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In deontological ethics, mainly in Kantian ethics, maxims are understood as subjective principles of action. A maxim is thought to be part of an agent's thought process for every rational action, indicating in its standard form: (1) the action, or type of action; (2) the conditions under which it is to be done; and (3) the end or purpose to be achieved by the action, or the motive.
Towards the beginning of the 19th century, the maxim began to play a significant role in German philosophy. Immanuel Kant ( Metaphysics of Morals , 1797) wrote that "know thyself" should be understood as an ethical commandment to know one's own heart and to understand the motives behind one's actions, in order to harmonize one's will with one's ...
Like Kantian ethics, discourse ethics is a cognitive ethical theory, in that it supposes that truth and falsity can be attributed to ethical propositions. It also formulates a rule by which ethical actions can be determined and proposes that ethical actions should be universalizable, in a similar way to Kant's ethics.
The first maxim, "Know thyself", has been called "by far the most significant of the three maxims, both in ancient and modern times". [14] In its earliest appearances in ancient literature, it was interpreted to mean that one should understand one's limitations and know one's place in the social scale. [ 15 ]
Kant's ethics are founded on his view of rationality as the ultimate good and his belief that all people are fundamentally rational beings. This led to the most important part of Kant's ethics, the formulation of the categorical imperative, which is the criterion for whether a maxim is good or bad.
The Golden Rule is paramount in the Jainist philosophy and can be seen in the doctrines of ahimsa and karma. As part of the prohibition of causing any living beings to suffer, Jainism forbids inflicting upon others what is harmful to oneself. The following line from the Acaranga Sutra sums up the philosophy of Jainism:
The concept of universalizability was set out by the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant as part of his work Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.It is part of the first formulation of his categorical imperative, which states that the only morally acceptable maxims of our actions are those that could rationally be willed to be universal law.
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785; German: Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten; also known as the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals, and the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals) is the first of Immanuel Kant's mature works on moral philosophy and the first of his trilogy of major works on ethics alongside the Critique of ...