Why be a good Kantian?

According to Kant, incentives always undermine genuine morality, then respect must not be an incentive.
What’s the point in being good, then, for a Kantian. I do not see the point to this? Any one have any good arguments why there might be a point to be being “good”? I guess I can’t see past my nose?

That is one of the things that bothers me about Kantian ethics too – why do your duty? Cicero would say to do your duty because it’s the rational way of fulfilling your animal needs. Aristotle based his ethics on what would make you happy. Monooq is a Kant-fan, maybe he or another can say something for the Wise Man of Koeningsberg!

be good because everyone can’t be bad.

you’re right,
you kant see past your nose.

I’m not a Kantian, but hasn’t this got to do with the categorical imperative I haven’t read Kant, but took some notice of his ideas, and I read that c.i. is quite similar to the golden rule ‘don’t do what you wouldn’t like someone else to do’ (free interpretation). I had to look up ‘incentive’ in the dictionary, and it means doing something out of fear, if I understand correctly. A society built on fear wouldn’t last, neither would a society who has ‘doing bad’ as normal standard.

Just my two cents. Nice little joke Monooq :wink: .

there are no good kantians

Well the idea would be that being good would be the point.

I’m guessing somewhere in the back of your mind you are holding the eudimist [have no idea if that is spelled right] axiom. Namely that :if pressed a person could always give a reason for his action, until he regresses to the reason of happyness.

For example. You ask Bob why he is fishing. Bob relplies “to get fish.”
“Why do you want fish?”
“Because fish are good for eating.”
“Why?”
“Because fish are deliscious.”
“But why would you want to eat delicious things?”
“Because it makes me happy.”

According to the axiom it would be unreasonable to question furthure here. For Kant, (and the genreal class sometimes called ‘cynics’) the line of questioning ends not at happyness but at goodness."

Let’s put Kant in the boat.

“Why are you fishing Kant?”
“Because I can generalise fishing into a universal law.”
“And why is that important?”
“Because the catagorical imperitive defines my duty.”
“And why do ones duty?”
“Because that is to good.”

Kant I think would find the next question unreasonable.

Let’s look at these two “unreasonable” questions.

Why would you want to be happy?

vs.

Why should you do good?

Well both of these seem like dumb questions. Obviously one would want to be happy. Happyness seems bound up in the definition of want. The same goes for should and good.

But I’ve cheated haven’t I. What about these questions:

Why should one be happy?

and

Why would one want to be good?

Both of these seem like reasonable and even interesting questions.

I hope this helps, even if I doubt it. Lord knows I’ve done nothing more here than manipulate some symbols.

I suppose that doing your duty is being good. What your duty is, though, should be the question.

I always liked Kant (what I understood, anyway) because doing your duty, if it is naturalistic, would appear to me the (dare I say) “right/good” thing to do. The reason why it would be is because, for me, it places people/living things in relation to the world like a large clock. Every being is a gear, which, when working along with everything else (and healthy), will help the world/clock progress in the “right/good” way. If one does not do their duty, then the world is bogged down, and if enough people are not doing their unselfish duty, then the world may break down.

Because our duty is not as simple as simply keeping ourselves oiled up and turning, it is difficult to determine whether or not we are actually doing our duty or not. More so, we do not know whether or not our progress in the world is in the right direction or not.

Our consciousness as well interferes with our duty because we as people cannot determine what exactly is right and I feel that our “extra” reasoning above animals allows us to reason and justify selfish feelings enough to please ourselves and not do a duty we cannot justify except that it MAY be a duty.

This can leave us doing our duty, thus being good, but not necessarily happy, which is essential of keeping us healthy. So what do we do? We can either contemplate why doing our duty is good, realize it, thus becoming happy that we’re doing good; do our duty anyway and be completely depressed; or not do our duty, be happy, and die not caring what happens to the progression of the world afterwards. The third is damn appealing…

Man, I hope this made sense. Canada.

interesting

No.

Kant differentiates between two worlds. One we can observe with our senses and changes constantly. The other we can only identify with reason. Kant argues that if we would be lead by our senses and would chase satisfaction for the senses, we will never feel fulfilled because there are always more desires to satisfy. Whereas if we would be lead by our reason than we can pose some ethical laws on ourself in order to ptotect ourselves from the temptation of the senses.

Respect doesnt have to be an incentive if the cause for this feeling or observation is reason.

I’m not even sure what a kantian is. I understand the basic idea, but, theres lots of kantians that have a different idea about what a kantian is, lots of kantians follow kant’s reasoning into a modern and much more complex idea about human nature, others embrace kant’s ideas e xactly as they were.

Kant equates the rational with the good, assuming that a strictly rational approach to deciding how to act will inexorably lead to our doing what is right and good - acting rationally then becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to one. In such a scheme, “incentives” have no fundamentally integral part in the processes of moral behavior and decision making because the potential rewards for acting in certain ways (supposedly, in the Kantian universe) don’t change what the rational, and therefore morally correct, thing to do would be. That’s how we end up with the categorical imperative and the notion of duty as the major arbiters of how we ought to behave. Both are means by which we can decide how to act irregardless of any considerations about the direct outcome of those actions, wherein lay the incentives (that’s the key). So, acting based on incentives would be to ignore the (again supposedly, in the Kantian universe) supremely rational mandates of the categorical imperative and duty, and would therefore obviously be undermining the authority of the ideally moral constraints that rationality places on our behavior.

except you cannot rationally get an ought from an is…

-Imp

That’s debateable, as per John Searle: if i say “i promise to give Imp 5 bucks”, then we can say that “Braxton has made a promise to Imp to give him 5 bucks” (an “is”, insofar as it is a statement of fact). By definition then, we can also say that “Braxton ‘ought’ to give Imp 5 bucks”, because, again by definition, the fact of a promise having been made creates a fact that an obligation exists, and any obligation always contains an implicit ‘ought’ of some sort.

This makes the notion of obligation an artifact of language, but that really shouldn’t come as a surprise, since, for the most part we never speak of animals (who, as you’ve correctly pointed out elsewhere, don’t share our nuanced comprehension of language) as being obligated to do things. Hence, the less likely an animal is to respond to language, the further it will dwell outside of any human moral realm. More evidence that morality is a human construction.

So it is, in a sense, possible to derive an ought from an is, but not (and i think this may be what you were getting at) in any way that doesn’t undermine the Kantian moral approach.

actually, I was simply restating the humean position against which kant continued to gnash his teeth…

-Imp

Well you could if it was really necessary.

So it is, in a sense, possible to derive an ought from an is, but not (and i think this may be what you were getting at) in any way that doesn’t undermine the Kantian moral approach.
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right, he gnashed his teeth against it because it was true in ways that undermined (and will always undermine) the notion that rationality exists primarily in service of the moral good.

As has been said, you should do your duty because that’s what rationality requires. Can’t we ask ‘why do our duty?’ Of course, just like we can ask the utilitarian why do what maximises happiness or ask the divine command theorist why follow God’s commands. This is no special objection to Kantianism.

Deriving an ought from an is? Of course we can. Searle doesn’t provide such an example. He relies on a hidden premise that we ‘ought’ to follow the rules of the promising game. I can promise to give someone money, but if I don’t follow all the rules of the promising game I have no obligation to actually hand over the dosh.

Here’s the actual way to derive an ought from an is (courtesy of the logician A N Prior).

  1. All brits are tea-drinkers.
  2. Therefore all Brits are tea drinkers or all New Zealanders ought to be shot.

An ought derived from an is. Anywho, if ‘no ought from is’ does afflict Kant it also afflicts Hume (Hume being a meta-ethical naturalist).

LOL

-Imp

There’s nothing hidden about the premise that we ought to follow the rules of the promising game - it’s intrinsic to what it means to make a promise. To make a promise is, by definition, to establish an obligation of some sort. Sure, we can choose not to fulfill the promise, but the obligation we established in making the promise remains, it’s merely unfullfilled. It’s a game with rules, yes, but it’s the same game with similar rules that we play when we decide that we have a deontological duty to act in a certain rationally pre-conceived way. We are setting obligations for ourself, creatings ‘oughts’ from ‘is-es’. I realize Kantians hate the notion that ethics might be essentially practical, but, unfortunately for them, that’s the direction in which all the evidence points.

There’s nothing in the premise 1. that implies that all New Zealanders ought to be shot - you would need some prior premise to define such terms. It’s not even an amusing joke - just a lazy, offhand attempt to dismiss the unfamiliar as irrelevant - like trying to disprove a universal rate of acceleration by dropping a feather and an anvil at the same time.