomous act. Rationality is shaped by experience; it is impossible to know ro even conceive of anything in a vacuum.

Determining how one should act is precisely a determination about external events, and rational decisions must be made with information that might be internalized, but was at some point external. Imagine a pure innocent (with the sudden gift of language) presented with a moral question: is cheating wrong? The innocent needs to know what cheating is, what money is, how.