Kant\'s Groundwork Reading Notes - Lecture 1 PDF

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This has notes from the reading Kants introduction and Kants Groundwork....

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PHIL 34905 Biomedical Ethics August 31, 2021 

Kant’s Introduction: o Action should be motivated by goodwill & duty and the morality of action is not measured by its consequences. o Kant is deeply aware of the certain kind of disanalogy between beings like humans and other sorts of beings in nature (rocks, planets, & atoms). It is not a coincidence that the planets behave as they do given the laws of nature. o For humans we can choose what to do. This is another peculiar power we can choose what to do based on thinking about what to do if we have certain reasons to act one way and not another. o We can reflect on those reasons we can deliberate, and we can come to a view about what to do and then we do it. o Kant thinks that the will and our reason sets us apart from other sorts of things in nature.  Other things in nature act in accordance with laws from a kind of necessity but rational beings like us act from a representation of laws or a concept of laws o Acting morally is how we act from necessity and how we govern ourselves. o Otherwise, we are battered around by our own impulses’ appetites and the world around us  Kant thinks we escape from that by making ourselves law-governed beings by acting with an eye to morality o Kant thinks we can figure out what morality requires just by thinking about thinking about morality. o Kant’s thought is it's a separate whether morality is a kind of real thing whether there's anything to it whether it has any content whether it can bind us whether we do act morally given these preconditions and in principle it's a separate question what our duties are. o Kant ultimately believes that we can determine what the supreme principle of morality is and what most or all our duties are or aren't just by examining those preconditions just by investigating the very nature of moral thinking.

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Kant’s Groundwork: o The main point of the lecture is to get across what Kant is up to and what Kantian ethical theory is all about. o Kant is focused abstractly on the nature of morality, and it takes a long time for Kant to get into what he really thinks morality requires. o One way to think about the groundwork is it's one overarching argument for the conclusion that there is really something to morality in the sense that morality gives genuine binding requirements and we as agents can act based on moral requirements.

PHIL 34905 Biomedical Ethics o Categorical Imperative: An unconditional moral obligation which is binding in all circumstances and is not dependent on a person's inclination or purpose (In Kantian Ethics).  Example: The categorical imperative is an idea that the philosopher Immanuel Kant had about ethics. Kant said that an "imperative" is something that a person must do. For example, if a person wants to stop being thirsty, it is imperative that they have a drink. o Hypothetical Imperative: In the ethics of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, a rule of conduct that is understood to apply to an individual only if he or she desires a certain end and has chosen (willed) to act on that desire.  Example: If you desire X (or not X), you should (or should not) do Y. The conduct urged in a hypothetical imperative may be the same as or different from that commanded by a conventional moral law. For example, if you want to be trusted, you should always tell the truth. If you want to become rich, you should steal whenever you can get away with it and if you want to avoid heartburn, you should not eat capsaicin.  Hypothetical imperatives are contrasted with “categorical” imperatives, which are rules of conduct that, by their form— Do (or do not do) Y —are understood to apply to all individuals, no matter what their desires. o The Formula of Universal Law states that you should only act for those reasons which have the following characteristic: you can act for that reason while at the same time willing that it be a universal law that everyone adopt that reason for acting.  Example: The maxim to promise falsely to repay a loan, to get money easily: If this maxim were a universal law, then promises to repay, made by those requesting loans, would not be believed, and one could not get easy money by promising falsely to repay. o The Formula of Humanity contains the command that we ought never to treat persons merely as means. ... First, Kant holds that if a person treats someone merely as a means, then she acts wrongly. The Formula of Humanity encompasses an absolute constraint against treating persons merely as means. o Material cognition considers some object and formal cognition is concerned with the very form of understanding and with the universal rules of thinking as such. o Ethics and Physics have laws, and they are objects and that's what these disciplines study they study the actual laws and objects in their purview. Physics studies laws of nature the laws according to which everything happens and ethics studies what cannot cause the laws of freedom....