START HERE: Kant and the website

All material in this section is fully integrated so you should be able to move between parts of the topic – for example, the handout and powerpoint are linked to extracts from literature and film.  You should also be able to follow the weblinks to find a number of excellent resources on Kant available on the internet.  To help you, I’ve hyperlinked key Kantian ideas into a roadmap.

Kantian ethics is usually contrasted with utilitarianism, because Kant believed in doing one’s duty according to the moral law, which he derives by practical reason in what he calls the noumenal realm (the realm of abstract ideas).  For this reason he is sometimes called a transcendental idealist.

Kantian ethics then is deontological (deontos is Greek for duty) where utilitarianism is teleological (telos means end or goal).  Utilitarians maximise pleasure or happiness, whereas Kant argues that acting out of moral feelings (or feelings of pleasure) is something fundamentally opposed to acting out of reason and duty.  Here is an excellent one page summary of Kant, by Harry Gensler.

In my handout I explore the noumenal basis for Kant’s ideas, and how the categorical imperative is expressed (the three formulations). Go to the powerpoint for a pictorial journey through the same ideas.  If you want then to see all past OCR AS exam questions on Kant, go to past questions, and I have marked an essay for you, see the sample essay.

There are ten revision questions and answers in the test yourself section, and a Kantian millionaire game to play with your friends.

if you wish to start with a video, Michael Sandel, of Harvard University, engages the audience in a fascinating debate on Kant.  A further video debates Kant’s famous example of the crazy axe murderer and the issue of lying to save your friend.

Kant’s moral theory is one of the great constructs of the Enlightenment, which began with the Protestant revolution in the 1530s and still influences our ways of thinking today.  In this age of reason and progress, people had faith that by exercising our minds we would make the world a better place.

That optimism may have been misplaced; after all Adolf Eichmann the author of the Final Solution, which sent six million innocent people to die by industrialised murder, claimed at his trial to be a Kantian (he is quoted in the powerpoint) and in extract 2 you can read the transcript of the trial or simulate it.  Extract 1 is from Schindler’s List, where Oscar Schindler converts to the cause of the Jewish people.  Are moral emotions really irrelevant, as Kant argues?  You can also watch the film clip or other film clips – unfortunately these can’t be streamed for copyright reasons – but a number of suggestions can be found in the film section.  Similarly the Milgram experiment raises questions about duty and authority – think this through and perhaps link it to the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1963.

But Eichmann’s idea of duty is actually very different from Kant’s….in what ways different I hope you will grasp as you wrestle with this giant of moral philosophers. (I have edited his great Metaphysics of Morals and posted it on the site, so you can read Kant for yourself).

Peter Baron July 2010