Die Wirklichkeit des Sittlichen

2008 ◽  
Vol 2008 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Kersting
Keyword(s):  
Social Environment ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Discourse Ethics ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Moral Principle ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Kantian Ethics ◽  
Hermeneutic Approach ◽  
The Given ◽  
Moral Convictions

Within the Kantian ethics consciousness of the moral principle is a fact of reason which cannot be grounded in any antecedent data, empirical or rational. Hegel however argues that the fact of reason is necessarily embedded in the fact of „Sittlichkeit“, that a pure reason is an empty and chimerical construction, that moral knowledge is unavoidably rootet in the contingent moral convictions of the given cultural and social environment. This essay defends Hegel’s critique of Kant’s moral philosophy and – by generalizing Hegel’s hermeneutic approach – sketches the outlines of an explicatory concept of ethics which contradicts the scientistic understanding of moral philosophy characteristic for Kant, the utilitarianism and the supporters of discourse ethics likewise.

scholarly journals The paradox of imperfect duty in Kant's moral philosophy: A problem in 'applying' ethics'

2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 540-564
Author(s):  
Phillip Richter
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Applied Ethics ◽  
Discourse Ethics ◽  
Kantian Ethics ◽  
Imperfect Duty ◽  
Helping Others ◽  
Metaphysics Of Morals

The Applied Ethics debate has not yet sufficiently clarified what application of ethics exactly is. The issue of application is considered to be especially problematic in Kantian ethics or in discourse ethics. This article describes the concept of applying ethics in Kant. In discussing the duty of helping others and the theory of its application in Metaphysics of Morals it is shown that a strict separation of justification and application in ethical theory results in the paradox of imperfect duty. The paradox says that the duty to help others would be fulfilled without ever being fulfilled in action. To overcome the paradox it is necessary to form submaximes of helping, which are not arbitrarily but instructed by a theory of casuistry. This casuistry, if it is considered as a doctrine of application in Kantian ethics, can overcome the paradox of imperfect duty. However, the casuistry can overcome this paradox only if it is understood as a philosophy of prudence, which can be found in Aristotle or Descartes.

scholarly journals Evaluating Others If They Stand Up for Their Moral Convictions, and Evaluating Ourselves If We Don't Stand Up

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florien M. Cramwinckel ◽  
Kees van den Bos ◽  
Eric van Dijk
Keyword(s):  
Social Environment ◽  
Sexual Minorities ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Moral Courage ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Situational Demands ◽  
Moral Convictions

AbstractActing on one’s moral principles is not always easy. Upholding one’s moral beliefs may run counter to one’s social environment or situational demands. It may often cause people to remain silent on their convictions, while at the same time some may show the moral courage to speak out. How do people evaluate those who do stand up, and how does it affect their self-evaluations? In two experimental studies (Ns = 207 and 204), we investigated both types of evaluations. The studies demonstrate that people who failed to uphold their moral beliefs still had positive evaluations of others who showed moral courage. More specifically, pro-gay participants who went along with writing an anti-gay essay denouncing equal rights for sexual minorities had positive evaluations of another person who spoke up and refused this task. The failure to display moral courage had negative consequences for participants’ self-concepts. In Experiment 1, we show that pro-gay participants’ positive self-concepts were lowered after writing an anti-gay essay (vs. a pro-gay essay). In Experiment 2, we reveal that participants' positive self-concepts were lowered only when they were confronted with morally courageous behavior and their own failure to uphold their moral beliefs was visible to the experimenter.

Beyond Respect and Beneficence

Respect ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 157-170
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Hill
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
Kantian Ethics ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Moral Attitude ◽  
Moral Attitudes ◽  
Recent Tendency

Thomas E. Hill, Jr. breaks with two conventional approaches in moral philosophy. Hill eschews the recent tendency to focus either on duties or on virtues, and instead emphasizes the importance of moral attitudes. And Hill specifically steps outside the usual framework of Kantian ethics by developing and defending the importance of a moral attitude besides respect and beneficence, namely the attitude of appreciation. To appreciate something is to recognize and respond appropriately to its value as something worth attending to, observing, admiring, cherishing, or the like, for its own sake. The attitude of appreciation is especially important in personal relationships, although it includes recognizing and responding positively to the distinctive features possessed by many sorts of things, not just persons.

Moral Knowledge from Others

2019 ◽  
pp. 59-105
Author(s):  
Sarah McGrath
Keyword(s):  
Social Environment ◽  
Moral Knowledge

This chapter explores a number of philosophical issues raised by the possibility of arriving at moral views by relying on other people. I defend the Moral Inheritance View, according to which a person whose earliest moral views are inherited from her social environment might very well have substantial moral knowledge even before she is in a position to begin critically reflecting upon or reasoning about those views. More generally, I argue that other people are in principle potentially rich sources of moral knowledge. To the extent that we have reservations about the propriety of forming moral views by relying on others—as opposed to through the exercise of our own autonomous judgment—what is legitimate in those reservations does not derive from its being impossible to acquire moral knowledge in this way, but rather from other sources.

Pluralizing Universal “Man”: The Legacy of Transcendentalism and Teleology in Habermas's Discourse Ethics

1998 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 685-718 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stella Gaon
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Ethics ◽  
Moral Reason ◽  
Moral Principle ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Collective Development ◽  
Tacit Assumptions ◽  
Central Claim

The central claim of this article is that Habermas's program of discourse ethics fails to “detranscendentalize” the Enlightenment subject. On the contrary, tacit assumptions concerning a transcendental conception of reason and a subject that is teleologically predisposed toward its rightful end are the logical pillars of Habermas's two most crucial claims. First, unless Habermas presupposes an abstract and decidedly unencumbered moral discussant, he cannot maintain his claim concerning the rationality—and hence the unconditionality—of the moral principle he describes. Secondly, unless Habermas begs the question of the proper end of individual and collective development, he fails to support the claim that discourse ethics speaks to the emphatic dimension of moral reason.

Paradigmatic Immorality

1975 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 689-695
Author(s):  
Justin Leiber
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
List Type ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Type Number ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Paradigm Case ◽  
The Status ◽  
Important Sense ◽  
Anglo American

The notion of moral philosophy that has been dominant in Anglo-American philosophizing since G.E. Moore is peculiar. Reviewing traditional works such as Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Hume's Treatise, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Mill's Utilitarianism, one is tempted to call this new notion of moral philosophy a different subject; and if one does this, it is less peculiar. However, let us accept that this new sort of moral philosophy does belong to the previous tradition; granted this, I shall explain why I think it peculiar through considering the status of the judgement that Hitler was a bad man.Consider the sentential function ‘x is (was) a bad man’. ‘Hitler’ seems an obviously suitable substitution for ‘x, at least in the most important sense. That is, one wants to say that if it is not proper or true to say that ‘Hitler was a bad man’ or ‘Hitler was bad’, it fs never proper or true to issue a sentence of this form, restricting x to human beings. Hitler seems indeed, in this most important sense, to be a paradigm case. One wants to say: if Hitler was not a bad man, who could be?

scholarly journals Is R. Rorty’s Moral Philosophy Possible? Antifoundationalism and Kant’s Criticism

Problemos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 36-47
Author(s):  
Agnė Alijauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Moral Identity ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Key Points ◽  
Moral Domain

This article aims to answer the main question raised – is Rorty’s moral philosophy possible? To what extent is it possible to treat it as an authentic theory? Rorty’s criticism of Kant and the Kantians, as one of the key points of contemporary moral philosophy, determines the posture in the moral domain and provides a certain place in discourse. The article states that, despite the fact that Rorty’s moral philosophy is not based on a particular theoretical concept, it can be considered as a fragmented whole consisting of several parts, one of which is the agent’s openness to the choice of moral identity. At the same time, we will critically question the position of Rorty himself – while maintaining the suspicion towards the sources of moral knowledge, he maintains an insufficient distance with one of his own sources of moral knowledge, namely historical progress.

scholarly journals Of empty thoughts and blind intuitions Kant's answer to McDowell

2010 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Günter Zöller
Keyword(s):  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
The Real ◽  
Myth Of The Given ◽  
Passive Data ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Given ◽  
Theoretical Philosophy

This paper examines the relation between intuition and concept in Kant in light of John McDowell's neo-Kantian position that intuitions are concept-laden.2 The focus is on Kant's twofold pronouncement that thoughts without content are empty and that intuitions without concepts are blind. I show that intuitions as singular representations are not instances of passive data intake but the result of synthetic unification of the given manifold of the senses by the power of the imagination under the guidance of the understanding. Against McDowell I argue that the amenability of intuitions to conceptual determination is not due some pre-existing, absolute conceptuality of the real but to the "work of the subject."3 On a more programmatic level, this paper seeks to demonstrate the limitations of a selective appropriation of Kant and the philosophical potential of a more comprehensive and thorough consideration of his work. Section 1 addresses the unique balance in Kant's philosophy between the work on particular problems and the orientation toward a systematic whole. Section 2 outlines McDowell's take on the Kantian distinction between intuition and concept in the context of the Kant readings by Sellars and Strawson. Section 3 exposes McDowell's relapse into the Myth of the Given. Section 4 proposes a reading of Kant's theoretical philosophy as an epistemology of metaphysical cognition. Section 5 details Kant's original account of sensible intuition in the Inaugural-Dissertation of 1770. Section 6 presents the transition from the manifold of the senses to the synthesis in the imagination and the unification through the categories in the Critique of pure reason (1781 and 1787). Section 7 addresses Kant's formalism in epistemology and metaphysics.

scholarly journals Repensar la democracia. Estrategia moral y perspectiva crítica en K.O.APEL

Daímon ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 75-89
Author(s):  
Domingo Viente García Marzá
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Discourse Ethics ◽  
Moral Principle ◽  
Architectural Theory ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
El Sistema ◽  
Democratic System ◽  
The Relationship

El objetivo de este artículo es mostrar la actualidad de algunas de las aportaciones más importantes de K.O.Apel a la reflexión democrática, en concreto a la relación entre ética y democracia. Para este objetivo compararemos estas aportaciones con las de J.Habermas, compañero de viaje en la propuesta de la ética del discurso. Comprobaremos cómo nuestro autor supo avanzar y justificar la necesidad de una estrategia moral, más aún, de una arquitéctonica de la razón práctica que relacione fundamentación y aplicación. Solo así se puede dar razón de la perspectiva crítica tanto en la fundamentación de la idea de democracia como en la aplicación del principio moral a las instituciones que componen el sistema democrático. The aim of this paper is to show the actuality of K.O. Apel's most important contributions to democratic reflection, specifically the relationship between ethics and democracy. For this purpose, we will compare these contributions with those of J. Habermas, his colleague in the discourse ethics approach. We will see how our author achieved an advance in the justification of the need for a moral strategy, even more so for an architectural theory of practical reason hich includes the conditions of its application. Only in this way we can give a reason for the critical perspective, both in the foundation of the idea of democracy and in the application of the moral principle to the institutions that make up the democratic system.

scholarly journals TINJAUAN KRITIS TERHADAP EPISTEMOLOGI IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804)

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 74
Author(s):  
Lailiy Muthmainnah
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Research Results ◽  
Metaphysical Problem ◽  
Hermeneutic Approach ◽  
Personal Invitation

The background of this article is a metaphysical problem that arose in Immanuel Kant's thought in his Critique of Pure Reason. Through a hermeneutic approach this article aims to analyze the metaphysical problems that arise in Immanuel Kant's epistemology of thought. Based on the research results can be concluded that the unequivocal separation between phenomena and noumena will cause humans will never come to the knowledge of the Transcendent, as well as with moral and aesthetics. This is because such knowledge can only be obtained through my participation as a Subject through the process of continuous existence and more of a personal invitation. In the end it can be concluded that the nature of analog knowledge is the meaning of multidimensional side of human life. This brings consequences to the need for intersubjective dialogue and continual openness. Knowledge is an infinite thing. Human knowledge therefore will never reach the end of the journey but only continuously expanded its horizon.

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