Notes on the basics of Kant

Notes on Immanuel Kant

    Kant developed a reason-based ethical theory i.e. not based on emotions. Ethics and morality are two things that one can discern from correct and proper reasoning. In divine command theory, one may act good according to the will of god to reach heaven or because of the fear of punishment. At the same time, if one proposed heaven for the one who murdered and hell for the saint, people would become murderers. Kant would disagree with this mode of ethics as one’s allegiance is given to the highest bidder. For deontology, intention is everything. Kant’s ethics begins with having a good will. Furthermore, a good will is the only good thing that is good in and of itself in this world. Everything else is contingently good such as strength, it can be used for good or evil. To have good will in a Kantian paradigm can be defined as having a pure practical reason. Once good will is established, the next step is the categorical imperative, to will that your maxim be made a universal law. In simpler terms, the categorical imperative is would you want all people, in all places and times, to do what you will do in an ethical dilemma. If one cannot have a consensus of what is good and the truth then they are not thinking properly. Non-moral dilemmas are a matter of taste and personal subjective preferences cannot be universalized. 

    Lying is always wrong for Kant. Therefore, if a murderer asked him where his prey went, Kant would give up the life of the prey to avoid lying. If you want all people in places and times who are in difficult situations to lie if they think it will help them get out of it, honesty would be meaningless as one could always rationalize lying. Once something is universalized, one’s justifications become meaningless. One may argue that a person from 500 years ago may have a different value universalized than a person from today, Kant would rebut by claiming that the reason that determines universalization transcends culture and time such that even a child can make a categorical imperative judgment. However, it is too easy to rationalize ethical dilemmas. Stealing is always wrong according to Kant because society would collapse if all people in all times and places steal. If someone is starving to death they could rationalize it by stating, stealing when one is about to die is always good because society would collapse if all people in all times and places starved to death. Kant would disagree with the latter reasoning as they are turning the universal into a particular, even if looking at the consequences of an action seems logical. 

    Hypothetical imperative is for non-ethical issues, for example, to get an A in one’s class, one must attend class a certain number of times and write a certain number of papers and get certain scores. The hypothetical imperative is the way to achieve the A, the steps required to accomplish a goal. 

    Kingdom of ends, always treat others as an end unto themselves, never as merely a means, perhaps the greatest feature of Kantian ethics. 

    Phenomena is anything one can perceive with their senses, the world created out of experience. Noumena is how the world truly is. The noumena passes through the senses for humans to try to make sense of it, although it is completely beyond comprehension. To make truth claims regarding the noumenal world phenomenological world is illogical according to Kant, one cannot make claims about the noumenal world but cannot deny its existence either. An analogy for this is the color spectrum, we may only see visible colors but to say that they are the only colors is untrue i.e. ultraviolet and infrared light. There is an external unknowable world but through our senses, it becomes a limited reality. Perhaps this is a Hegelian dialectic even if his idea is distinct rather than a synthesis or the fact that Hegel came after Kant. The thesis is the world beyond the cave according to Plato, a primary world, with the material world being the shadow on the walls. The antithesis could be the material world according to Aristotle who argued that the material world is the primary reality that is empirically understood and the world beyond is an abstraction. The synthesis could be Kant’s idea of the noumenal and phenomenological world as explained above. 

    Kant poses the question of how synthetic judgments a priori are possible. To understand this question, Kant defines two types of knowledge: a priori, which is independent of all experience, and a posteriori, which is based on experience. He also distinguishes between two forms of knowledge: analytic, which is true by nature of conceptual relations, and synthetic, which includes something new and is dependent on something beyond the concepts themselves. Kant argues that establishing the synthetic a priori as a third mode of knowledge would allow him to push back against skepticism about causation and metaphysical knowledge. He believes that we do have synthetic a priori knowledge, such as in mathematics, but he assumes the burden of providing a philosophical proof of this knowledge. Kant also distinguishes between two stems of human cognition: sensibility and understanding. Sensibility is responsible for giving us objects through intuition, while understanding allows us to think about those objects through concepts. Both are necessary for possible experience. Kant's strategy is to argue that some intuitions and concepts are pure, meaning they are contributed entirely by the mind and independent of anything empirical. Knowledge generated on this basis, under certain conditions, can be synthetic a priori. This insight is known as Kant's "Copernican revolution." Kant argues that many claims of traditional rationalist metaphysics violate the criteria he establishes. He seeks to establish the limits of how far reason can legitimately proceed in answering questions that cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason.