Deontology and Kant's Ethics Chapter 4

Duty-Based Ethics: Kant and Deontology

• Deontological ethics emphasizes the relationship between duty and the morality of an action, considering certain types of acts as intrinsically right or wrong, regardless of their consequences.
• Deontology is derived from the Greek word "deon," meaning duty.

Immanuel Kant

• Born on April 22, 1724, in Konigsberg, Germany, as the fourth child of nine offspring of very religious parents.
• Kant rejected the puritanical pietism that prevailed in his family and had a deep moral sense.
• He studied at the University of Konigsberg, where he took up classics, physics, and philosophy.
• Kant lived an unexciting life, never traveling beyond 30 miles of his native town.

Kantian Ethics

• Kant's ethical theory, known as the categorical imperative, holds that the rightness or wrongness of an act does not lie in its results or effects.
• He sought to establish a universally accepted moral principle, binding upon all humanity.
• The human person is subject to the internal condition of humanity, i.e., their good will.

Good Will

• For Kant, the highest good is a moral good, and the only thing that is good in itself is a good will.
• A good will refers to intention or motive, and a person has a good will if they do what is right with the correct motive.
• Submission to one's duty is not due to external demands but due to internal decision-making.
• The only correct motive for moral actions is duty, and doing what is right for other reasons (e.g., pleasure, prestige, or avoidance of guilt) is acting from the wrong motive.

Acting from Duty

• Duty is considered as that which an individual ought to do despite the inclination to do otherwise.
• Acting with a good will means doing the right thing for the right reason, which is respect for the moral law itself.
• Kant distinguishes between acting from duty and acting in accord with duty, emphasizing the importance of acting from duty for the right reasons.

Categorical Imperative

• The categorical imperative is the principle that describes the sense of unconditional duty that lies within all of us.
• It is the source of "the moral law within," which is the source of our feeling that we ought to perform or refrain from performing certain types of actions, regardless of our desires.
• The moral law is absolute and can allow no exception, according to Kant.