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Kant's Formula of Humanity reads: “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” [2] Kant's ethics are centered around the idea of a "categorical imperative." It's a universal ethical principle saying that you should always value the ...
Kant began his ethical theory by arguing that the only virtue that can be an unqualified good is a good will. No other virtue, or thing in the broadest sense of the term, has this status because every other virtue, every other thing, can be used to achieve immoral ends. For example, the virtue of loyalty is not good if one is loyal to an evil ...
Kant thinks that the positive understanding of freedom amounts to the same thing as the categorical imperative, and that “a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same.” [xviii] This is the key notion that later scholars call the reciprocity thesis, which states that a will is bound by the moral law if and only if it is free ...
The Kant scholar Allen W. Wood characterizes the essay as "famous (or infamous)". [3] Helga Varden has written, "Kant's example of lying to the murderer at the door has been a cherished source of scorn for thinkers with little sympathy for Kant's philosophy and a source of deep puzzlement for those more favorably inclined...
The Kingdom of Ends (German: Reich der Zwecke) is a part of the categorical imperative theory of Immanuel Kant. It is regularly discussed in relation to Kant's moral theory and its application to ethics and philosophy in general. The kingdom of ends centers on the second and third formulations of the categorical imperative. These help form the ...
The general concept or principle of moral universalizability is that moral principles, maxims, norms, facts, predicates, rules, etc., are universally true; that is, if they are true as applied to some particular case (an action, person, etc.) then they are true of all other cases of this sort. Some philosophers, like Immanuel Kant, Richard Hare ...
While Kant admits that humanity could subsist (and admits it could possibly perform better) if this were universal, he states: But even though it is possible that a universal law of nature could subsist in accordance with that maxim, still it is impossible to will that such a principle should hold everywhere as a law of nature.
Kant believed this principle was a categorical freedom, bound only by the free will as opposed to the Humean hypothetical freedom ("Free to do otherwise if I had so chosen"). [4] There are several ways of deriving the formula—for example, the argument that it is wrong to blame people for things that they cannot control (essentially phrasing ...