Kant's Theory and Objection

Kant's Theory and Objection

The Ethical Theorist Immanuel Kant, was born in 1724 and died in 1804 at the age of 80. He was the first philosopher to publish in Germany, and his theory in which he devised was called Deontology. Deontology was a theory that discussed duties and obligations and even further, to figure out what duties we have. His central idea was also what makes actions right is that the person has right motives and intentions. He defined duty as an act type, which would be morally wrong for person S to avoid if person S knew they had to do that duty. For example, a US citizen has a "duty to vote", in this case it would be morally wrong for that person to not vote. He also defined right as an act type that person S is entitled to, and it is morally wrong for anyone to prevent person S to do that act type. In this example Kant stated that ever human has a "right to life", so consequentially it is morally wrong for anyone to prevent a human from living. Kant went even deeper with duties and developed Perfect duties Vs. Imperfect duties. He stated the person S has a perfect duty to do an action, so whenever S can do an act of type A, S has a duty to perform that act no matter what. Then he explained that an imperfect duty is somewhat similar but differed in the sense that the person has the duty to do an action only sometimes, but he does not have a perfect duty to do act A, for example one should give to charity sometimes as an obligation, but not entitled to all the time.

Kant also discussed Maxims; he assumed that whenever a person engages in any given action, she acts according to a maxim. In other words, if a person find themselves in a particular circumstance more than once, they will adopt the maxim they previously used and commit themselves to that act. So basically it all depends on that the agent thinks her circumstances are and what she thinks she is doing. For example, a person wants to borrow money from a friend, their maxim would be, "when I'm broke and can money no other way, I will borrow some money from a friend" regardless if they would be able to pay them back.

Deontology also discusses willing consistently. If a person wills consistently, than everything he/she wills could come true at the same time, whereas if a person wills inconsistently then obviously what she wills does not come true at the same time. One of Kant's theories of Categorical Imperatives discusses universalizability. In Kant's theory of CI1, he states that an act is morally right if and only if its maxim is universalizable. The maxim of an action is said to be universalizable if the agent of X can consistently will that everyone, whenever in a situation like his/hers, acts on a maxim like the maxim on which he/she performs it. Therefore, he says that it is wrong to lie because if everyone lied then you wouldn't be able to trust people in society. Kant's examples of perfect duties to self would be to not commit suicide, and a perfect duty to others would be to not make a lying promise. He also gave examples of an imperfect duty to self which would be to not let talent "rust", and the duty to others is to give to charity. What Kant meant by a lying promise is if someone needs something from another person, but knows that they won't be able to repay them back. So Kant's argument here is that if everyone were to use lying promise to borrow money, then no one would lend money to