Maxim

Ethics is the study of morality, judgment and their relations. Within Ethics there are many ethical theories including Kantianism and Utilitarianism. Immanuel Kant believes in Kantianism, which is where the name comes from and theorists like Bentham and Mill believe in Utilitarianism. Moral theorists use their ways of thinking to aid everyday actions and situations; they even use their theories to take their side on moral issues. Kantianism is the theory began by Immanuel Kant. According to…

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…

Writing in 1912, Karl Liebknacht warns, “All the international conflicts have been brought to their greatest point of intensity. Like a cyclone, imperialism spins across the globe,” and describes the alarming act that is New Imperialism. Historians characterize this nineteenth century phenomena by a flood of newly industrialized countries aiming to gain influence over a foreign group of distant and less-developed people. European countries, motivated by the need to protect their country’s own…

imperative for finite beings like us, who have needs and inclinations and are not perfectly rational.) Notoriously, Kant offers several different formulations of this principle, the first of which runs as follows: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law” (4:421). (On the different…

empire established by Al-Qaeda allowed for more war criminals to be taken to Guantanamo Bay. Not only is this allowing the U.S. to completely follow the just war theory, but it also allows the U.S. to follow the maxims Sun Tzu set forth in the Art of War. As Sun Tzu states in his tenth maxim “those skilled in war subdue the enemy’s army without battle” (480). Eventually, the U.S. may be able to assert dominance over radical Islamic sections of the Middle East that peace can be restored by…

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World represents a polemically rich work that fails to make the author’s main point: that “the ‘Third World’ is the outgrowth of income and wealth inequalities…shaped most decisively in the last quarter of the nineteenth century” with Asian, African and Latin American economic systems, particularly rural ones characterized by commercial commodity production, joining the larger global economy (15-16). Davis asserts the “Third…

are also given little to no assistance once they are released from prison other than the surveillance provided by probation officers that only ensures that they follow their parole conditions. Thus, the carceral system undermines the seven universal maxims by actually producing…

to uphold the moral law? To answer this question from a Kantian point of view, any action performed must be done from a duty to the highest moral law in order to have any moral worth. What determines whether an action has moral worth or not is the maxim. Freedom ends when your choices begin to affect other people and morality is universal. We can’t disregard the freedom of one person to help one or many others. For instance, it would be wrong to kill one healthy individual to distribute her…

moral duties according to Kant are not hypothetical. The first of these categorical imperatives states that you should “act only to the maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (Kant 12). In other words, before making a moral decision, Kant believes we should ask ourselves, “what if everyone did that?” In this case, maxims are our personal principles that ultimately guide our decisions and could be described as the person’s intention. For example, if…

liberation. The way that Lucy is a semi-self-portraying record of Kincaid's educational encounters makes its voice all the more legitimate. The materialness of women's activist speculations in Rebecca was with regards to the storyteller's association with Maxim and his dead Mistress Rebecca. In Lucy, by differentiation, we see Jamaica Kincaid's investigation of nuances and complexities required seeing…