Immanuel Kant's Argumentative Essay

Immanuel Kant argued that the most important part of morality is a standard of rationality. With this being said he created something called the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative has three major formulations. Of relevance to this essay is the second formulation: “Act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person, or in the person person go another, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”(Dieser, 2017) This means that we should treat people the way that we would want to be treated. We are intended to treat people with respect due to the fact that we are autonomous beings. Being autonomous is an individual’s ability for self-determination or self-governance. It allows us as human beings to have the freedom to pursue our own goals thought the categorical imperative. Kant believed that being autonomous is very important and valuable, but in order to have it one must have free will. This requires one to have self-consciousness and the capacity to be guided by reason. In addition there is a certain ability that we as humans have, but animals lack. This ability is the ability to to look at our desires and choose the proper course of action. Yes, humans and animas both have desires that we can turn into actions but it is the ability to choose the right choice that is at stake. (Wilson, …show more content…
Bentham had a different definition of freedom than Kant. Due to the fact that Bentham focused his theories on freedom and the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people, he believed that freedom meant something different than what Kant had stated. Bentham looked at freedom in a way that meant that you can pick pleasure and avoid pain. Freedom consisted of removing obstacles to the fulfillment of our desires. Therefore, if we are still able to be free while being utilitarian then non-human animals do have moral