Friday, October 9, 2009
Kant Duty vs. Inclination
Kant describes an idea of duty vs. inclination and we are supposed to act in such a way that the maxim of your action could become a universal law. Like his example with the shopkeeper we all should follow our duty even if our inclination makes us want to go against it. The shopkeeper doesn't overcharge an inexperience customer out of duty even when his inclination tells him he could make a little bit of extra money in doing so. However, he goes on to describe that the shopkeeper is not overcharging because of his inclination to attract more customers. A question I want to ask is if anyone can think of an example where people follow their duties without any inclination? If not, why is it impossible to do so?
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As we discussed in class it is essentially impossible to act solely out of duty. Although it is possible and normal for duty to be the driving reason behind which we choose to do something inclination will always be a factor too. Because when we act out of duty we feel some positive benefit which also makes us inclined to do so. Take for instance doing the dishes, in my house this is one of my duties. I do the dishes cause I a m supposed to, not because I like doing them. ALthough this may seem like an action done out of duty and not inclination it is still both because although i don't like cleaning plates and bowels I like having a clean kitchen and a happy parents so I am still inclined to do the dishes. Thus, in almost any example duty cannot exist without inclination. There is one possible exception, however, which we discussed in class. That is someone suicidal who chooses to stay alive. They receive no benefit from remaining alive the only thing that keeps them from killing themselves is duty. However it is my opinion that even someone like this can have an inclination against suicide and not just a duty. Many depressed people choose not to kill themselves because of the people around them, they don't want to hurt those who love them, thus knowing that their loved ones are happy gives them an inclination to stay alive despite their inclination to suicide.
ReplyDeleteI hope this helps I am sorry its kinda a wordy explanation filled with run on sentences but that is just the way my crazy head works
I agree with Claire, the problem is that being humans we can't ever do something solely out of duty, since we are thinking beings we will always have a cost benefit analysis in our minds with every action. We have done this from our very earliest times, eg Fight/Flight reflex. Its instinctual so there's no way to get around it. Even if we were to do an action that would seem completely selfless like sacrificing ourselves in battle to save others we draw satisfaction from thinking about the lives that we saved or the good they we did.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with Claire. No matter what we do, it seems like we'll always have that sense of pride in the back of our minds. For example, our duty to help others. It's almost impossible for someone to give to charity and claim that their only aim was to help others. One of the reasons people give to charity is for the "warm and fuzzy" feeling they get afterward. Knowing that you did a good deed makes you feel good about yourself. That's why it's nearly impossible to be legitimately selfless.
ReplyDeleteI'd also like to point out what is quite possibly the best typo in the history of man. In Claire's post, she said "i don't like cleaning plates and bowels..." I'm not making fun of you. I thought that was awesome.
Wow that is embarrassing.
ReplyDeleteBut on another not I would like to add that the fact that often times when we do something out of duty it is also of inclination because of the happiness that we derive from making others happy, seems to correlate with Rousseau's philosophy. The reason we always have an inclination to something often has to do with our amour de soi. Kant may not have believed this but I feel like the two philosophies make sense together.
I'm not sure if anyone can every actually act only by following their duty. We have an inclination to do those things we believe we have a duty to do. Even the suicidal person has an inclination to fulfill his duty, even if he feels life isn't worth living. I guess I disagree with Kant in that I think it is impossible for someone to act on their duty without any inclination to act on that duty. Does such a person exist?
ReplyDeleteI don't believe so I think such a person would have to be completely lacking emotion and thus he/she would not really be human.
ReplyDeleteGoing back to the idea of suicide. I don't even believe this is an example of acting solely out of duty. The individual may go against their inclination to kill himself but he is remaining alive due to another type of inclination. He or she has an inclination to not hurt those who love them. I suppose that could be viewed as selfless but in my opinion it is still an inclination and not simply a duty. Feel free to disagree with me on.
ReplyDeleteI guess I'm somewhat confused on why, exactly, it's one's duty to stay alive. In the instance of the tortured Jews in Poland, to whom do they owe the respect of remaining alive? I think the obvious answer is a higher power, but in my experience of Kant, that really doesn't seem like a cop out he's likely to take. In my mind, there's no such thing as duty without inclination if that's the only exception that can be thought of since I'm not quite buying the duty involved.
ReplyDeleteI feel like I'm beating a dead horse, but again, I say that there more than likely isn't a way to act out of duty without inclination because acting out of duty, even an unpleasant duty (even in such extreme cases as the tortured individual who follows his duty to stay alive instead of choosing death even though he has reason to do so), because adhering to and following duty is always accompanied with some form of 'i've done something right/good' feeling. And that, in and of itself, is a form of inclination. Even if we hate the outcome, like the tortured who must stay alive instead of opt for suicide, there is still that slight sense of relief or happiness that we have followed our duty, that we have done what we were supposed to do.
ReplyDeleteTo respond to Emma, I agree that it does seem like a bit of a cop-out for Kant to say that our duty is to a higher power/god, I personally feel that our duty is mostly to ourselves and to the continuation of our world. Because although on an individual level an action against duty does not seem significant, if we follow Kant's logic about our actions becoming universal laws, we must think of how our action would be if everyone else did it. So maybe we don't have a duty to a higher power to stay alive, but instead we have a duty to the continuation and logic of our world to stay alive. Perhaps. Hm.
NB: This is a good discussion, but you may all being get hung up on something that is neither intended nor technically an issue for Kant. Kant's point is not that moral actions (i.e., actions done solely out of duty without or contrary to inclination) are possible. Rather, his point is to discover a legitimate basis for moral action. This is a groundwork for a metaphysics of morals; Kant wrote several other works on practical and political philosophy. However, if you understand his intent against the backdrop of the other thinkers we are reading, he is trying to establish a basis for moral action and thought upon which these other considerations could then be established. In other words, it doesn't matter if a moral action has never occurred on earth. What matters is we now have a basis for moral judgment that is valid and demonstrable, and from this we can then begin to determine practical duties from a theoretical framework derived solely from pure reason, without any admixture of subjective experience.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Lindsey in regards to her comment about Emma. Looking at Kant's categorical imperative, would you not be using yourself as a means and not an end with suicide? Therefore disrespecting yourself? And furthermore, if you kill yourself, you're willing the maxim of your actions to be a universal law, and therefore making it okay for everyone to kill themselves. This hardly seems like a societal norm that is acceptable.
ReplyDeleteI think what is important for Kant is not the action, but the maxim of that action. If you do not commit suicide because of the inclination that living would be better, than you are still not acting morally. You can only act morally if the maxim of your action is some duty. If there are other inclinations that go along with that action, they are not of any importance because they are not the maxim.
ReplyDelete