W2 - her notes summarized Deontological Ethics & Immanuel Kant

Introduction

• Distinction between subjective/relative conception of morality vs. objective/universal conceptions of morality.
• This course will engage with objective/universal conceptions of morality, holding that there's a universal/objective conception of what's morally good/bad.

Deontological Ethics

• Deontology points to our duties.
• Deontological ethics suggests some actions are impermissible under any circumstances due to the dignity and intrinsic value of human beings.
• Deontology is about our duties, as seen in professional codes for nurses, doctors, and engineers.
• Examples of deontological intuitions:
  • Do not kill: It is wrong to kill one person to save five needing organ transplants, even if the person is a match for all.
  • Do not lie.
• Kant: An 18th-century German philosopher and a founding father of deontological ethics.
• General idea behind deontological approaches: The intention is what matters!
• Kantian ethics: Whether an action is right or wrong is determined by the intentions of the moral agent.
• In Kant’s words: whether an action is right or wrong is determined by the maxim guiding the action. My maxim is: the way I summarize the intention motivating my action.

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

• The book is divided into three sections. The first section provides a good introduction to some of Kant’s most famous ideas.
• “Metaphysics of morals” is about morality/ethics.
• “Groundwork”: we need to provide proper ground to our moral philosophy. This should resolve some of the disagreements we have when discussing ethics.
• In that section that we’ve read, Kant takes as a starting point some of our most common intuitions about morality.

1. The Good Will (pp. 9-12)

• One of the most important concepts in Kant’s moral philosophy is that of the good will.

What is a will?

• A will is “the capacity to act according to the representation of laws, i.e. according to principles” (26).
• The good will is: our capacity to act according to a good moral principle.
• N.B. It’s worth noting that as rational beings, we all have that capacity. A strength of Kant’s moral philosophy is that it moves away from any kind of elitism: there is no need to be especially intelligent, or cultivated, or educated, to know what our duty is; to know what the right thing to do is.
• Now, let’s further clarify what is the good will and why it is so important.

1.1. The Good Will is Good Without Limitation

• Only thing that is good (morally speaking) without limitation = the good will
• “There is nothing it is possible to think of anywhere in the world, or indeed anything at all outside it, that can be held to be good without limitation, excepting only a good will.” (p. 9)
• What does Kant mean by “good without limitation”? = good without qualifications.
• Understanding, wit, the power of judgment (talents of the mind) and power, wealth, honor, health, happiness (gifts of fortune): are all limited in their goodness.
  • How are they limited? They can be used for purposes that are bad. For instance: I can use my intelligence and good judgment to figure out the best way to rob a bank. I can use my courage to lead an insurrection of the US Capitol. etc.
• On the other hand: a good will cannot be used for bad purposes.
  • It is possible that other incentives will conflict with our good will and win over it. For instance, say I own a pub and want to be able to sell t-shirts promoting my pub. I can have the t-shirts made either locally by workers earning fair wages, or in Bangladesh for a fraction of the cost, by workers who are not earning fair wages. Let’s say I am able to afford both. I deeply believe in the importance of workers earning fair wages and my good will is telling me that this would be the way to go… but in the end, it’s possible that I will make a certain calculation, and that my intelligence or my interest in making profit will drive me to pick the cheaper option.
  • This means that in this case, my intelligence or interest in making profit “won” over my good will.
• The good will is that by which we accomplish actions that are morally right. Simply understood for now: acting on my best intentions.

1.2. The Good Will is Good in and of Itself

• “The good will is good not through what it effects or accomplishes, not through its efficacy for attaining any intended end, but only through its willing, i.e., good in itself, and considered for itself, without comparison” (Kant 10)
• The good will is good in and of itself – it is not good because of the effects it brings on.
• The good will can for sure bring about good effects, but that’s not why we say it’s good. It’s good in itself, not as a means to an end.
• This introduces an important idea: for Kant, what makes an action morally good is not its happy or useful consequences; it’s our intentions in doing it.

1.3. The Good Will as the Highest Good in Itself

• Kant provides another argument to convince us of the importance of a good will for morality and ethics: the good will is the highest, most important good we have as human beings.
  • Here, Kant wants to distance himself from those who would argue instead that the pursuit of happiness is really what should matter the most in ethics.
    • N.B. Kant is not saying that happiness is not important; but rather that it should not be the principle guiding our actions.
    • Argument to which Kant is opposed: the good will is good and important only because it can bring about happiness.
• The good will is the highest good; it’s what matters for ethics, for making actions that are morally good. Not happiness.
• Happiness is too difficult to reach and too unstable.

2. Acting From Duty vs. Acting in Accordance with Duty

• The good will is closely related to the concept of (moral) duty. When we act in a morally good way, our action should align in some way/be consistent with some sort of moral duty.
• We have seen that our actions should be motivated solely by good intentions. They should not be done because of whatever positive consequences they may have; they should not be done either because they contribute to our happiness.
• Kant turns to a new problem here: it is obvious, even just intuitively, that certain actions are morally wrong and conflict with our duty. For instance, murder or lie. But a problem that proves more interesting is the following: what about all the actions we do that are in accordance with duty, but that we did for other purposes, i.e. actions that are in accordance with duty but not motivated by duty?

Three Types of Action:

• (1) Actions that are contrary to duty
• (2) Actions that are in conformity with duty
• (3) Actions performed from duty

Example:

• I own a retail store; I sell candies and licorice. A child, Anita, walks in and puts all her coins on the counter, asking for as much licorice as they can buy with that. What should I do?
  • (A) Take advantage of the situation and give Anita less licorice than she can buy. à This is obviously wrong. This example is conflicting with duty. We are not going to talk much about it!

More interesting examples:

• (B) I charge Anita the regular price for her licorice simply because I know it’s the right thing to do;
• (C) I charge Anita the regular price because I realize that other customers in the store could see me taking advantage of her and be put off / not want to come back to my store;
• (D) I charge Anita the regular price because I figure that she might want to come back to the store and it’s in my advantage to make sure she feels like she got enough licorice for her money.
• In (B), (C), and (D), I do the right action. But my motivations are very different from one scenario to the other.
• For Kant and for deontological ethics, the only true morally good action is (B), because my only motivation is to do the right thing. What does this say about me if I do (C) or (D)? Again, we’re not interested in figuring out if I am a good or a horrible person. These actions certainly do not make me a horrible person. But it means that I have let other incentives take more room, be stronger than my good will. So these actions in particular cannot qualify as morally good. They are not morally bad either – they are, so to speak, neutral. You don’t score moral points with those.
• TL;DR: Fulfilling our duty does not mean that we acted in a morally good way. We need to act from duty, not only in conformity with duty, for our action to have a moral worth.

Key Propositions from Kant’s Ethics

• (i) “An action has moral value only if it is done from duty”, not merely in conformity with duty.
• (ii) “an action from duty has its moral value not in the aim that is supposed to be attained by it, but rather in the maxim in accordance with which it is resolved upon” (15)
  • What does this mean? That the result of an action is not what matters.
• (iii) “Duty is the necessity of an action from respect for the law.” (16)
  • … which law are we talking about? See this next section:

3. The Moral Law and Our Maxims

• In order to make sure our actions are made from duty, the maxim guiding each action must have a certain form. It must be universal; admit of no exceptions.
• Reminder: “A maxim is the subjective principle of the volition; the objective principle (i.e., that which would serve all rational beings also subjectively as a practical principle if reason had full control over the faculty of desire) is the practical law.” (Kant 16)
• Maxim: the subjective principle guiding my action – how I summarize my intentions in a specific situation.
• The moral law (here: practical law): is universal. Laws are intended to be universal. This is the form we should aim for in the maxims guiding our actions everyday.
• “I ought never to conduct myself except so that I could also will that my maxim become a universal law.” (Kant 18); “Can you will also that your maxim should become a universal law?” (Kant 19)
• Kant’s test: can we make our maxim a universal law?
• Thinking back of Anita at the candy store. Say I decide to go for the obviously bad option of charging her more than the normal price for her licorice: my maxim would be “I will overcharge customers who are unexperienced or ignorant of certain things”
• If we universalize this principle: we come to the idea that it is morally acceptable to live in a world where business owners take advantage of the ignorance of their customers.
• Kant’s conception of evil is to be understood on an everyday scale; it’s really just about making an exception for oneself. That can lead to very, very bad instances of evil; but also to much smaller, less significant instances of everyday evil. à we will come back to this notion of evil next class.

5. The Broken Promise

• Kant’s famous example in the Groundwork: the broken promise. Can I make a promise with no intention of keeping it? No. Here is why.
• Say I promise that I will deliver your order of sour beer by Friday, while knowing very well that I cannot keep that promise and that it’s going to take more than five days for me to do the delivery. My maxim would be something like “I will break a promise whenever it suits me in order to avoid making a customer unhappy from the start”
• If we think of the universal law this leads us to: ruins the very concept of a promise. If we live in a world where it is universally known that promises are broken whenever convenient, a promise has no value anymore.
• This is also why people generally avoid violating a contract.