Kant Categorical Imperative Essay

For example, “Pay back your debts unless it would be more respectful to not do so,” is an example of a universal maxim.

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It’s wrong to cut people in general, but there are circumstances that override the importance of the harms caused by cutting people, such as when a surgeon is given permission by the patient to do what’s necessary to be healed.

Many people have thought that Kant’s theory is false because it requires us to accept absurd implications, such as the idea that the situation is irrelevant to morality.

If we could use the categorical imperative to prove that surgeons shouldn’t cut people to heal them, then we could think the categorical imperative was proven false.

Some people use Kant’s “fanatical” devotion to honesty as evidence that Kant’s categorical imperative requires us to accept such absurdities.

Hare thought that Kant confused universality with generality, but that is not obvious.

Kant Categorical Imperative Essay

What is obvious is that many people do seem to confuse the two. Hypothetical imperatives aren’t situational Categorical imperatives are overriding because they apply to people no matter what their interests or desires are; but hypothetical imperatives depend on our goals.The point is that the difference between categorical and hypothetical imperatives aren’t based on our situation. The strongest evidence that Kant dismissed the importance of the situation and consequences was his essay, “On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns” (also known as “On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives.”)5 It is here that Kant famously declares that it’s wrong to lie to a murderer who is looking for your friend to kill her when the murder asks if she is hiding in your house.“Hypothetical imperative” isn’t Kant’s term for “situational ethics,” it’s Kant’s term for nonmoral normativity—right and wrong that doesn’t refer to morality at all. However, it’s not obvious that this essay proves that Kant’s moral theory requires us to ignore the situation for at least two reasons: First, Kant could have a strange devotion to honesty, perhaps out of prejudice.Ermanno Bencivenga argues that Kant’s categorical imperative was developed in an attempt to understand and describe moral rationality rather than a comprehensive moral theory to be used in practical everyday moral reasoning.3 Kant’s theory is incomplete in the sense that it’s not obvious how the imperative can our ought to be applied because we don’t fully understand rationality and we need to know what a rational person can will. Hare, when people insist that there can be no situational considerations of universal laws, we must point out that universality and generality are two different things.Different conceptions of rationality could effect the answers the categorical imperative give us: Depending on how the concept of a rational agent is articulated, some forms of behavior will be required (or ruled out) by the kind of logical argument indicated above; that is, this kind of argument will prove them (or the avoiding of them) to be a . Moral laws are morally whenever they apply to everyone in the same way—but situational requirements can apply to everyone in the same way.However, his moral theory—the “categorical imperative”—does not seem to imply absolutism, as many think.I will discuss two reasons people think Kant rejected the importance of the situation for morality: (1) They confuse universality with generality, (2) they confuse hypothetical imperatives with situational ethics, and (3) Kant said we should be honest no matter what.I personally don’t understand how morality could function without considering the situation, and I see reason to reject such an idea.First, consider the simple action of cutting someone. No, surgeons have to cut people sometimes to heal them, and surgeons can’t know when or how they ought to cut people without understanding a person’s health problems and how cutting the person is necessary to heal them.However, Bencivenga thinks this is often misguided.We think we can use reason to understand the world through natural science and it would be wrong to use past assumptions of the natural world to debunk current scientific findings.