FREE ESSAY ON DUTY AND REASON AS THE ULTIMATE PRINCIPLE: KANT

DUTY AND REASON AS THE ULTIMATE PRINCIPLE: KANT

Duty and Reason as the Ultimate Principle: Kant
Kant claims that only actions from duty have moral worth. In other words, actions from
motives other than duty deserve no positive moral evaluation. I like and agree with
Kant's view because I believe that a good will makes a good person. I also believe we
have all been put on this earth to do our duty. We should do our duty just for duty
alone; we should not be concerned about anything else. I will begin by discussing Kant's
distinction between what is good merely as a means to an end and what is intrinsically
good, or good in itself.
A good will is not good because of what it accomplishes; it is good through its willing
alone. Contrary to some people's belief, to be healthy, wealthy, or happy does not
guarantee that a person is morally praiseworthy. Many people object to this statement
because these characteristics are good features of human nature and benefits of a good
life. However, they have value only under appropriate conditions, since they may be used
either for good or for evil. For example, Hitler had all these characteristics, but he
had an ill will. Thus, he was undeniably not a good person. Therefore, these
characteristics do not make the possessor a good person. 
I will use Bill Gates as another rebuttal to the objection I mentioned earlier. Bill
Gates has been the richest man in America for a few years. He undoubtedly has more money
than he will ever spend, but just recently has started to donate some of his money to
charity. Some people would say he donates money because he has a good will, and,
therefore, he is a morally good person. But did Bill Gates really donate money because he
had a good will? No, I feel he gave money to charity because of social pressure, not a
good will. He would have started donating much earlier if he would have had a good will.
However, it wasn't until he and Microsoft started to get a bad, greedy reputation that he
started to donate his money. Therefore, Bill Gates did not donate because of a good will,
and is not a morally good person for doing so.
A good will is easily distinguished from one that acts from an indirect inclination,
doing the right thing merely as a means to an end, for a selfish purpose. For many
people, the difficult thing is to distinguish a good will from a will that has a direct
inclination to do something that is right. For instance, it is not surprising that many
people think if you are helping others because you have love in your mind, you have moral
virtue. However, Kant does not believe this is true. There are people so sympathetically
constituted that without any motive of selfishness they find an inner satisfaction in
spreading joy and helping others. Many of us look at these people as having moral virtue.
I must admit I was one of these people before I understood and took a liking to Kant's
view. To Kant, having a natural inclination to do what coincides with duty is not the
same thing as acting from duty. Only if someone acts without any inclination, from the
sake of duty alone, does his or her actions have genuine moral worth.
Kant's moral theory states that actions are morally right in virtue of their motives,
which must derive from duty, not inclination. The clearest examples of morally right
action are precisely those in which an individual's determination to act in accordance
with duty overcomes his or her evident self-interest and obvious desire to do otherwise.
In such a case, Kant argues, the moral value of the action can only reside in a formal
principle or maxim, the general commitment to act in this way because it is one's duty.
Thus, he concludes, Duty is the necessity to act out of reverence for the law. This
brings about an interesting question. What should we do today, if tomorrow is the end of
the world? Should we execute all the criminals who are on death row, or would this be a
selfish, inappropriate action? Kant would say, and I agree, that if tomorrow is the end
of the world, it is our duty to execute all criminals sentenced to death. If we do not,
we will not have performed our duty to do so. I do not believe this act is selfish or
inappropriate because it is not done out of hate or rage, simply duty. This view to do
your duty is commonly used in the military today.
According to Kant, then, the ultimate principle of morality must be a moral law conceived
so abstractly that it is capable of guiding us to the right action in application to
every possible set of circumstances. So the only relevant feature of the moral law is its
generality, the fact that it has the formal property of universalizability, by virtue of
which it can be applied at all times to every moral agent. For this chain of reasoning
about our ordinary moral concepts, Kant derived as a preliminary statement of moral
obligation the notion that right actions are those that practical reason would will as
universal law. 
A categorical imperative unconditionally demands performance of an action for its own
sake; it has the form Do A. It states, Act in such a way that the maxim of your will can
always become a universal law. That is, each individual agent regards itself as
determining, by its decision to act in a certain way, that everyone, including itself,
will always act according to the same general rule in the future. I believe this
expression of the moral law provides a concrete, practical method for evaluating
particular human actions.
Consider, for example, the case of someone who contemplates relieving a financial crisis
by borrowing money from someone else, promising to repay it in the future while in fact
having no intention of doing so. The maxim of this action would be that it is permissible
to borrow money under false intentions if you really need it. But making this maxim into
a universal law would be clearly self-defeating. The entire practice of lending money on
promise presupposes honest intention to repay; if this condition were universally
ignored, the false promises would never be effective as methods of borrowing. Since the
universalized maxim is contradictory in and of itself, no one could will it to be law,
and Kant concluded that we have a perfect duty not to act in this manner.
Kant supposed that moral obligations arise even when other people are not involved. For
example, killing yourself whenever you feel like it could never be a moral rule. It could
not be universalizable because everyone would be dead. Since it would be contradictory to
universalize the maxim of taking one's own life if it promises more misery than
satisfaction, we have a duty to ourselves not to commit suicide. 
Kant offered another categorical imperative stating, Act in such a way that you always
treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of the other, never simply as
a means, but always at the same time as an end. This places more emphasis on the unique
value of human life as deserving of our ultimate moral respect. This imperative can be
applied to the cases I mentioned earlier. For instance, violating a duty by making a
false promise (or killing myself) would be to treat another person (or myself) merely as
a means for getting money (or avoiding pain), and violating a duty by refusing to offer
benevolence (or neglecting my talents) would be a failure to treat another person (or
myself) as an end in itself. 
In conclusion, only a morally good will makes a morally good person, and only actions
from duty have moral worth. Kant's view has opened my eyes and has inspired me to do my
duty in life. He gives people a simple way to evaluate whether their actions are morally
good. A person should simply ask himself or herself whether their actions could be
universalizable. If they could not be universalizable, then they are not moral.