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kant's ethical essays
kantian ethical analysis
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Kant Sewction 1
Kant starts off making two distinctions regarding kinds of knowledge, empirical/rational and formal/material. Empirical or experience-based knowledge is contrasted with rational knowledge, which is independent of experience. This distinction between empirical and rational knowledge rests on a difference in sources of evidence used to support the two different kinds of knowledge. Formal is contrasted with material knowledge. Formal knowledge has no specific subject matter; it is about the general structure of thinking about any subject matter whatsoever. Material knowledge is of a specific subject matter, either nature or freedom. Rational knowledge is metaphysics, of which there are two branches, the metaphysics of nature and of morals. The metaphysics of nature is supposed to provide rational knowledge of the laws of nature. These are not empirical laws; they are more like universal principles of nature that any empirical physical would presuppose, such as that no event in nature occurs without a natural cause. The metaphysics of freedom is supposed to provide knowledge of the laws of freedom. These are the universal rules which free agents devise to govern them. Thus, Kant's grounding, his initial attempt at a critique of rational reason, is an investigation of the possibility of purely rational knowledge of morals. Take, for example, the Moral Rule: Thou shalt not lie. If the moral law is valid as the basis of moral obligation or duty, then it must b...
In 2014 a little over 3 million children in the United States were under the guardianship of a relative other than their parent (Szilagyi, 2014). This agreement is referred to as kinship. Kinship care is defined as the care of children by relatives or close family friends, also known as fictive kin, after they have been removed from biological parents. Relatives are usually looked to as the primary resource of care support because they maintain the child's connections with the family and help to preserve the cultural values of the family. (ChildWelfare.gov) Kinship care is divided into three different categories: informal kinship care, voluntary kinship care, and formal kinship care (child welfare information gateway, 2016).
A foster parent, as defined by the Health reference series second edition, is an individual who is licensed to provide a home for an orphaned, abused, neglected, delinquent or disabled child (Matthews, 2004). A permanent placement is one that is intended, but not guaranteed, to last forever (Barth & Berry 1988). Foster care is not for delinquents but somewhere for children go when their parents can no longer care for them. A form of foster care has always been around in early Christian churches where “worthy widows” would board children in need and were paid by church collections. Foster care started in 1562 during the time of the English poor laws, which stated the poor children were allowed to be placed in legal services until they reached of aged (nfpaonline.org). In the 1970’s, foster care increased in popularity but foster parents were seen as unfit to adopt children permanently (Barth and Berry, 1988). In 1980 the Adoption Assistance of Child Welfare Act (public law 96-272) made it clear that the most desirable permanent placement for children is with their own family. The law...
Actions of any sort, he believed, must be undertaken from a sense of duty dictated by reason, and no action performed for expediency or solely in obedience to law or custom can be regarded as moral. A moral act is an act done for the "right" reasons. Kant would argue that to make a promise for the wrong reason is not moral - you might as well not make the promise. You must have a duty code inside of you or it will not come through in your actions otherwise. Our reasoning ability will always allow us to know what our duty is.
Over the years the ways executions are performed have changed significantly to be less gruesome, Though even with these changes capital punishment still remains as inhumane and unconstitutional as it was before and effecting the lives of several people. The eighth amendment holds a strong cases against capital punishment. According to the University of Minnesota Human Rights Library the eighth amendment states “excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted”. When our country allows these executions to continue it is allowing our rights to be trampled, no one deserves to be treated inhumanely. Beyond our constitutional rights being trampled, there has also been an extreme shortage in the three step drugs used in executions due to Pharmaceutical companies not wanting to be part of killing when there sole purpose is to provide to help people survive. That leaves one with the question, if there is a shortage in these drugs how are facilities still administering lethal injections? The answer is simple. “States are now buying drugs from illegal sources, ordering new ones from compounding ph...
Immanuel Kant is a popular modern day philosopher. He was a modest and humble man of his time. He never left his hometown, never married and never strayed from his schedule. Kant may come off as boring, while he was an introvert but he had a great amount to offer. His thoughts and concepts from the 1700s are still observed today. His most recognized work is from the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Here Kant expresses his idea of ‘The Good Will’ and the ‘Categorical Imperative’.
Immanuel Kant’s theory of ethics is rooted in deontology. Describing Kant’s ethics as deontological means that they are derivative of mankind’s moral duty. For Kant, this critical component of ethics is an extension of Hume’s fork as it creates a third category, which is synthetic Apriori. This category is comprised of math, ethics and causality. His rules-based ethics revolves around the good will, as deontology in its nature revolves around adhering to the rules. Kant says that intelligence is great by nature, but means very little unless you apply them in virtuous and good will. In order for something to be truly good, it must be intrinsically good and without qualification.
Foster care is the planned care for children who cannot live with their birth parents for a period of time (Emerson & Lovitt, 2003). Children in foster care may live with unrelated foster parents, a relative, in a group home, or in residential care. Children who are removed from their home and placed in foster care are often removed due to issues concerning abuse, neglect, parent-child conflict, or physical and/or behavioral problems (Trout, Hagaman, Casey, Reid, & Esptein, 2007). According to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS, 2015), on September 30, 2014, approximately 415,000 children were in foster care in the United States; approximately 64% of these children were school-aged.
Kant’s moral philosophy is built around the formal principles of ethics rather than substantive human goods. He begins by outlining the principles of reasoning that can be equally expected of all rational persons regardless of their individual desires or partial interests. It creates an ideal universal community of rational individuals who can collectively agree on the moral principles for guiding equality and autonomy. This is what forms the basis for contemporary human rig...
Through his discussion of morals in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant explores the question of whether a human being is capable of acting solely out of pure duty and if our actions hold true moral value. In passage 407, page 19, Kant proposes that if one were to look at past experiences, one cannot be certain that his or her rationalization for performing an action that conforms with duty could rest solely on moral grounds. In order to fully explain the core principle of moral theory, Kant distinguishes between key notions such as a priori and a posteriori, and hypothetical imperative vs. categorical imperative, in order to argue whether the actions of rational beings are actually moral or if they are only moral because of one’s hidden inclinations.
The Transcendental Deductions of the pure concept of the understanding in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in its most general sense, explains how concepts relate a priori to objects in virtue of the fact that the power of knowing an object through representations is known as understanding. According to Kant, the foundation of all knowledge is the self, our own consciousness because without the self, experience is not possible. The purpose of this essay is to lay out Kant’s deduction of the pure concept of understanding and show how our concepts are not just empirical, but concepts a priori. We will walk through Kant’s argument and reasoning as he uncovers each layer of understanding, eventually leading up to the conclusion mentioned above.
The foster care program has become such a huge thing worldwide. It can help to provide children homes and families which they would not be able to find otherwise. Foster care programs also offer temporary food, domestic care for children from birth to age eighteen. While programs laws and rules are different from state to state, typically foster care is used by children 's welfare services when a child is identified as having been orphaned, abandoned, abused, or neglected. At the same time though it has a negative impact. The foster care system hurts the structure of the family unit which has existed for centuries. Foster Care has become better and better as time goes on. Before, there would be people who scam the system and it was hard to
Foster care is supervised care for delinquent or neglected children usually in an institution or substitute home. There are many people involved upon placing a neglected child in the foster care system. The children are assigned a social worker who is responsible for a child to have a place to sleep every night. Although the government has this system set up to help children, there are a bountiful amount of flaws in the system, affecting the children in a negative way or circumstance. Due to “ageing out” adolescents are leaving their foster homes and are not able to become fully independent due to their lack of child development , emotional necessities , and lack of stability.
...f Pure Reason, 616). Kant places religion within the rational realm. He starts with the rational individual which is living in an absolute moral society. The moral law is based upon religion. “...and I maintain, consequently, that unless moral laws are laid at the basis or used as a guide, there can be no theology of reason at all” (Critique of Pure Reason, 613). To Kant, a society’s commitment to absolute morality, moral law, and the church was the rational world’s meaning for religion.
While Kant’s theory may seem “overly optimistic” (Johnson, 2008) now, it was ruled as acceptable and rational behavior then. Kant believed that any moral or ethical decision could be achieved with consistent behavior. While judgment was based on reason, morals were based on rational choices made by human beings (Freeman, 2000). A human’s brain is the most advanced in the animal kingdom. Not only do human beings work on instinct, but they have the ability to sort out situations in order to make a decision. This includes weighing the pros and cons of decisions that could be made and how they affect others either positively or negatively. This is called rational thought. Kant believed that any human being able to rationalize a decision before it was made had the ability to be a morally just person (Freeman, 2000). There were certain things that made the decision moral, and he called it the “Categorical Imperative” (Johnson, 2008). If someone was immoral they violated this CI and were considered irrational. The CI is said to be an automatic response which was part of Kant’s argument that all people were deserving of respect. This automatic response to rational thinking is where he is considered, now, to be “overly optimistic” (Johnson, 2008).
In Kant’s book, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant talks about the three formulations of the categorical imperative. By these formulations, he describes his idea of organizing the moral principle for all rational beings. Kant also talks about the principles of humanity, rational ends, and the “realm of ends” which are constituted by the autonomous freedom of rational beings.