Imagine that you live with eight other people, and in order to continue living at your current residence, you need to make some drastic changes in your water usage to bring down the monthly payment. However, you have a dilemma with this as you enjoy taking long showers and watering your plants. Therefore, you cannot see yourself decreasing the amount of water you personally use. You determine that you could continue using the same amount of water, if collectively all of your other roommates succeed in their water conservation efforts in order to bring the total of the water bill down. If worse comes to worst, one of your roommates, Pat, is known for being wasteful, and realize that even if you and your roommates get evicted the blame will most
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A good will, as defined by Kant, is one that acts merely from duty, with all actions being rational and in agreement to the moral law, with inclinations set aside. Kant further describes four possibilities for your actions. Your actions can be contrary to duty, conform to duty but are done from an indirect inclination, conform to duty but are done from a direct inclination, or your actions can conform to duty and are done from duty. In the given scenario, one could conclude that your actions are contrary to your duty. Your duty is to act in conformity to the grounds that you and your roommates declared, in order to ensure that you will not be evicted. However, you feel like you are above conserving water, and thus are acting contrarily to your duty. Kant would declare this action as being immoral, and can be expressed through the following quotation, “…All actions except moral ones are done for the sake of one’s own pleasure, and so are all equally selfish and without moral worth” (Kant 62). Your decision to continue using water at the same rate as you previously did is undoubtedly a selfish act that is contrary to your duty, and thus Kant would argue that your actions are immoral and consequently your actions are …show more content…
He makes clear and precise definitions for what makes an action permissible or impermissible to perform. Through his two formulas one could conclude that secretly using more water than your roommates is by no means a moral act because it contains contradictions in conception, and does not follow the formula of humanity, therefore not conserving water under your circumstances is
A good will, as defined by Kant, is one that acts merely from duty, with all actions being rational and in agreement to the moral law, with inclinations set aside. Kant further describes four possibilities for your actions. Your actions can be contrary to duty, conform to duty but are done from an indirect inclination, conform to duty but are done from a direct inclination, or your actions can conform to duty and are done from duty. In the given scenario, one could conclude that your actions are contrary to your duty. Your duty is to act in conformity to the grounds that you and your roommates declared, in order to ensure that you will not be evicted. However, you feel like you are above conserving water, and thus are acting contrarily to your duty. Kant would declare this action as being immoral, and can be expressed through the following quotation, “…All actions except moral ones are done for the sake of one’s own pleasure, and so are all equally selfish and without moral worth” (Kant 62). Your decision to continue using water at the same rate as you previously did is undoubtedly a selfish act that is contrary to your duty, and thus Kant would argue that your actions are immoral and consequently your actions are …show more content…
He makes clear and precise definitions for what makes an action permissible or impermissible to perform. Through his two formulas one could conclude that secretly using more water than your roommates is by no means a moral act because it contains contradictions in conception, and does not follow the formula of humanity, therefore not conserving water under your circumstances is