Immanuel Kant Research Paper

Immanuel Kant was a philosopher who lived during the Enlightenment which was a period in European intellectual history characterized by reason and a willingness to challenge traditional assumptions. One of the mottos of the enlightenment was “Have courage to use your own reason” (Kant, page 85). Grendlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Foundations of the

Metaphysics of Morals) was published in 1785. In Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,

Kant set forth several common “categorical imperatives” to develop a clearer understanding of moral law.

In the 1990’s, the Louisiana Department of Education adopted seven standards for school leaders. One of the standards referred to ethics. It had eight performance indicators, such as modeling ethical

“Nor could one give poorer counsel to morality than to attempt to derive it from examples; even the Holy One of the Gospel must be compared with our ideal of moral perfection

(Kant, page 25). Kant wrote that the supreme principle of morality should be based on pure reason independent of all experiences (Kant, page 25). The purpose of reason, according to

Kant, is only to influence a will that is good with no other motive. There is no other purpose.

“To be sure, common human reason does not think of it abstractly in such a universal form but it always has it in view and uses it as the standard of its judgments. Without in the least teaching common reason anything new, we need only to draw its attention to its own principle, in the manner of Socrates, thus showing that neither science nor philosophy is needed to know what one has to do in order to be honest and good, and even wise and virtuous. We might have conjectured beforehand that the knowledge of what everyone is obliged to do and thus also to know would be within the reach of everyone, even the most ordinary man. Here we cannot but

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When people do not treat others as “ends, they violate they do not consider universal law and they contradict the principles of reason.

Immanuel Kant

The process of thinking that Kant used to drive the proper way to act in conflicting situations is that moral law is separate from the law of consequences or benefit. There is always going to be a conflict of inclination vs. the moral law. This is when duty must take precedence over all other interest and motivations. Duty is the constraint to do the act from the moral law.

“If we attend to our experience of the way men act, we meet frequents, justified complaints that cannot cite a single sure example of the disposition to act from pure duty” (Kant, page 22).

Good will cannot consider motivation or outcome. To demonstrate the concept of will, Kant explored “duty”. Kant wrote, “a completely isolated metaphysics of morals, mixed with no anthropology, no theology, no physics or hyperphysics, and even less with occult qualities, is not only an indispensable substrate of all theoretically sound and definite knowledge of duties; it is also a desideratum of the highest importance to the actual fulfillment of its precepts (Kant,