Immanuel Kant On The Trap Of Duty

Charles Homans Professor: Alex Silverman
Philosophical Perspectives 3 - Paper 2 - Prompt 1 Writing TA: Scott Ferguson

The Trap of Duty

In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant attempts to reason through the nature of morality. More specifically, in the first section, Kant creates a hypothetical situation to illustrate what he believes makes an action moral or not. He creates a shopkeeper who does what would usually be considered the “right” thing, that is, charging their customers fairly, but whose motives are not solely from duty. Kant’s belief is that only actions motivated directly by a sense of duty are truly morally good. I agree with Kant insofar as motivation is important, but it is my belief that his

Then, no matter how much good a person does, they are always ultimately acting for the same base reasons as even a murderer who kills because they derive a twisted pleasure from the action of killing -- the only difference is the nature of the actions that gratify them. This would leave the person who acts from duty, not sentiment or inclination, as the only remaining contender for moral

Are they not both, on some level, rooted in sentiment? There cannot be duty without sentiment -- a stone does not have moral standing because it has no duty because it experiences no sentiments. It is only through sentiment that we can even perceive having a duty, let alone being aware of what that duty is and being motivated to perform that duty. In my view, it is not possible to act on a maxim, dutiful or otherwise, without any inclination or sentiment to act that way. It is possible for a person to act solely from some higher duty that is not beholden to their own sentiments, even for individual actions. In that sense, Kant’s dutiful shopkeeper does not exist (or rather, the mode of action they are meant to represent does not exist), and as such is not worth ascribing the only good moral standing