Walter wrote:
Robert does identify a problem in Kant's ethics, though I do not believe it is as severe as he renders it. (My reading of Kant is open to criticism. What an odd thing to say. A case of "one thought too many"?)
Robert Paul Reed College
I think we can safely claim that Kant was very much attuned to the importance of motive and purpose in assessing the moral worth of actions and maxims. This is why Kant typically provides these aspects of a maxim in his discussions of them. His "maxim schema" is more accurately represented by: "In circumstances C, I will do A for the purpose of P." The lying promise discussion is the best known of Kant's maxims. It is through such a structure that any action is defined as the kind of maxim it is - i.e., prudential, morally permissible, forbidden, etc.. As I see it, a maxim *expresses* the motive and purpose of the agent and the action comes to be *defined* as the particular action it is through the relationship between motive, purpose and act expressed in the maxim. I think that an action on its own is not open to moral assessment on Kant's terms. (It's legal status is a different matter.) This despite his claim near the end of his life, that the act of lying is always categorically forbidden. (I believe Kant at times errs in applying his theory to specific circumstances.) In his prime though, Kant recognized that motive and purpose are indispensible ingredients of moral worth. The examples in the Groundwork all ride on this recognition. In the case of duties of wide latitude, judgment is required and, yes, Kant could have said more about the kind of judgment that interested Aristotle. I think he simply had other fish to fry.
We have good grounds for attributing to Kant a perspicuous recognition of the differences involved in performing the act of C: giving to charity (acting benevolently): 1. Cing from the motive of augmenting (or in W's case, restoring) one's reputation 2. Cing because one wants to help others in need and this from a love of mankind 3. Cing from the motive in 2 where C is morally permissible (promotes the dignity, moral worth, of agent and recipient and is thus universalizable.) 4. Cing in order to soothe one's conscience (i.e., I murder Paul Stone and then make a huge donation to the Evangelical Society for the Elimination of Terror in the World.)
I hope most of this is right.
Cheers, Walter
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005, Robert Paul wrote:
Walter is right: this is a poorly defined (or expressed) maxim: but such vagueness and generality in the formulation of maxims never seems to have given Kant much pause. He seems not to have realized that the specificity of maxims can change the outcome of their tests against the Procrustean illusion of the CI: given the maxim schema 'do x,' the generality or specificity of the substitution instances of x obviously matter. But Kant never distinguishes between the maxim 'tell a lie,' and the maxim 'tell a lie in order to save the life of an innocent person,' except to deny that the latter is a different action from the former, as if 'lying' were all one thing and instances of it all the same 'action.' What one might propose to do is seldom fine-grained enough in Kant's own account to allow for such distinctions. It as if he were blind to the distinction between 'feed a child' and 'feed a starving child.'
Robert Paul The Reed Institute ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
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