Allen W. Wood Quotes About Duty

Quotes about: Duty

• Kant's description of most ethical duties reads more like a description of moral virtues and vices. Once we see this, we see that Kantian ethics is indeed a kind of virtue ethics, and that it does not "divide the heart from the head" (to anticipate one of your later questions) but instead recognizes the deep truth that reason and emotion are not opposites.

  Allen W. Wood

  Heart, Reason And Emotion, Opposites

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Kant does not think there is anything wrong with being beneficent from sympathy. He thinks we have a duty to cultivate sympathetic feelings by participating in the situations of others and acquiring an understanding of them. He thinks we also have a duty to make ourselves into the kind of person for whom the recognition that something is our duty would be a sufficient incentive to do it (if no other incentives were available to us). That's what he means by "the duty to act from the motive of duty".

  Allen W. Wood

  Mean, Thinking, Understanding

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Kant does not think that along with choice of an action we also choose in each case the motive from which we do it. He thinks all is well if I act beneficently, realizing that it is my duty but also having sympathetic feelings for the person I help. But I ought to strive to be the sort of person who would still help even if these feelings were absent. And it is such a case that he presents when the sympathetic friend of humanity finds his sympathetic feelings overclouded by his own sorrows, and still acts beneficently from duty.

  Allen W. Wood

  Thinking, Choices, Feelings

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Notice that tearing oneself out of the insensible state is the opposite of remaining in it; the man who is beneficent from duty nevertheless acts with feelings, if not with empirical inclinations.

  Allen W. Wood

  Men, Opposites, Feelings

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• What is central to morality is rational self-constraint (acting from duty), in cease where there is no other incentive to do your duty except that the moral law commands it.

  Allen W. Wood

  Self, Law, Acting

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Kant regards the universalizability test for maxims as focused on a very special sort of situation: one where the agent is tempted to make an exception to a recognized duty out of self-preference. The universalizability test is supposed help the agent to see, in a particular case of moral judgment, that self-preference is not a satisfactory reason for exempting yourself from a duty you recognize. Kant thinks, as a matter of human nature, that this situation arises often enough and that we need a canon of judgment to guard against it.

  Allen W. Wood

  Thinking, Self, Special

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Kantian ethical theory distinguishes three levels: First, that of a fundamental principle (the categorical imperative, formulated in three main ways in Kant's Groundwork); second, a set of duties, not deduced from but derived from this principle, by way of its interpretation or specification, its application to the general conditions of human life - which Kant does in the Doctrine of virtue, the second main part of the Metaphysics of Morals; and then finally an act of judgment, through which these duties are applied to particular cases.

  Allen W. Wood

  Principles, Doe, Doctrine

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Kant's system of duties constitutes a Doctrine of Virtue because the duties also indicate what kinds of attitudes, dispositions and feelings are morally virtuous or vicious.

  Allen W. Wood

  Attitude, Feelings, Doctrine

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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