Phi202

Kantian deontology has certain striking features (connect the moral theory with a certain metaphysical picture of the self a highly abstract and rationalistic picture) that make it quintessentially Modern. These features exist in embryo in our ordinary moral views but Kant articulates them in a very systematic way and places them at the heart of morality in a way that not all moral theories.

What are these features?

Moral value of an action depends on its being done with what is caused to produce a certain outcome.

That is, it depends on the will to produce that outcome. Whether that outcome actually eventuates, to the extent that that issue is outside of your control, is morally irrelevant.

E.g two people in subjectively identical circumstances spend $100 000 of their own money to buy an experimental drug for a stranger who is dying of a rare disease. Even if, due to pure luck, the drug works, in the one circumstance and not in the other, the moral value of the action is the same - this is the intuition Kant builds on. They did different things, but what they did intentionally was the same. (Subjectively identical premises rules out the pending (and had reason to know that the drug wasn't going to work.

i.e whether it is motivated by a recognition that the act is required by a purely rational moral rule.

What you will is important.

Why you will is important.

The moral rule you are motivated by, if it is to be genuinely moral, must not command you hypothetically or conditionally to do A if you want B, where B is some desire you just happen to have. Rather, it must command you categorically or unconditionally to do A, based on any rational being would enough. To say that a desire is one you just happen to have is to say that your having it is contingent fact or is an accidental feature of you; the idea is that you could have existed without desiring B, that that desire is not a necessary or essential part or feature of your make up. What makes a motivation contingent to you is that it is an empirical desire, stemming from de facto or merely given feelings. For Kant, the only motivations that are necessary for you to have, the only ones they are part of your essential make up, are not here that contain no empirical concept and are purely formal. This is another way of saying that your essential true self is your rational self.

Acting from self-imposed laws that stem from the rational nature of your essential self is freedom of autonomy; acting from externally imposed (stemming from your pathological nature of your contingent empirical self, or mere tradition) laws.

Does Kant undervalue feeling?