| STRENGTHS of Kantian Ethics: By insisting that we treat people as ends not means, Kantian ethics would (if followed by everyone) lead to the disappearance of racism, sexism, homophobia etc. as all human life is respected.In making us treat others fairly, Kantian ethics avoids one of the disadvantages of utilitarianism which can be used to justify making a minority of people suffer so that the majority are happy (a good example of this is the pleasure Roman citizens gained from watching gladiators fight to the death in their arenas). Kant also forces us to take responsibility for our moral decision making by making us more aware of our duties. In doing so we avoid just selfishly doing what we feel like or giving way to urges and desires that we know are bad for us. By insisting that morality is a matter of duty and intention, Kant is ensuring that we cannot be two faced in the way we handle ethical dilemmas e.g. by concealing out true motives from others in our behaviour (by, for example, making out that we are a kind person in order to impress someone sufficiently so that they will go to bed with us). Kantian ethics acknowledges that all human beings have rights simply because they are human and rational. Such thinking underpins the production of important documents such as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights produced in 1948. Kant’s theory makes morality possible for those who are not by nature kind, compassionate or generous. On Kant’s view, anyone who is rational and capable of understanding where their duty lies can be a good person. By focusing on motives and intentions, Kant makes us reflect rationally on the motives for our actions instead of simply using reason to get where we want to go and do what we want to do via the problem solving process involved with the following of hypothetical imperatives. Kant’s moral philosophy puts us in the driving seat by making us entirely responsible for thinking through the entire process of making moral decisions from start to finish. This forces us to ‘step up to the plate’ rather than passively going along with whatever we get told to do by an external moral authority. Kant’s moral philosophy is exceptionless. This, at least, guarantees consistency when it comes to our moral decision-making (but is the cost of achieving this goal too great when it comes to flexibility? And is Kant demanding too much of us in this respect? WEAKNESSES of Kantian Ethics: For Kant, only rational beings are thought to be capable of making moral decisions. This does not include animals. So they can be treated as means and you would not have any particular duty to look after your pet dog or cat. However, recent research into animal psychology has found that some species (such as African grey parrots, chimpanzees and gorillas do seem to be able to reason in a simple way). Kant does not take our feelings for others into account which seems to fly in the face of our natural attachments to friends and relatives. It is also possible to argue that some of the emotions we feel, such as sympathy or compassion have a moral dimension to them. After all, don’t we tend to think that people who display these emotions are morally nicer people and that people who lack feelings are immoral (like psychopaths)? Kant is not much help when it comes to deciding between conflicting duties. For example, if we are concealing Jews from the Nazis by hiding them in our attic but the Gestapo appear at our front door asking whether we are sheltering any Jews which duty do we follow? On the one hand we could be following a maxim ‘one should not lie’. But the second formulation of the categorical imperative requires that we treat people as ends not means. But if we tell the Gestapo the truth it is arguable that we are treating our Jewish lodgers as a means (as well as probably breaking our promise to protect them). The philosopher called W.D. Ross tried to get round this problem by arguing for exceptions to what he called prima facie or ‘first sight’ duties. For example, we might agree that we generally have a prima facie duty not to kill others, according to the prima facie duty of non-maleficience (not harming others). But if there is no alternative then Ross thinks that a duty to not take a life can be set aside if we have a greater duty to preserve our own life in self defence. In other words, Ross is arguing that we should follow a particular duty unless a conflicting duty appears to make a greater claim on us. Having said this, a criticism of Ross is that he does not provide us with a clear way of knowing what our prima facie duties are and when such exceptions can be made. All he does is to suggest that we can use our intuition to work out which duty to follow. But surely he has abandoned Kantian ethics at this point and is instead appealing to ethical intuitionism as a quite separate method for making moral decisions. Some moral principles cannot be universalised but still make sense in some situations. For example, universalising the principle ‘one ought to use contraception’ would lead to the extinction of the human race if everyone followed this maxim. But surely contraception is useful to prevent the spread of STD’s and to sensibly limit family size if you already have lots of children. By ignoring the consequences of our moral actions, Kant is also requiring us to ignore what common sense intuitively tells us is right e.g. to lie to a madman with an axe about where the person is he is looking for. As you can see from one of the questions below, the inflexibility of Kantian ethics has been an issue. Once a maxim passes the 3 tests of the categorical imperative, it has to be followed no matter what. There can be no exceptions. But one way around this issue has been suggested by the American political philosopher Michael Sandel. He argues that there is still scope within Kantian ethics for the telling of misleading truths. So when, for example, we are confronted with a would-be murderer we can throw them off the scent by saying something true about our friend like ‘I saw them two hours ago in the library’. By going to the trouble of concocting a misleading but technically true statement when a simple lie would do, Sandel thinks that we would still be showing respect for the moral law. And Kant even did this himself. When his writing got him into trouble with the King of Prussia’s censors, he responded by promising ‘As your Majesty’s faithful subject’ not to do so again. This reply was carefully worded so as to only apply while the present, elderly King was still alive. |