Essay On Kant's Categorical Imperatives

As a pure deontologist, German philosopher Immanuel Kant was an advocate of the concept that an act may be right or wrong based on the act alone. Consequences of that act do not matter: an act is moral or right if it abides by a rule or a set of rules; otherwise it is immoral or wrong. In Kant’s deontologist ethics, he characterised imperatives—or, in other words, commands—as either hypothetical or categorical. Hypothetical imperatives are commands that are entirely voluntary in regard to a person’s desires. Categorical imperatives, on the other hand, are the complete opposite of hypothetical imperatives in that it is involuntary regardless of a person’s desires. These are rules that a person ought to do and follow. Categorical imperatives, according to Kant, are our moral obligations as human beings capable of rational thought. In the form of formulations, this kind of imperative is the foundation of Kant’s moral theory.
According to Kantian ethics, morality is derived from …show more content…
Baby Angela’s parents treat her as a means, and the end would be to help other children. Doing so makes such an act immoral. This would be the case if the term humanity applies to Baby Angela. In “Kant’s Formula of Humanity,” Christine M. Korsgaard, an American philosopher and a professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, states:

“When Kant says that the characteristic of humanity is the power to set an end, then, he is not merely referring to personality, which would encompass the power to adopt an end for moral or sufficient reasons. Rather, he is referring to a more general capacity for choosing, desiring, or valuing ends; ends different from the ones that instinct lays down for us, and to which our interest is directed by the operations of reason.” (Korsgaard, 1986)

Furthermore, she adds