Immanuel Kant -Ethics

[Browneyed]

HI to everyone!!

I'm struggling to understand Immanuel Kant's theory of ethics. Please help guide me in understanding his work. I have researched Kant and found that the primary principle of Kant’s ethics, “the duty to act” primary means that it everyone’s duty to do what is right just because it is the right thing to do, without any ulterior motive. The outcome of the act, whether it is good or bad has no reflection on whether the person act was right or not, as long as it was done with the right intentions. I'm trying to relate this to my job. I work as a nurse and struggling with finding an example or how Kant's theory is applied in the setting of healthcare I work at......

Please any insight into this would help and would be appreciated....

[mal4mac]

That seems like a reasonable statement of his primary principle - but it's incomplete. For instance, Kant believed that you should never lie. He grounded that belief in the idea that this could be made into a universal law. His moral thinking is grounded on such general universal laws.

An act is right, regardless of consequences, if it follows a universal law.

Imagine you are a nurse in Libya and have just put bandages on a group of injured rebels. Imagine if, later, one of Gadafi's goons stops you in the street and asks if you know the whereabouts of any rebels. If you said, "No!", From a strict Kantian persepective you would be doing wrong, because you broke the rule that says lying is wrong.

So an unbreakable rule against lying would be unworkable, but a more sophisticated rule (perhaps one with a list of exceptions) might be something we could live with. This would be based on other "universal laws" - "Mislead goons as often as possible... Always help freedom fighters..."

The difficult, then, is knowing if we have the 'right' sophisticated rule... it's difficult to see how we could know this for certain... and hence philosophers are never done with arguing :)

Imagine if a small child asks you if she is going to die, and if it will be painful. If the answer is "yes", a strict Kantian, following the simplest rule, would just say, "Yes!" But it's difficult see what the "right answer" would be... and it would depend on the child and her unique circumstances...