Kant On Virtue Analysis

I will argue that my personal moral system derives important elements from the moral theories of Kant on the highest good, and Foot on virtue. I will illustrate my argument with the situation of giving money to a homeless man. First the situation must be explained. I am walking in Chicago, and there is a homeless man on the street. As I get close to him he asks me for some money. Now there are two possible options for how I could respond. I could stop and give him some money, or I could lie and say that I do not have any money to give him and continue on my way. The first philosopher that I will use to analyze this situation is Kant. Kant’s morality comes from his idea of the “Highest Good.” In his work he says “Duty introduces another end for the human beings will, namely to the best of one’s ability towards the highest good possible in the world, which is within our control” (Gregor 1996, 282). What he is saying here is that duty is not enough to base our moral actions, and that the highest good is what is more important and it is something we can control ourselves. To further understand this, he breaks the highest good into two main parts, duty and universal happiness. This is shown when Kant says “Universal happiness combined with and in conformity with the purest morality through out the world” (Gregor 1996, 282). He then goes on to further elaborate on what duty is, he does this by saying “Duty is nothing other than the limitations of the will to the condition of a universal law” (Gregor 1996, 283). This is very key to Kant’s belief system. He says that under the subcategory of duty there are two more categories, will and universal law. Looking at will first, we have previously covered that to will something is to first decide on it, and then to take action on it. In the situation above the first thing I have to do is to decide if I want to give the homeless man some money. Next I must act on that decision. Let’s say that I decide not to give him money, and the action would be lying and telling him that I have no money to give him. Based on that alone I have willed something. This then leads into the second part of duty, universal law. …show more content…
According to Kant universal law is “a maxim adopted from which, as well as from every end may one have, we here abstract altogether” (Gregor 1996, 283). What Kant means by this is, after we have willed something we then make it a universal law. He defines universal law as a maxim that we all have. Thus he is saying that after we will something, it becomes universal to all and everyone will do that same thing. When I lie to the homeless man about having money to give I am then making the universal law that lying is an acceptable act. Then as a result everyone in the world will lie because I have made it the universal law. But lying, just like any other action has consequences. Since I have lied to the homeless man and made lying an acceptable act. Then that means pharmaceutical companies can lie about the drugs that they make. A pharmaceutical company can lie and say that a drug they have made can treat and save a person from a life threatening condition if they take their drug. But really the pill the person takes is a sugar pill. As a result of that, a person who takes their pill with the hopes of having his life saved, will actually die due to the …show more content…
In the reading Foot says “Virtues, which I might express by saying they are corrective” (Foot 1978, 8). Then a few lines later she also says “there is a temptation to be resisted” (Foot 1978, 8). This very clearly shows that for Foot, for an act to be virtuous it must be done so that our own human temptations are resisted. She believes that’s they are corrective, meaning that they are there to correct us from following our own desires and wants. She is implying that if we do things that satisfy our natural human desires the act is not virtuous. Charity is a virtue because it requires us to give up something of our own for