Paste your essay in here… In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant discusses the human good will. In his opinion, there is nothing good in the world but good will. “A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes – because of its fitness for attaining some proposed end: it is good through its willing alone – that is, good in itself” (528). Kant believes that a sense of moral obligation, duty, is the major aspect of acting out of good will. A moral person acts not because of the consequences of her action, but because through her reasoning, she considers the action to be ethically the right thing to do and thus feels morally obliged to do that action. Kant draws a definite line between the inclinations and moral reasoning believing that a person’s moral worth is revealed when she acts out of duty rather than inclination. For Kant, good will is what provides the motives for an action. A moral agent acts morally because she recognizes her duty to do so and not because of what the results of her action might be. Kant claims that a person can have a moral worth only when the intentions and motivations of her actions are good; since consequences are not in people’s power, good consequences are not enough for the action to be ethical.
Kant puts a huge emphasis on human reasoning. In his opinion reason guides people to action and serves as the source of morality since through reasoning, people consciously make decisions to act ethically. Since moral action requires reason, only rational beings can be moral agents. When one has good intentions and that is the moving force of her actions, she is a moral agent. A moral person does not act for the good consequences, rather for good reasons. When discussing the morality, Kant focuses on two extremes to describe human actions. He believes that an action can either be right or wrong and a person can either have moral worth or lack moral worth. Subsequently, Kant believes that a person’s actions determine her moral worth, but this should not be mistaken in the good consequences of the action, rather the good intentions. Kant considers that an action has moral worth when it is done out of duty rather than inclination. Certainly, an action is ethical if it is intended to serve for something good or to benefit someone without having a self-interest in it. Kant brings an example of a sensible shopkeeper who keeps his prices low so that anyone could afford his products. Yes, people are served honestly, but it does not mean that the shopkeeper is acting out of duty, rather by the inclination of self-interest. For Kant, a rational person does what is morally right because she recognizes her moral duty to do so rather than for anything she may get out of it.
Good consequences are often considered as justifications that actions are moral. For Kant, consequences do not mean anything if the intentions are not good. He argues that people do not have control over the consequences of their actions. In a way, it is true that people can give their consequences direction but there are many other factors that can affect them and change their trajectory. That is why people cannot rely solely on consequences as a determinant whether an action is moral or not. Using something that one has no power over to justify actions is not the right way to do it. One may act out of instinct and have good consequences but this type of actions has no moral worth. Doing a right thing for a wrong/ unknown reason does not grant one’s action a moral worth. An action can be considered as moral only when it is done for the sake of duty because the moral agent recognizes that it is her duty to act so.
Kant is right to claim that a person can be morally worthy only when her actions are supported by ethical motives. However, he does not explain what to call a person who does not have any specific intentions but happens to do a good thing by chance. Does this make her an unethical person? – I don’t think so. I think, Kant fails to touch upon the group of people who have neither good nor bad intentions. Can one be considered unethical if she does not do anything bad, doesn’t harm anyone, rather accidentally does something good for others? I think Kant should have classified those people in a separate group. People who could be considered as amoral, the ones who are simply indifferent to moral aspect of their actions but are still eligible of doing something ethical out of inclinations. It is not fair to call someone unethical simply because they did not think about the goodness of their action before they did it. However, it would also be unfair to others if these people were considered as moral agents because their good deeds are inadvertent and not intended. That is why there should be a classification for people who are in the middle of being unethical and ethical.
In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant brings a few examples of actions that are good but not ethical. He writes:
“To help others where one can is a duty, and besides this there are many spirits of so sympathetic a temper that, without any further motive of vanity or self-interest, they find an inner pleasure in spreading happiness around them and can take delight in the contentment of others as their own work. Yet I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however right and however amiable it may be, has still no genuinely moral worth” (529).
I find it hard to follow what Kant thinks of people who spread happiness for the sake of their inner pleasure. I understand that since the actions in this example are driven by the personal pleasure one attains, they cannot be considered as morally worthy. However, I do not think it be right to refer to people of such a great sympathy as morally unworthy, and I wish Kant had touched upon this kind of people more thoroughly because I refuse to call them unethical. Maybe Kant did not think of them as unethical either, but his writing about this particular aspect of moral philosophy is very ambiguous to draw any conclusions.
To sum up, Kant examines many controversial ideas in his writings. He touches upon the idea of acting out of good will that refers to acting out of a sense of moral obligation or duty. When acting for the sake of duty, one recognizes her responsibility to act so and therefore is called a moral agent. Kant talks about two important aspects of actions/deeds, their intentions and consequences. Although it may seem that both are equally important in evaluating the moral worth of an action, Kant claims that consequences are irrelevant when determining whether an action is of moral worth or not. Kant believes that consequences are not in people’s power, therefore morality of one’s actions can only by judged by her initial intentions of acting so. For Kant, a moral agent does not act for the sake of desirable consequences or for self-interest, but rather through her reasoning because she knows it is the moral thing to do. An act may conform to the moral law without being moral; it is moral only when it is done for the sake of the moral law. Kant’s reasoning would be much stronger if he could define what he thought to be the opposite of moral worth and if he believed there to be different levels of lack of moral worth. Are all actions that lack moral worth equally bad? Or is there another way to refer to the lack of moral worth? It would also be very helpful for the readers if Kant could explain if he considered morally unworthy agents to be strictly unethical.