PHIL 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Immanuel Kant, Moral Agency, Categorical Imperative
Document Summary
Immanuel kant, duties toward the body in regard to life . 1724 1804: from his lectures on ethics taken by students :o, weren"t published til. 1924: over 4 decades he gave this lecture almost 30 times. Laws of nature, e. g. gravity (newton): universal, necessary, knowable. Is there a moral law: it"s not based on culture, and even though kant is religious he doesn"t bring in. Kant is a hardcore rationalist who focuses on motive / duty: kant is trying to do for morality what newton did for physics figure out the fundamental rules of nature. E. g. all bodies have mass and a gravitational force. Morality not based on consequences, but on motive purity. Motive duty reason avoiding self-contradiction = categorical imperative. Act only on a maxim of conduct that you can will to become a universal law o. If everybody"s doing it involves you in self-contradiction, then it violates the moral law o.