Kant – 1

Book: http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/Kant%20-%20groundwork%20for%20the%20metaphysics%20of%20morals%20with%20essays.pdf

Kant offers a different account of why we have a categorical duty to respect the dignity of persons and not to use people as means merely even for good ends.

It wasn’t until he was fifty-seven that he published his first major work and it was worth the wait. The book was the critique of pure reason, perhaps the most important work in all of modern philosophy. And a few years later Kant wrote the groundwork for the metaphysics of morals.

In the groundwork for the metaphysics of morals, Kant gives us an account of the most powerful accounts we have, of what freedom really is.

Kant rejects utilitarianism (Bentham’s idea). He thinks that the individual person, all human beings, have a certain dignity that commands our respect. The reason the individual is sacred or the bearer of rights, according to Kant, doesn’t stem from the idea that we own ourselves, but instead from the idea that we are all rational beings. We are all rational beings simply means that we are beings who are capable of reason. We’re also autonomous beings which is to say that we are all beings capable of acting and choosing freely. Now, this capacity for reason and freedom isn’t the only capacity we have. We also have the capacity for pain and pleasure for suffering and satisfaction. Kant admits the utilitarian were half a right. Of course we seek to avoid pain and we like pleasure. Kant doesn’t deny this. What he does deny is Bentham’s claim that pain and pleasure are our sovereign masters. He thinks that’s wrong. Kant’s thinks that it’s our rational capacity that makes us distinctive, that makes us special, that set us apart from and above mere animal existence. It makes us something more than just physical creatures with appetites.

Now we often think of freedom as simply consisting in doing what we want or in the absence of obstacles to getting what we want. That’s one way of thinking about freedom. But this isn’t Kant’s idea of freedom. Kant has a more stringent demanding notion of what it means to be free, and though stringent and demanding, if you think it through, it’s actually pretty persuasive.

Kant’s reason is as follows:

When we, like animals, seek after pleasure or the satisfaction of our desires of the avoidance pain. When we do that, we aren’t really acting freely. Why not? we are really acting as the slaves of those appetites and impulses. I didn’t choose this particular hunger or that particular appetite, and so when I act to satisfy it, It’s just acting according to natural necessity. And for Kant, freedom is the opposite of necessity. There was an advertising slogan for the soft drink Sprite a few years ago. The Slogan was “Obey your thirst, you can’t beat the feeling”. There’s a Kantian insight. Buried in that, Sprite advertising slogan that in a way is Kant’s point. When you go for Sprite, or Pepsi, you might think, you are really choosing freely from Sprite versus Pepsi, but you’re actually obeying something, a thirst, or maybe a desire manufactured or messaged by advertising. You are obeying a prompting that you yourself haven’t chosen or created.

And here it’s worth noticing Kant’s specially demanding idea of freedom. What way of acting, how can my will be determined if not by the prompting sub nature or my hunger or my appetite, or my desires?

Kant’s answer is: to act freely is to act autonomously. And to act autonomously is to act according to a law that I give myself, not according to the physical laws of nature or the laws of cause and effect, which include my desire to eat or to drink, or to choose this food in a restaurant over that.