Immanuel Kant 1724 – 1804

Kantian ethics, named after the philosopher Immanuel Kant, is often taught alongside utilitarianism because it provides a good contrast. It has a very different approach to ethics. Whereas utilitarianism is all about the desirability of the consequences, for Kant the desirability of the consequences is irrelevant.

Students often find Kantian ethics more difficult to grasp than utilitarianism and their essays on Kantian ethics often gain lower marks. There are a number of reasons for this. Understanding why this is so will help you to avoid running into the same problems.

Firstly, Kantian ethics is less intuitively obvious. Even before you begin to study utilitarianism you know what it means to maximise happiness or to bring about the best possible consequences. It is far less obvious to see how you can decide what is right and wrong without taking the desirability of the consequences into account.

Secondly, although both theories use technical vocabulary, the language used in Kantian ethics is less familiar and harder to grasp.

Thirdly, the different bits of utilitarianism don’t depend on one another as closely as the different bits of Kantian ethics. You don’t need to get every detail of the hedonic calculus correct before you can explain what Mill meant by higher pleasures. With Kantian ethics each bit is like a cog in an old clock. You don’t properly understand the workings of the clock unless you can say what each cog is doing. In the same way, you don’t really understand Kantian ethics unless you can explain how all the bits fit together.

You might want to think of Kantian ethics as a machine or an algorithm for deciding on whether something is morally acceptable or not. An algorithm is simply a process to be followed. Think of a computer program. There is an input, the program then follows certain rules to do something with this input, and then there is an output. Or think of a recipe. There are the ingredients, these are dealt with following the step by step instructions. And then there is the output, the cake or whatever it was that was being prepared. So it is with Kantian ethics. There is an input, i.e. your proposed course of action and your thinking that is leading you to make that choice. Kantian ethics then subjects this to a particular process. Finally, there is an output, a decision on whether what you are proposing is permissible or impermissible.

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Since all the different bits of Kantian ethics fit together like cogs in a machine, perhaps the best way of ensuring you don’t go wrong is to learn the various definitions word for word. You can learn them just as if you were learning lines in a play. Aim to be word perfect. Of course, you need to be able to do more than simply recite the definitions. You also need to explain how they fit together and give examples of how the theory can be applied to different situations. However, if you can't define the terms accurately and precisely then you will have much less success in explaining how all the parts fit together. Trying to explain Kantian ethics with only a rough idea of what the terms mean is like trying to build a clock with only a rough idea of how big the cogwheels need to be.

 

 

 

 

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