The Parable of the Good Samaritan is a story Jesus tells in order to explain the commandment “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” The story tells of an injured man on the side of the road needing aid. A priest and Levite walk past the man and ignore him. Then a Samaritan walks by and offers aid to the fallen Jew. During this time, Samaritans and Jews were not in the best of relationships. Jesus was making the point that “thy neighbor” is everyone, even enemies. That mankind should treat everyone the way they hope to be treated in a similar situation. Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and Immanuel Kant would all ethically evaluate the story in different ways. This paper will argue that Aristotle and Kant agree with aspects of Christian ethics,
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For Kant, an action is morally correct when the principle behind the action is good. The focus is placed less on the actions themselves, but on the reason for those actions. If the principle behind a virtuous action is greed or lust, then the action, whether it helped or hurt society, would be deemed ethically wrong. Kant focuses a lot of his theory on the notion that individuals act mostly rational. In Kantian ethics the basis of morality is solely rational. It’s solely rational for an individual to act in a way that they would want everyone else in the world to act. The universal law principle of Kant’s follows the belief that an action is ethically good when the reasoning behind it is that an individual performs the action because it's something they wouldn’t mind becoming an universal law that everyone does. In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Kant would state that the action to aid the injured is only good if the action sprung from the simple desire to do good. Since the Good Samaritan wasn’t acting under the expectation for money in return, but only to help the injured man his action was ethically good. The Samaritan completed an action that he simply expects every individual in the world to
For Kant, an action is morally correct when the principle behind the action is good. The focus is placed less on the actions themselves, but on the reason for those actions. If the principle behind a virtuous action is greed or lust, then the action, whether it helped or hurt society, would be deemed ethically wrong. Kant focuses a lot of his theory on the notion that individuals act mostly rational. In Kantian ethics the basis of morality is solely rational. It’s solely rational for an individual to act in a way that they would want everyone else in the world to act. The universal law principle of Kant’s follows the belief that an action is ethically good when the reasoning behind it is that an individual performs the action because it's something they wouldn’t mind becoming an universal law that everyone does. In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Kant would state that the action to aid the injured is only good if the action sprung from the simple desire to do good. Since the Good Samaritan wasn’t acting under the expectation for money in return, but only to help the injured man his action was ethically good. The Samaritan completed an action that he simply expects every individual in the world to