Kantian ethics was developed by a
German philosopher named Immanuel Kant, who believed what defined us as human
beings are our rationality and autonomy. Kant created a system of moral law
which is based on always respecting yours and everyone’s rationality and
autonomy: (1) never undermining these traits in yourself or anyone else, and (2)
always promoting rationality and autonomy is yourself and all other people. Kant
created a universal law version of moral law which indicates that any moral law
should be possible for all people to do, in all situations. An important
distinction to make about Kant is that he believes what determines the goodness
of an action is the intentions, not the consequences.
Utilitarianism is another major
theory of ethics and was founded by philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Utilitarianism
tells us that for humans, morality is based on increasing pleasure and
decreasing pain. The central idea of Utilitarianism is to always act in a way
which produces the greatest amount of happiness for all people who are
affected. This means to always act in the greater interest; so if you have a
choice to make only yourself happy or a large group of people happy, you should
choose the latter because it generates the most happiness. In order to
calculate amount of overall happiness the Utilitarians use a cost-benefit
analyses. It is important to remember that Utilitarians believe that an action
can be morally good even if the motives are bad.
I believe that Kant’s moral
theory is the most plausible out of the two. I believe this because although
always maximizing happiness is good in theory, to ask people to always act in
the greater good is expecting too much. Furthermore I believe that in always
striving towards promoting rationality and autonomy in you and others, a person
will already be striving towards happiness. Another point of Kant I admire is
his passage on good will and its importance in being truly morally good. A
person may perform actions which end in good or even great consequences, but if
they have malicious intentions, I do not believe they should be considered
morally virtuous.
Barbara Reasoning:
1. All lies are unethical
2. All deceptions are lies
3. Therefore, all deceptions are
unethical
Hey, just wanted to say that it was a little confusing in this sentence here:
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mainly because, I beleive it was kant who wanted people to act in the greater good at all costs. Another thing I wanted to point out was how interested I was in your idea that the intention is more important than the result. As people, I feel that naturally, when something goes wrong, without thinking, we already get upset or saddened by the results. Its like someone saying they will meet you somewhere at 8. They dont show up or call you that night. Naturally, as humans we tend to get mad and blow up like "damn this asshole couldnt show up or call me and let me know they cant come" without even thinking on the other side of the spectrum. Maybe this person got into a car accident on the way there and couldnt let you know. Result was:they didnt come however, the intention was: they plan on coming.I feel that most people dont take the time to even try to invision someone else's intentions, and to be honest, that might even be too time consuming. So while the idea of intentions matter more sound good in theory, how practical is it?
I liked your paper but disagree when you said that "to ask people to always act in the greater good is expecting too much". Now I do agree with the "always" part but sometimes I believe certain sacrifices must be made for the betterment of society. Whether it is slightly raising taxes to fund the building of bridges and roads or circumstances like that. Overall I thought you did a great job and really liked you Barbara argument.
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