The intersection of right and good in Kant's metaphysics of morals
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- My dissertation focuses on the ways that erroneous beliefs contributing to conclusions about what we morally ought to do can and cannot be legitimately employed within a Kantian context. I approach this issue through questions about Kant's theory of conscience and the role of conscience in moral decision-making. According to the standard reading of Kant's ethics, there is a single set of objectively correct duties for all agents. On my reading, by way of contrast, an agent's duties are determined to some extent by his/her beliefs about the world. In other words, I give a defense of a kind of limited pluralism within Kant's ethics. I do this by arguing for three main claims. First, I argue (in chapters 1 and 2) that in Kant's ethics agents with similar core values but different beliefs about how the world works will arrive at very different (but nonetheless reasonable) conclusions about what they ought to do in particular situations. Second, I argue (in chapters 3 and 4) that according to Kant an agent who acts according to his/her conscience is behaving permissibly. And third, I argue (in chapters 5 and 6) that for Kant juridical duties are fundamentally different from ethical duties, so an ethical pluralism could be represented in a single (Kantian) state despite the fact that there are limits as to what counts as reasonable. In this way, I hope to show that even within Kant's system of objective value, because agents might have different beliefs about how the world works, there is no determinable set of judgments for a set of circumstances that exists independently of those agents' beliefs and intentions. To put this another way (to bring out where I diverge from the now-standard reading of Kant's ethics), I am arguing that the results of Kant's moral standard, the Categorical Imperative (CI), are radically underdetermined without information about an agent's beliefs about how the world works. One can determine whether something is permissible for an ideal agent (with only true beliefs); one can determine whether something is permissible for some given, fallible agent; but one cannot determine whether something is permissible simpliciter, for it is indeterminate. In slogan form, the underlying idea of this is that for Kant permissibility does not exist in a vacuum. We can make judgments about permissibility only for a given context, and part of that context includes information about an agent and his/her beliefs about how the world works.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Kahn, Samuel Muzika |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Philosophy |
| Primary advisor | Wood, Allen W |
| Thesis advisor | Wood, Allen W |
| Thesis advisor | Anderson, R. Lanier |
| Thesis advisor | Cohen, Joshua |
| Thesis advisor | Friedman, Michael |
| Advisor | Anderson, R. Lanier |
| Advisor | Cohen, Joshua |
| Advisor | Friedman, Michael |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Samuel Kahn. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Philosophy. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2012. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2012 by Samuel Muzika Kahn
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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