“People should always do their duty”. Explain how Kant understood this concept.

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Kant and the categorical imperative

Q:        “people should always do their duty”.  Explain how Kant understood this concept.

Immanuel Kant was an eighteenth century German philosopher, who lived all of his life in the town of Konigsberg, East Prussia.  Kant belied that the only way we can make selfless, rational moral decisions is by acting out of a sense of duty.

Kant was troubled by the apparent inconsistency between the findings if the physical sciences in his day, and that of the accepted moral and religious attitudes and doctrines of his contempories.  What particularly concerned Kant was the fact that everything that occurred in the natural sciences could be explained by the use of strict laws, whereas human beings appeared to behave in a relatively chaotic and unpredictable manor when faced with moral decisions.  Kant believed this to be a contradiction that had to be resolved, and subsequently started work on a deontological, universal moral theory defined by him as “the categorical imperative”, something that he believed should underpin all moral decision-making

Kant starts his argument by making a distinction between a posteriori statements and a priori statements.  Kant held that an a posteriori statement is one that is based on experience of the material world, whereas an a priori statement requires no such knowledge; it is known independent of the phenomenal world.

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Kant then continues to make a further distinction, between analytic statements and synthetic statements.  An analytic statement, he claims, is one that by its very nature is necessarily true, as the predicate is included within the definition of the subject.  For example, “all squares have four sides” is an analytic statement, as the predicate, i.e. the square having four sides, is part of the definition of the subject, “square”.  As well as being necessarily true, an analytic statement is purely explicative, as it tells us nothing new about the subject.  By contrast, a synthetic statement is one in which ...

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