Importance Of Kant's Ethics

Kant’s Ethics- Morals, Happiness, and Human Life Kant’s Ethics is a work that reflects how Immanuel Kant perceived ethics through morals and happiness and painted a picture of human life through these things. Ethics is what is defined as things that guide a person’s actions or their behavior. In Kant’s Groundwork, he discusses morals- what we consider to be right and wrong, and how we feel or duty, good will, or inclinations influence our morals which in turn influence our actions. Another thing that is crucial in Kant’s ethics is the role of happiness- are we selfish all of the time or do we ever want to do for others? Through morals and happiness in Kant’s Ethics, Kant paints a picture of what human looks like from this perspective. In …show more content…
It becomes very obvious as the reader reads through the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that selfishness and dutifulness are enormous components of Kant’s view on ethics. Kant’s view remains the same throughout all parts of his Groundwork… that being selfish is not considered moral and that doing things from a dutiful mindset can make all of the difference in a moral action. Just as a dutiful mindset can turn bad quickly so can happiness. As mentioned earlier, people would like to think that they do things for others to make themselves happy but more times than not they do for themselves to be happy. Happiness really all depends on how you let yourself go about it. Kant remains consistent in his thinking about morality and happiness throughout everything discussed in the first two sections of his …show more content…
As the reader reads through the different sections, Kant continually makes statements regarding how humans can be so selfish and sometimes they do not even realize it. Although Kant paints this picture of a selfish human life, he also paints a vivid picture of a life of a dutiful and truly helpful human being. In the first section of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant continually reminds the reader that doing actions from a sense of duty and truly wanting to help others is what gives the feeling of true morality and happiness. Many different philosophers over time have studied and proposed many ideas of human life and how it should be and how it could be done, and they have all varied slightly from one another. For example, Aristotle focused on happiness and pleasure, and some have focused on a human’s responsibility and identities. All of these perspectives have shaped the way that human life is expressed but Kant’s perspective focuses on a deeper perspective. In Section 2, Kant says “On the contrary, if we attend to experience of people's conduct we meet frequent and, as we ourselves admit, just complaints that no certain example can be cited of the disposition to act from pure duty; that, though much may be done in conformity with what duty commands, still it is always doubtful whether it is really done from duty and therefore has moral worth. Hence there have at all