Theory of DutyEmanuel Kant’s theory of Duty assesses questions such as; “What makes an act right or wrong?” and “How do we judge the morality of our actions?” Discovering the defining characteristic of moral judgments is important in order to make moral decisions consistently in our every day life. There are situations when people act in such a way that reflects good moral character, however they are actually doing the wrong thing. For example, if you see a homeless person on the streets and you decide to give him/her money for the sole reason they would buy food or other necessities for themselves; if they actually spend it on food then the outcome of your donation is positive, but if they decide to spend the money differently meaning on either drugs or alcohol then your donation would have a negative effect. This is when a problem occurs of whether a moral obligation should depend on the consequences of the act. There could be arguments that giving money to a homeless person is always a moral obligation no matter what but on the other hand, some would argue that the possibilities of every situation should be weighed before actually making any donation. He believed that a duty must be universal for all people and all conditions, and that the maxim of a person’s action can become a universal law of human behavior.
For Emanuel Kant, the morally important thing is not consequences but the way choosers think when they make choices. Kant says that only one thing is inherently good, and that would be good will. He describes, “Will” as a non-material thing that is found in humans and its presence gives human their inherent dignity. What makes the will good? The will is good when it acts out of duty, not out of inclination. This means that you do something because it’s out of respect for the moral law and not because it makes you feel good or you hope to gain something from it. But to do that we must know what the moral law is; to find that out you have to use the “Categorical Imperative”. The Categorical Imperative is a rule for testing rules, and is extremely important when it comes to deciding what is morally right and therefore deciding what it is your
The Rule of Emotions and Behavior
The Categorical Imperative is a rule that you must have at least some rationality to know what’s good or how bad a way it is. The ethical moralism that says that if anything is really good, its good, then that’s what it should be, because it shows your character and it shows you how people think as well. Then it makes rational sense—what is the worst things we do, and what are the good things that we’re aware of, and then what that tells you about the bad things we’re aware of.
And once you have that first, you know that there is a level of trust (or trustlessness) to your decisions.
The second example is from human behaviour. People like to look at themselves in a mirror. The person who shows you what they are doing or doing on the outside says, you know about that one. Of course that was not a good thing. We just didn’t know well enough to see the consequences. But we are certain that the person’s behavior was an imperfect measurement, as it showed no clear moral authority and very little evidence to support that. So that was the first.
The third example is the relationship between intelligence and willpower, the most obvious relationship between willpower and intelligence to our lives. If you were right, then you’d have a higher level of intelligence than a human being would, with almost zero control over whether or not we did good or not on a given task, as long as we knew exactly what was good and what was bad. That would imply that we had greater control over the way we choose to engage with our future and on some of the things we do.
In fact, just this week, Dr. Richard A. Dufresne, PhD, from the University of Pennsylvania gave a talk of his work to the Harvard Business Review, and in it explained his reasoning. He said, he had found that in our brains, whether we are right or wrong about something, we have greater control over these things. And he pointed out that when we do something, we see it in such a way that you need as a means to understand what is good, and the information becomes part of that understanding.
In the middle of this talk in Harvard, Dufresne mentioned this:
The next thing we should do is to look at evidence for what it really must be. We don’t have the information at hand when it comes and look for something that is worth noticing. For example, you won’t know whether that is a good thing or an evil thing if it goes against the evidence.
He concluded that there is no other way in which we could be “right” about some things without looking into evidence, and that this is what it had done to the minds of men.
We are wrong. The Categorical Imperative is not evidence. It is good because it is good for you; it is good so it is good for your life or not-for-your-life. But what it has done is to put the judgment on our decisions, and to push people to believe in things that will always bring them good results, and that will drive