Kant's Moral Philosophy

Immanuel Kant is possibly the most important figure in Enlightenment

philosophy

and, as Professor Stalloff has just shown you, his treatment of epistemological and ontological problems is profound and synthesizes many trends that have been present in the history of continental rationalism and also in British empiricism and The rest of his

philosophy

,

moral

philosophy and political philosophy, also addresses themes that had been developed in the earlier history of

moral

thought, in particular Kant's moral philosophy is a reaction to the skeptical naturalistic type of approach. and reductionist philosophy, morality and politics that was Featured by David Hume in Professor Stalloff's lecture yesterday on Hume and Morals.

I think he discovered that Hume held the view that morally praiseworthy actions or actions that were pleasant to ourselves or others or useful to ourselves or others now present all kinds of difficulties. Attached to this kind of view on one level, it is immediately attractive because it makes common sense, it is more or less consistent with our experience of the world, but there is a deep problem with it because to some extent it tends to subjectivize ethics, makes ethics a matter of opinion, taste or sentiment because, ultimately, the foundation of our moral judgments from Hume's point of view are our feelings of approval that come from the utility or pleasure we derive from the behavior of ourselves or others. people.

This greatly upset Immanuel Kant. Kant wrote that it was David Hume who awakened him from his dogmatic slumber, who made him truly understand the strength and depth of English empiricism and the skeptical approach to morality and politics that characterizes Kant. A very religious thinker, it is difficult to immediately discern when you read his work because it is very dry, technical and sophisticated in terms of its logical procedures, but Khan came from a pietist family, a family of German Protestants who were extremely devoted to religion and the religious values. Kant is a strong religious believer in contrast to Hume.

Kant is a very pious, almost solemn thinker, and when he saw Hume's moral theory at first he tried to refute it but he couldn't and he spent 11 years reading Hume trying to solve it. One only participates in an 11-year reading project of the same philosopher if it bothers you a lot and Kant was very bothered by the implications in Hume which were essentially that morality is a matter of taste, a matter of feeling, a matter of feeling, it is now a simple empirical fact that people's feelings are different. You go from one person to another and if you ask them what their favorite color is or what their favorite food is or what their favorite piece of music is you will find that these opinions vary from person to person and this bothered Kant greatly. seems to imply that God's justice that the supreme divine moral law is an illusion or a myth does not apply to human beings hume suggests that morality is really a branch of anthropology and this tremendously bothered Count said I can't stand to see morality taken to the level of a miserable anthropology, so let us go beyond miserable anthropology, to a universal system of moral judgment that is completely binding on all rational beings in all circumstances;

That is the kind of religious truth that Kant wants to formulate in the language of German idealism. Let me conclude from the beginning so that you understand what the essence of Kant is. He is trying to create a rapprochement between Christian religious beliefs and the intellectual state of Western culture once it developed Newtonian mechanics and its social and political consequences. and concomitant morals, so Kant is trying to reconcile his faith in the god of the Bible, his belief in heaven and supreme moral justice, and he is trying to do so in an intellectually serious and sophisticated way, one that does not bang the desk and demand the abdication of your rationality but is the climax of the perfection of rationality, so it is an enormously ambitious task that Kant now undertakes in a book called The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals which I think You should read if you are interested in finding out.

On Kantian Morals is the most accessible of Kant's books, which is not saying much, those of you who have read Kant before can understand how his prohibitive prose is one of the problems with German philosophy as a whole, is that there is not much in it for clarity or elegance of style easy and directly accessible philosophers tend to write in English for better or worse more difficult philosophy such as Kant's is found among the German right German-speaking authors now the book of Khan The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals states that Kant wishes to once again be the Newton of the moral world.

I have returned again and again to the topic of physical science, the advance of Newtonian mechanics, which has fundamental implications for the rest of our thinking about politics, society, right and wrong, and about the individual psyche. Su

kant

wants to be the Newton's moral world there are a couple of things built into that idea that aspiration first is a difference between the moral world and the everyday world of sensory perception, the Newtonian world, and in fact this is the case Kant is a thinker metaphysician What I mean by a metaphysical thinker is a thinker who divides the cosmos divides the world into two parts.

This is analogous to the distinction that Plato makes in the line divided between the world of the senses and the world of the senses. extra outside of space and time

kant

believes there is a similar distinction in ontology there is a numerical world and a phenomenal world the numerical world is the world of sensory perception the world or the phenomenal world is the world of sensory perception the world of space and time the world that is explained by Newtonian mechanics and that is completely connected by the principle of causality one thing causes the other there is a completely determined relationship between all events in the physical world of space and time this is the Newton's great achievement to show us that f is equal to m a for all bodies everywhere or at least that is what was thought now at the end of the 18th century by dividing the world and giving, if not to the devil, what belongs to Physicists by allowing Newton to rule the world of space and time have a separate realm in which they hope to do something analogous to what Isaac Newton did to formulate the rules of the numerical world of the moral world the definitive quasi-mathematical algorithm of moral justice of moral rectitude that applies to things that are numerals for human souls, for rational agents and for free entities, so there is a distinction between the two halves of the world, the Newtonian world is the world of space and the time, the world of causality, each domino knocks down the other domino in the other world. numeral world that is the kingdom of freedom that is the kingdom of morality so there is a division in the world between the world of causality and the world of freedom and by rescuing the idea of ​​freedom allowing it to be intellectually serious giving it a place in Its ontology has made possible the autonomous judgment of free moral acts, in other words, if war, if Newtonians and humans are right and the world is simply the set of spatio-temporal events, there is no freedom, freedom is impossible if Isaac Newton is. well and that every event in the world causes the next event that comes after it, so first of all, what does it mean to praise or blame someone for what they did?

They are so determined. They are as mechanical as anything else in a completely different world. Newtonian mechanical universe Human beings are essentially elaborate soft machines, they are internal clockworks that do what they do because they have to, as that is the nature of the universe as a whole, once we adopt Newtonian mechanics as an archetectonic perspective of the world, this is what bothers. Kant says that if we live in a completely determinate world of bodies and move through space, then what does it mean to say that this is a good action or that is a bad action?

To me, it simply says that I like this action or that I don't like that action it relativizes moral judgment it subjectivizes moral judgment essentially it says that there are no moral facts that there are only moral opinions and that together the rough generalizations about most opinions Morals are what we call good and evil from these judgments these aggregate judgments about good and evil change across geography perhaps the moral judgments of people in China are different from those made in England perhaps the ones made made in England at the time of the Roman conquest were different from those made in the 18th century, what it does is relativize and subjectivize ethics, converting moral judgment into what Khan called a miserable anthropology, since Kant proposes to offer a universal law that allows us to establish the good or evil of each action of every free rational moral agent under all circumstances regardless of the space and time of this universal. the moral algorithm will be true in China and true in England true at the north pole true at the equator true today true tomorrow was true last year true a thousand years ago is true forever in other words, kant wants to wrap moral truth in armor of idealism and logic and present it in a way that he believes to be unassailable to anyone who really understands his argument Kant is going to formulate the law of ultimate moral duty and this is called the categorical imperative Kant says in the beginning of the foundations of the metaphysics of morality of that the only good thing is good will and that is a deep, important and essentially Christian idea, it is something that essentially comes from Saint Augustine, the intention of your action is the standard by which we are going to judge it now, here you have an important deviation Of Hume Those of you who have read Hume's treatise Those of you who have read Hume's investigation into the principles of morality will find that he does not say much about intention;

In fact, intention isn't much of a concern, fuming the inner workings of people's psyches, that's not the problem, if you want to know if an action is good or bad, you don't go back to the agent's intention, although that may be something interesting and discourage you from influencing your feelings about his action, but the key to hume in judging an agent's good or bad behavior is how you feel about the consequences of what he did, so it's your feeling for hume in the Kant's case is not a question of feeling, it is a question of discovering what the intended agent is if they intended something good if they did not have malice a foresight then their behavior is irreproachable on the other hand if they had malice or bad intention when they started an action even If they did not carry out the action it is a bad thing, let me give you an example to clarify this because it is not always immediately obvious.

Imagine a worker working on the roof of a building. He is standing there and notices a loose brick. He sees someone on the ground. He says "I don't like it." i have always hated that guy, he throws the brick and kills him now hume would say that we don't like that because it makes us feel bad for the poor guy who got hit in the head with a brick kant would say that The reason we disapprove of that behavior is because he had the intention of harming someone, that is the intention he had. Now let's go to an alternative situation.

We have the same worker on a roof and accidentally, in the process of working, he accidentally drops a brick. Without looking down without knowing what is happening on the ground, the brick falls and kills someone in Hume's view, since it was not in Hume's view, it is pretty much the same action that he might be inclined to do. say, well, if it wasn't intentional. I don't disapprove as much as I would if the person was being malicious, but I still have some aversion because he makes me feel bad again. I feel sympathy for the person who was hurt from Kant's point of view.

The action of man. He is morally innocent, he did not intend to hurt anyone, he committed what we call an accident, that is the distinction between intentionality and accidental behavior, and we have this idea built into our legal system, there is not only murder, but intention to commit a crime. murder, conspiracy to commit murder if a man was working on this roof and he threw the brick intentionally we would put him in jail if he accidentally knocked the brick off we would say it was an accident we wouldn't blame him we wouldn't say it was morally reprehensible we might say he should be more careful in the future, which should be more prominent, but we wouldn't say that was a morally bad disposition, that's the key distinction between Kant and Hume. mainly with the intentions of people with the state of their soul essentially now Khan's formulation his universal for determining the good or evil of an action is called categorical imperative and to understand what a categorical imperative is you have to understand what a hypothetical imperative is and to understand what a hypothetical imperative is I have to briefly review all of Hume's moral theory, so I'm going to do that very quickly.

Well, Hume believes in the reason that states thatreason is a slave to the passions which he states that specifically in the treatise what he means by that is that reason is an instrument that allows us to obtain the things we desire and the desires we have are not rationally determined, for example, we could say I have a desire for a cup of coffee, now I don't sit down and do some math problems and then say aha, that way it shows that I want coffee, I don't have to consult any kind of rational element in my mind to discover that I'm hungry that I'm thirsty that the lights are hot that any of my physical desires immediately want to come directly to me through some type of instinct through my feelings through my feelings my emotions wherever they come from do not come from my reasoning ability in the vision of hume, reason being a slave to the passions means that I am going to use my reason exclusively instrumentally.

This is the instrumental conception of reason and what it means is that reason tells you how to satisfy your desires once you have them, so that If you want a cup of coffee, reason may tell you that the correct way to do so is to go outside. Go out into the living room and pour yourself a cup, so reason tells you how to get what you want, but it doesn't tell you what to want. Desires come from somewhere else. Then the ends of your actions come from your irrational and arbitrary desires. Your feelings. The media. through which you achieve your actions are derived through reason.

What Kant understands by heteronomy is acting on the basis of your feelings, your passions, your emotions, acting in such a way that you satisfy your desires instead of satisfying the ends that you now it gives you pure rationality. Hume thinks that reason is exclusively instrumental, he thinks that a passion is needed to generate actions, a feeling, a desire and that is why his entire moral theory is organized around the idea of ​​heteronomy of satisfying your desires and reason exclusively tells you the best means. by which to achieve the ends that come irrationally arbitrarily Kant wants to formulate a new conception of rationality and consequently a new conception of the human psyche that corresponds to his new ethical ideas that makes possible the categorical imperative and the distinction between a categorical imperative and a hypothetical imperative.

Which is the basis of Hume's morality is something like this A hypothetical imperative is an imperative that you yourself desire simply because you are the person who is doing the things you are doing, for example, you are thirsty, you might say I want to go to take a drink of water I want to go have a cup of coffee is a hypothetical imperative if you want to have a drink of water go out to the water fountain if you want to have a cup of coffee go out to the coffee machine if you want a hamburger go to McDonald's if you want an elephant go to Africa if you want a volcano go to Hawaii in other words it has the form of if you want something then do the following it is a hypothetical imperative everything depends on that first part of the clause if you want x go do y what Kant is trying to formulate is a categorical imperative that does not apply to you if you want something but simply applies to you rather than if you want x go do and just says go do y for everyone in all circumstances, wants to find some obligation which all rational agents have simply by virtue of being rational agents.

This is called the categorical imperative and what makes the imperative in this case categorical is the fact that it is not hypothetical and what we mean by being hypothetical is that the if clause then if you want a hamburger go to Burger King if you want an elephant go to Africa it's not an if-then clause it just says do this now how are you going to pull a rabbit out of your metaphysical hat and find something that everyone should do under all circumstances today tomorrow last year in china in india at the north pole on the moon everywhere what obligations do all moral agents have simply in virtue of the fact that they are moral agents?

The categorical imperative is formulated several times in the course of the foundations of the metaphysics of morals and what it states is that rational agents have the obligation to act in such a way that the maxim that they could desire the maxim of their action becomes in a universal law. of nature, that is a very complicated formulation, it is not easy or intuitive like much of human morality is, so let's analyze this idea. Kant says that we have an obligation to act in such a way that we can will the maxim of our action to be the general rule under which how we are behaving could be universalized, could happen all the time, and could happen to us and other people as well as to others. others.

It is very complicated to understand at first. You will find it a very difficult book to read. Let's take some examples to understand it. It's a little easier what Kant is saying is something like this: we all implicitly recognize the existence of moral rules that in one way or another we believe must be obeyed by everyone, particularly other people. There is nothing easier to improve than other people's morals and when when we approve or disapprove of other people's behavior we are doing so implicitly in context based on whether it follows the categorical imperative now here is the problem and here is the origin of everything evil among human beings and of course that's the only evil there is or maybe among angels or something like Lucifer, but a lot of the evil in this world is restricted to things like us, well, something like this works when we do something wrong, let's say, let's say a mafia hitman is going to murder someone for money, this mafia.

The hitman is going to do something that he implicitly recognizes as evil. He recognizes that there is a universal moral rule that says he couldn't wish everyone to commit murder whenever they wanted. No, I agree that I don't want everyone to murder. everyone else, I couldn't wish for that to become a universal law of nature, that people should be constantly killing each other. I want to live in a world where everyone else is really good, where everyone is very kind to me and where none of them are going to murder me on the other hand, although I recognize the universality of this moral law, I want there to be an exception, I am going to make an exception in this moral rule I'm going out to commit a contract murder take the money back and live a pleasant life have a good time at the same time on my way back from this contract murder I don't want someone to murder me in fact I don't want to live in a world where people constantly murder each other I want an exception to the moral rule only from me now think about it this is not just true for mafia hitmen it is true for all the evil acts that all of us and I mean all We do it when we know we are doing something wrong, let's take example, I mean, I could take an example like pickpocketing, but most of us don't turn out to be pickpockets, let's take something like I don't know, double parking. or these are the small infractions that we commit, we recognize that we don't want everyone to disobey these rules at the same time, we think we should be the exception, right?

Think about it, all the pickpockets in the world want to be able to walk. taking other people's wallets, but don't want their own to be taken, do you understand the idea that all the evils we have come from recognizing a certain universality and moral rules and then saying that I should be the only exception? Kant's point is that that is irrational that that is literally heteronomous in the human sense when you make these arbitrary exceptions to the universal moral rule what you are really doing is succumbing to heteronomy succumbing to the allure of your passions succumbing to your desire to be an exception to the moral rules that deep down you know apply to everyone think about how many people in America cheat on their income taxes do all these people want everyone to cheat on their income taxes because then the government wouldn't work and we all recognize that we should? pay our taxes and yet a lot of people will play with the numbers thinking that everyone else should pay their full share, but I'm going to play with that a little bit.

What they are doing there is operating heteronomously, they are not behaving freely. And for Kant, free behavior and rational behavior are the same, being free is the same as being rational in the tradition of German idealism, so what does this mean? It means that when we behave heteronomously we behave passionately, we are behaving irrationally. and that means we are breaking the categorical imperative and we are doing what we know is wrong when we behave rationally that is the same as behaving freely when we behave freely and rationally that is the same as behaving autonomously when we behave autonomously freely and rationally we follow the categorical imperative and that is the same as being virtuous, means that we are living according to the moral rules that deep down we know apply to everyone, we make no exceptions for ourselves and this freedom, this autonomy. remember that autonomy comes from the Greek words autonomous to make laws for oneself that is the Kantian conception of freedom it is an idea derived from Rousseau freedom is not the arbitrary liberties of the savage in the state of nature for Kant freedom is free it is the freedom regulated under law freedom is the activity of making a moral law that you yourself obey this is what enlightenment is coming to our maturity taking responsibility for our actions understanding that there is a universal moral law that commands us to become moral agents free, rational, good and virtuous now, what is this?

There is a universal moral law that applies equally to me and to you and that I should not do anything to you that I do not want you to do well to me, this is the golden rule dressed in its best Sunday logic, that's right. you dress it in a kind of armor of logic and strict rationality and it comes with a huge apparatus, I mean, Professor Stalloff described to you the epistemological things that are connected to this, there is a huge ontological and epistemological system that connects to this, the essence This is what it is and in some way the cornerstone of this system is the possibility of creating free rational moral agents;

In other words, Kant asks us to be something more than animals, something more than flesh, he wants us to live up to the potential of having a soul. There is something in us that differentiates us from animals that are entirely heteronomous. We are capable of stopping. our appetites we are capable of making rational choices and decisions we are responsible moral agents Kant's law is then the law of good will formulated in the language of continental rationalism the objective of his system is to create the possibility of the existence of moral knowledge independent moral facts of feelings or subjective moral opinions makes freedom possible, remember in Hume's system conscious freedom is an impossibility it is an absurdity in a completely deterministic world or since Hume wants to get away from that a little in a completely physical world it does not make much sense to talk about freedom it doesn't make much sense to talk about intentions it's just one damn thing after another in khan In this system we are elevated above the rest of nature and share something in common with God and the angels.

An interesting aspect of Kant's ethical theory is that it is connected to Kant's political theory. Khan has a political philosophy that is a kind of appendix, but it is also one of the highlights of the political theory of the Enlightenment and corresponds in some respects to the differences between the Kantian system and the human one. Hume is essentially an empiricist and rather conservative in political philosophy likes things more or less the way they are and you can see how that would appeal to an empiricist empiricists are rational risk minimizers they know what happened in the past they know what we can anticipate if we don't make too many changes radical and do not have utopian ideals about change In the world there is no fundamental moral law to which politics or ethics have to refer for Kant, that will not be the case for Kant.

The categorical imperative is not only universal but applies to every rational agent and that does not mean that it applies alone. To human beings it applies, for example, to nations, it applies to angels, they are supposed to be incorporeal beings, but also free and rational, without a doubt, the categorical imperative also applies to them, perhaps that is the Lucifer's greatest sin, that is something like that because many of his writings attempt it. in a very ironic way to connect the mythology of Christianity and the Bible with these discoveries that he has made in the realm of logic and pure ideas.

Well, Khan's political theory is an extrapolation of his moral theory and, in some respects, it is a response to Hume's moral theory and Hume's political theory argue something like this: first, the categorical imperative requires that individual human beings abandon the state of nature, if there is such a thing, and form what is called the social contract. most of the great political thinkers of the Enlightenment are social contractualists and of course they are interested in the state of nature because the mechanicsNewtonianism has moved the focus of intellectual life from theology to the study of nature, so the state of nature arises again and again.

In Enlightenment political theory and what Khan says is something like this, the state of nature can be seen metaphorically as the state of pure heteronomy of pure animality of pure passion that drives human beings when they have not discovered in some way respects their own potential for autonomous, free, rational behavior, this comes up in an essay called the origins of what it's called, um, the origins of human history or something, it's in a collection of political essays and historical essays that Kant wrote about the time of the French revolution and says in the origin of human history and here the emphasis on the word human as opposed to history in the sense of natural history the origin of human history is, in quotes, the garden of Eden when the people decide when they were expelled from the garden adam and eve had sinned and decided to put the fig leaf on what that metaphorically means to put the fig leaf is that human beings become human they become rational when they become distracted when they decide to start curbing your desires and curbing your sexual impulses is what is the type of um that archetypically separates us from animals we are distant from our immediate passionate demands of the demands of heteronomy and that is what makes us free that is what makes us human that it is what makes us rational that is the origin of human history the further development of human history advances progressively until reaching enlightenment enlightenment disappears it is a period in which free reason unlimited human reason finally ascends to the place that it corresponds in human thought and life and begins to dominate the old mythical metaphorical systems of religion and political legitimacy.

He begins to review and revise previous systems of ethical judgment and, for Kant, the development of human rationality. That's what human history is about, you can see how in some senses he will be a precursor to Hegel, he will look for an idea that will be very important to Hegel later, the idea of ​​collective subjects, usually in a practical everyday way when we think in a moral subject when we think of an individual we are talking about an individual bodies and minds this person and this person and this person Kant wants to allow the possibility of moral agency that moral personality and by implication the obligation to obey the categorical imperative duty universal morality that this obligation fulfills not only in individuals like this person and this person and this person adheres in God and the angels and also in nations nations are moral agents for Kant and this is very important because this means that individuals do not They have the obligation not only to get rid of the dubious and contingent liberties of the savage in the state of nature and to form legal liberties by creating a government from the state of nature, but also because the categorical imperative demands it and nations are moral subjects who are obliged to obey the categorical imperative all nations of the world is one of Khan's great discoveries and arguments are required to eliminate the state of nature among nations in the same way and for the For the same reason that all individual human beings have that obligation, what this means is that civil law, the creation of civil law is an obligation for individual human beings and the creation of international law is an obligation for nation states once governments have been created, in In other words, Universality and legality and legality are the two key ideas for Kant and since universality is a key idea for him, it is an ultimate impulse of his moral and political system, it does not stop at the level of the nation-state as Hume's political theory does.

Hume says that his political moral theory only applies to individual human beings because of things like scarcity and the fact that human beings are social animals. Kant says that there is a moral rule for all agents, so there is really no discrepancy, there is a kind of continuous movement. of the theory of law as it applies to individuals and of the theory of law as it applies to nations or collective subjects and what that means is that this categorical imperative demands that the nations of the world abandon the dubious and contingent freedom characteristic of the state. of nature to renounce the war of all against all, to renounce the right of tooth and fang and to create legitimate, rational and, in this sense, free relations among themselves.

Kant is one of the first to formulate the idea that the rationality that freedom that moral virtue requires the creation of what he called the league of nations the ideas of the league of nations were formulated by woodrow wilson at the end of the World War I is a strictly Kantian conception. Woodrow Wilson, before becoming president, was a professor of law and philosophy at Princeton and he really liked Kant. I was working on some of his articles recently and, in fact, Wilson considered the idea of ​​a league of nations to be a universal moral obligation and, in fact, had a practical influence on the development of politics.

In the 20th century we are often inclined to suggest that mere moral theory, that the mere reflections of philosophers of two and three hundred years ago have little or no influence on everyday life; in fact, that is not the case, in some cases. circumstances there are some philosophers whose influence has not only been profound but omnipresent, they have influenced the patterns of our thinking and the everyday words we use to formulate our thoughts and, in the case of Kant, his ideas on political philosophy, his ideas about the connection between morality and politics, in fact influenced the highest levels of practical politics in this century Kant's ontology should be complete compared to Plato's he divides the world from the top of the divided line realm of forms and the realm of sensory perception Kant makes a similar move when he distinguishes between pneumonia and phenomena, in addition to that, what is integrated into that metaphysical perspective is a coherence between political theory and moral theory that we will find among the Germans, the metaphysicians and also the metaphysical elements in the Greeks, and we do not find that in the other. naturalist philosophers of the world like hume and other skeptical thinkers people who deal with the problems of politics and ethics for plato politics is ethics is ethics in general the main metaphor of the republic is that the city is like man and that the The soul of the city is like the soul of man, that there is a rational part, a spiritual part and an emotional part in the human soul, in the human psyche, and that human virtue is the organization of the parts of the soul so that rationality dominate the other elements, well, there is a perfectly analogous one. consideration when building the ideal city because for all metaphysicians politics and ethics fit perfectly, so if the city is like man and Platonic virtue is what organizes the individual soul, the ethically political virtue for a good city will be that organizes the strata of society. the people of gold the guardians the people of silver spirit and the craftsman the bronze class so that the gold class the rational class dominates in the same way that it dominates in the virtuous individual soul this is not only true for plato this will also be true for Kant's moral theory and Kant's political theory and isomorphism here the connection between structure is not accidental Plato is one of Khan's favorite philosophers and there is considerable sympathy not only in their conclusions but in the approach they take to creating a kind of seamless network throughout philosophy hume is a kind of empiricist, a skeptical and cheerful guy who is willing to deal with the fact that there may be some disjunction between politics and ethics, that there may be some circumstances if you want to be stubborn and realistic about it where morally good behavior as Machiavelli tells us may not be politically astute may not be politically appropriate the Kantian the Platonist and probably also the Christian will say no, that is not the case what is morally good what is fair to the individual is always fair collectively if we have real moral obligations that are universal that are not contingent that are not a matter of our feelings or our sentiments or our whims then a rule for everyone has to apply consistently and universally, otherwise we will end up with a problem of duplicity and hypocrisy to which we pay homage to moral virtues in our speeches, but then, when we go back and actually make public policy, we do it on some other basis that we are not afraid to say.

I think it was Machiavelli who developed this one-world perspective when he said that it was appropriate to appear good and be bad than to be good all the time. Khan says that is always wrong, it is better to be good because that is obligatory for all agents. rational morals and not only is it necessary and morally appropriate to look good, but if you look good, that's fine, if you don't look good, that's fine, how you look is completely irrelevant because the only thing that is good is good will if you conscientiously follow the only algorithm universal for moral judgment. and for morally righteous behavior then how you look makes no difference how you fare in this world makes no difference because there is only one root for moral bliss as it says in the scriptures the truth will set you free kant believes he has proven it To us, the only universal moral truth that applies to all rational beings as rational beings.

Kant holds the belief that once you understand the nature of his argument, you cannot help but be persuaded if you are rational and if you understand what he is saying and because this rationality is the kind of ultimate Platonic rationality that does not change, that does not suffer alteration, which is independent of space and time, which is absolute knowledge, much more certain and fundamental than anything we can derive from physics or mathematics, he has given it the greatest benefit. the greatest contribution a philosopher can make: he has told human beings for the first and perhaps even the last time that it will be necessary what they must do to be morally virtuous what they must do to fulfill their moral obligations and what the ultimate standard today and tomorrow for just moral behavior, this standard can be extrapolated to a theory of politics and from there to a theory of human nature, to a philosophical psychology, to a kind of philosophical sociology, to a philosophy of history in which human beings are judged and human cultures are judged for their contributions to the development of human rationality and self-awareness, it is extraordinary the amount of philosophical implications and the weight of philosophical implications found in the treatment of morality on Khan's part and the remarkable thing about this treatment of morality is a fact that it is extremely difficult to understand the first time you look at this when I teach this to my university class I say read it again nobody understands Kant the first time no It's my fault I'm doing my best with you and then after you read it again I tell you now let me give you the big scoop on this.

Here they are teaching you something that you already know and everyone already knows it and we teach it to six-year-olds. all the time, in other words, this is not only a rich and deeply complex intellectual system, but it is also the kind of thing that any six-year-old can understand; In fact, we teach it in kindergarten every day. Let's take the hypothetical case of Johnny and Janie, two six-year-old children. Johnny wants Janie's toy and Johnny is stronger than Janie. He takes away Janie's toy. to take that toy away from janie johnny what if everyone? Would you like people to take toys from you all the time and the response?

Oh, and I always wondered when I was six, what difference does it make? All? Am I stronger than her? I want the toy, that's the human response. but all kindergarten teachers are implicitly kantian when they say johnny, what if everyone did that and johnny of course doesn't know what to say since he hasn't read kant, so johnny gives him the toy back and then, If you do it long enough, Johnny? He is under the impression that there is some reason to believe that the moral judgments he makes apply to everyone, including him, and that he is being evil and cruel when he makes exceptions to the universal moral rules that he wants for himself and that he wants everyone to do. the others do. obey if you can teach this to a six year old and in fact we can't just teach it to six year olds we teach you six year olds every day of the week there's something here there's a simple nugget of truth that I I don't know how fix that, in fact if I had a six year old he would probably say things like Johnny what if everyone did that?

You don't want to take that toy away from Janie and Johnny when they're six years old. -old man and a human says yes, I want the toy, but if we explain the idea that moral rules areThey apply to everyone, Johnny, not just you, and someday you will meet seven-year-olds who are older. that they are going to take away your toys if you don't have a teacher who is Kantian, then all our universal moral rules, all our attempts to create a moral order and moral knowledge that is independent of subjectivity, that is independent of relativism, This type of miserable anthropology is a tribute to Kant, whether we like it or not, we often find that the extreme cases of Kant's moral theory are unacceptable, we do not like the immediate implications of them and it often seems a little too rigorous a little too bloodless a little too inanimate for us quite a bit too rationalistic but in practice almost all of us every day of our lives not only recognize kanti and moral theory but we teach them to our children and the reason why What to teach our children, I suspect that we want them to behave that way and I think we want them to behave that way because in one way or another we believe, as Woodrow Wilson said in his philosophy of education, we must believe what we believe.

We tell children and I think we tell children essentially Kantian moral theory because we believe it and I think we do believe it because Kant's conception of good and evil is deeply integrated into our conception of rationality, freedom and virtue and also because he is one of the greatest Athenian interpreters of the intellectual tradition that emerges from Jerusalem and that in one way or another our culture is saturated with the moral judgments that come from the Judeo-Christian tradition and In that sense telling Johnny that he shouldn't do that makes Janie unhappy and what would happen if everyone did?

That's really our way of saying that our culture is saturated with these value judgments and we don't always remember them, we're not always fully aware of them, but they're there. whether we recognize it or not and maybe becoming aware of it allows us to think about it to be sure what it is that we are teaching children and I think even after doing that, this is again my tribute to Kant for the fact You're still going to tell him that Johnny, you shouldn't do that to Janie, what if everyone did that? So Khan's theory is a deep, provocative, brilliant, subtle, insightful moral epistemological ontological theory, which we teach children every day, homage to Kant, okay, the simplicity of this and its complexity is what makes it probably the greatest contribution to the moral theory of the Enlightenment.

One of the high points of German idealism. One of the great achievements of the human spirit.