Critically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Kantian Ethics.

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Gavin Huggett

Critically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Kantian Ethics.

Kantian ethics originates in the ethical writings of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), which remain the most influential attempt to justify universal ethical principles that respect the dignity and equality of human beings without assuming theological claims or a metaphysical conception of the good. Kant’s systematic, critical philosophy centres on an account of reasoning about action, which he uses to justify principles of duty and virtue and an account of the relationship between morality and hope.
Both Kant’s ethics and contemporary Kantian ethics have been widely criticized for preoccupation with rules and duties, and for lack of concern with virtues, happiness or personal relationships. However, these criticisms may apply more to recent Kantian ethics than to Kant’s own ethics.
Kant’s main writing on ethics and politics can be found in, The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals 1785; throughout these writings he insists that we cannot obtain ethical conclusions from metaphysical or theological knowledge of the good or from a claim that human happiness is the sole good. We lack the basis for a teleological account of ethical reasoning, which therefore cannot be simply a matter of mean to an end reasoning towards a fixed and knowable good.

Kant’s alternative account proposes simply that reasons for action must be reasons for all. He insists that we can have reasons for recommending only those principles of action which could be adopted by all concerned, whatever their particular desires, social identities, roles or relationships. Respectively, reasoning must reject any principles which cannot be principles for all concerned, which Kant characterizes as non-universal principles. Kant calls this reasoning the ‘supreme principle of morality’ and the ‘categorical Imperative’.

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Kant claims that the categorical imperative can be used to justify the underlying principles of human duties.  Suppose that everyone were to adopt the principle of promising falsely: since there would then be much false promising, trust would be destroyed and many would find that they could not get their false promises accepted, contrary to the theory of universal agreement of the principle of false promising. A maxim of promising falsely is not universal, so the categorical imperative requires us to reject it. Equivalent arguments can be used to show that principles such as those of coercing or doing violence ...

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