Immanuel Kant View Of Morality

Immanuel Kant was prevalent philosopher who focused on the morality in his 18th century work “Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.” Here, he separates the branches of knowledge, what is inherently good, and the imperatives to guide morality. The first major premise of his Kant’s view of morality is his division thesis; it separates ethics into two groups: rational and empirical. The rational side, marked by its sole use of reasoning and logic is called morals. In contrast, the empirical side is also known as practical anthropology since it relies on experiences and observations to form rules. Going off of on his division thesis, he believes that the rational side should be put before the empirical side in a sense that the rational …show more content…
An example would be the law “You are not to lie.” Many people feel obliged to follow this rule, but dont, which implies moral laws does not arise from absolute necessity since people feel the situation dictates whether the law holds morally. In fact, there is not one moral law that everyone follows or feel obliged to follow. This implies that moral laws don't exist but rather practical rules exist because we attempt to uphold these rules in most situations. The simple fact that people don't always follow these “moral laws” goes to show how varied in the way humans …show more content…
It’s understandable that using logic to form laws seems compelling but the flaw in here is that humans aren't a constant. Humans simply can't ever be used as a constant in an equation to form laws like the speed of light can be used to form laws in science. His view is fundamentally flawed in that the empirical means and reasoning are interconnected and one really is pointless without the other. In addition, to be a proper philosopher, one really needs to be a practitioner of both the empirical and rational side in order to properly form conclusions and make moral laws. Conclusions must have a premise and the premises must come from empirical means because like I said before, humans are constants and observations have to be made in order to properly form conclusions. An example of the unpredictability of humans can be seen in policy making. A law was made based solely off of reasoning that the snake population would be reduced if the government simply gave a reward for each snake tail they bring in. The result was the complete opposite of what was intended because farmers started raising snakes since the reward was so profitable that the snake population actually increased when the law was stopped. You can also see other cases in economic theories where they are completely wrong because they relied solely off of logic and not observations. If other