哈佛大学公开课Justice-What#39;s the right thing to do 06.pdfVIP

Justice 06 Mind Your Motive / The Supreme Principle of Morality Now we turn Now we turn to the hardest philosopher were going to read in this course. Today we turn to Immanuel Kant who offers a different account of why we have a categorical duty to respect the dignity of persons and not to use people as means merely even for good ends. Kant excelled at the University of Konigsberg at the age of 16. At age of 31, he got his first job as an unsalaried lecturer paid on commission based on the number of students who showed up at his lectures. This is a sensible system that Harvard would do well to consider. Luckily for Kant, he was a popular lecturer and also an industrious one and so he eked out a meager living. It wasnt until he was 57 that he published his first major work. But, it was worth the wait, the book was the Critique of Pure Reason perhaps the most important work in all of modern philosophy. And a few years later, Kant wrote the groundwork for Metaphysics of Morals which we read in this course. I want to acknowledge even before we start that Kant is a difficult thinker but its important to try to figure what hes saying because what this book is about is what the supreme principle of morality is, number one, and it also gives us an account ®C one of the most powerful accounts we have ®C of what freedom really is. So, let me start today, Kant rejects utilitarianism. He thinks that the individual person, all human beings, have a certain dignity that commands our respect. The reason the individual is sacred or the bearer of rights, according to Kant, doesnt stem from the idea that we own ourselves but instead from the idea that we are all rational beings. Were all rational beings, which simply means that we are beings who are capable of reason. We are also autonomous beings, which is to say that we are beings capable of acting and choosing freely. Now, this capacity for reason and freedom isnt the only capacity we have. We also ha