Immanuel Kant: Stealing Goes Against The Conscience

Humans since the beginning of time have always had the desire gain more items than their neighbors. Humans will also commit immoral actions to gain more items, an example of this is stealing but humans will also try to "justify" their actions with a reason this is know as trivialization. We will be looking at how trivialization goes against the common good and how it misinforms our conscience by looking at keys points such as the ethicist Immanuel Kant, how this bad decision goes against the three senses of the conscience, and how this action goes against the church's teachings.

To understand how stealing goes against the good we will be looking at the theories of human ethics according to Immanuel Kant. "What is this "good will?" For Kant

it is the will to do our duty for not other reason because it is our duty." (ISOG Pg16). According to Kant the good will is some action we do because it is our duty, stealing from a store because you want a chocolate bar goes against the good because it is not your duty to steal a chocolate bar from the store. Even if you steal the chocolate bar because your friend is hungry and you think it is morally right to steal the chocolate bar because you are being kind to your friend so they don’t have to pay for it your action still goes against the common good, " For Kant, therefore, a human action is morally good when it is done for the sake of duty. An act of kindness done to a friend may be praiseworthy, but it is not a moral act." (ISOG Pg 16). You know that stealing a chocolate bar goes against the good because it is illegal and immoral but you do it anyway because you convince yourself that is being kind but it is not because it is not your duty to steal the chocolate bar for your friend. By looking at Immanuel Kants' theory on ethics we can conclude that the action of stealing a chocolate bar goes again the good.

Another reason why stealing goes against the good is because it goes against all three senses of a healthy conscience.

The first sense that stealing goes against a healthy conscience is a Conscience as a capacity to recognize right and wrong. "All people in all cultures have a general awareness that some things are right and others are wrong. The fact that individuals and societies may disagree about what is right only helps to show that all people have the capacity to know the good." (ISOG Pg54). Stealing goes against this sense because people all around the world know that stealing is wrong because it is illegal and it goes against the common good, and same thing with muder everyone knows that killing someone is illegal. The next reason why stealing goes against the good is because your conscience is a process of moral reasoning. "You need to search out in each situation what is the right thing to do. To act according to your conscience, you must seek to learn the fact, to learn what moral values are, to reason correctly in moral matters." (ISOG Pg54). Your conscience knows moral reasoning so your conscience knows that stealing is wrong and your conscience is telling you to not steal from that store but you decide to steal anyway which makes your action immoral. Finally stealing from the store is wrong because your conscience is the final judgment. " Your conscience is incomplete until you act on it. After examining all the factors you still need to make a judgment and a decision and commitment to do what is right." (ISOG Pg54). Not listening to your conscience even though you have all these factors telling you that stealing is wrong and that naturally your conscience wants to pick the right decision and by not listening to it proves that your action goes against the

good.

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