nm0182: er last time as you know that er er tape recorder broke down i've in 
fact done a rerecording rather swiftly last night for anyone who did miss the 
lecture and needs to make use of that material er but it er it is now in S-R-C 
er somebody said could i put in a box available er the er O-H-Ps that i've been 
using well i've put er er er copies from which i've copied O-H-Ps in the box in 
the philosophy common room and somebody else was saying what about our essays 
er to which the answer is yes what about your essays indeed er i'll hope to be 
able to let you have them er next week er right now we said today that we'd 
talk about Kant in considering the three dominant strands of ethical thinking 
that emerged out of the break-up of the medieval synthesis i've sketched the 
appeal to pleasure with particular reference to utilitarianism er from er from 
Bentham onwards and last time i was talking about the appeal to moral insight 
from Butler's conscience to twentieth century intuitionism and there 
remains the appeal to law now first let's get some quite proper objections out 
of the way there are well known objections to conceiving of morality in terms 
of law it's misleading to compare er morality or moral laws with laws of nature 
because we no longer believe that the stars and other such bodies being subject 
to the laws of nature we no longer believe they're animate bodies er or animate 
beings who consent to obey their instructions it's also misleading to compare 
morality with the product of legislation since as we saw in an earlier lecture 
an act can be immoral without being illegal or may of course require what our 
conscience condemns and perhaps more important than all these legalisms it's 
sometimes called is a term for a recognized moral failing the scrupulous 
legalist will go to absurd lengths in fulfilling commandments to the letter er 
and the lax one will take advantage of every possible loophole and indeed the 
legalist may show both traits together and 
the fault of course lies precisely in the fact that duties are interpreted as 
if they consisted in obedience to a fixed and all sufficient code and as many 
of you will know the New Testament is no-, er notably severe on this sort of 
approach and another objection moral rules can conflict in particular 
situations we've already seen that and then of course one has to look if one's 
er thinking of morality in terms of rules or laws one needs to look for further 
rules to decide which to set aside and the resultant elib-, elaboration can get 
er very unrealistic and that incidentally is part of the attraction of 
something we've come across before and i'll raise again with you particularism 
sometimes called situation ethics where you don't look for rules or laws at all 
you say let's look to each particular case and the final objection that i'm 
just going to touch on if morality is wholly dependent upon a set of rules or 
laws it becomes difficult to describe those who live by very 
different codes from our own as moral or morally good but of course right from 
the beginning people are seen as the sophists saw that even quite alien and by 
our er light misguided codes may foster distinctive forms of virtue which 
perhaps are worthy of respect and certainly not just to be dismissed as moral 
errors committed in good faith so there are all those objections to thinking of 
morality in terms of law and for present purposes i'll accept them all right 
but even if we accept all this there is something i've left out there's one 
very important feature of moral judgements that thinking of morality in terms 
of law helps to bring out and this very general feature makes difficulties for 
what i've called moral particularism and the point is this just as laws are of 
universal application they enjoin conduct of a certain type in all 
circumstances of a certain type so moral judgements appear to have a 
universalist element and i think i can present the 
argument like this whenever we make whenever we make a moral judgement about 
for example an act whenever we make a moral judgement er about something an act 
for example and this differentiated from just telling someone what to do 
issuing an imperative whenever we make a moral judgement about something call 
it an act we must make it because of something about the act the focus isn't 
right is it that's better er and then it always makes sense to ask what this 
something is what is it about it that justifies that moral judgement now it may 
be difficult to put into words but in making a moral judgement rather than just 
saying do this you're saying that there's a reason now this feature of moral 
judgement as i say differentiates it just from simple commands simple 
imperatives so to every particular moral judgement it would appear there 
corresponds a universal judgement to the effect that a certain feature of the 
thing judged is so far as it goes a reason for making a 
certain judgement about it now that's an argument and i've put it up there 
which e-, what with i'm calling for the moment universalists accept or 
universalism in morals universalists accept and particularists reject this 
argument let's just take it a little further give you an example if i say that 
a particular act is good because oh i don't know er suppose we say because it's 
the act of helping a blind person across a road then i seem to be adhering to 
the universal judgement that it's good to help blind people across roads er 
assuming they desire our assistance er assuming that er you know they're not 
horribly lost and in fact they their destination is this side of the road all 
those other things if they desire properly our assistance then it's good to 
help blind people across roads appears to be the universal judgement that lies 
behind that was a good act because it was helping him across the road and that 
that universal judgement appears to be there we're not just 
talking about this particular person across this particular road so i say the 
people who accept that sort of example i can call for the present purposes 
universalists and particularists will reject it now a universalist is not 
committed to the view that it's a good act to help blind people across roads on 
all occasions just because it is on this you can find all sorts of 
circumstances under which it would not be obviously the universalist is only 
committed to the view that it would be a good act in the absence of something 
to make a difference from this one something more than the mere fact that it is 
different now this if you accept that this general feature of moral judgements 
can be used for interesting purposes and Kant effectively did accept it Kant 
provided er used this general feature of moral judgements to provide a test for 
the validity of particular moral judgements and so as one might say er Kant er 
pr-, uses the general form of moral judgements as i've 
just sketched them up there to provide a test er for their proper content and 
from this ethical premise about the nature of moral judgements he drew a moral 
conclusion and the general form of that moral conclusion he laid out in what he 
called his categorical imperative which has various versions i'll just give you 
perhaps the most important one Kant's categorical imperative act only on that 
maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a 
universal law and of course as you will see it's a rather formal way of putting 
it but it has much in common with something that's not formal at all the famous 
golden rule er do unto others as you would they did unto you now there seems to 
be at least a tolerable plausibility in terms of widespread intuitions er for 
it seems a reasonable plausibility for regarding this as the a anyhow 
foundation stone of morality it is a powerful argument in many cases if a 
person is contemplating some act to ask her 
or him what it is about the act which makes them call it right and whether if 
some other act possessed those same features but their own role in it were 
different would she or he judge in the same way of course whether or not they 
would still prefer to act in this way remains a matter about which they may 
still have to make up their minds though one might still distinguish between 
silly and sensible choices so there's still freedom of moral decision and 
action but it's not irrelevant to ask the question what if the roles were 
reversed now this universalist feature of moral judgements er er does though it 
does as i say embody a central feature of laws in general is not what is 
usually being pointed to when people talk about laws of nature so he's not 
talking about laws of nature for reasons i'll explain shortly he's talking 
about what he calls laws of freedom Kant didn't think of himself as working out 
laws of nature he sees these as a function not of the way that 
nature has to go but of what we are free to act on so he calls them laws of 
freedom obscure terminology and i'll explain it a bit now i think to explain it 
i just need to go back slightly one one of the criticisms that i raised a few 
minutes ago er to thinking of morality in terms of law is that it's misleading 
to compare morality to a law of nature in the scientific sense for we no longer 
suppose that various items stones stars various bodies we no longer think of 
them as in some sense animate beings who consent to obey their instructions and 
of course in days when people thought of the order of nature as following the 
orders of a divine lawgiver who was also the source of the moral law then that 
analogy made a lot of sense human beings on that traditional account were 
unlike the rest of the created order in that er we were given freedom to choose 
whether or not to obey the divine laws whereas the rest of creation has no 
choice in this freedom lies the 
possibility of morality and hence of virtue for virtue virtue lies in freely 
obeying the laws of God and so for men the law of God is seen under the aspect 
of a moral law whereas for the rest of creation law is a matter of necessity i 
take it that model is fairly familiar to you think of the whole universe is 
under the law of God what distinguishes human beings from the rest of creation 
we have some or do we have free will so we can decide in within a restricted 
range whether to set ourselves within or outside the law of God not completely 
we can't defy the law of gravity or if we do we'll end up with broken bones or 
death but there are certain moral laws that we can defy and if we do that's 
what's called sin and we have freedom to sin that that model is familiar 
talking about the moral law as giving the laws which are made possible by human 
freedom makes a form of sense in that framework er now since Newton er we've 
not really thought of laws of nature in 
this way science has become independent of religion and of theology we tend to 
think of scientific laws of nature now much more as a matter of statistical 
regularities and i think what we see in Kant is perhaps an attempt to salvage 
what can be salvaged of the general picture i've just sketched er that general 
picture of morality as embodying laws of freedom what can you salvage from that 
when the old prescientific notion of a law of nature in terms of obedience to 
orders has disappeared how can you do this how can you s-, how can you to what 
extent can you salvage this without theological premises and that's really what 
Kant's trying to do and i think the argument can be reasonably displayed like 
this there were two quite closely connected differences between moral laws and 
laws of nature one difference plainly is our subjectivity er we have a 
subjective sense of obligation to obey moral laws but none to obey laws of 
nature we don't feel any moral obligation to obey the law 
of gravitation er if we can er get round it in some way or another perhaps by 
flying then we have no qualms about doing so of any moral sort so that's one 
obvious difference er we have a subjective sense of obligation to obey moral 
laws but none natural laws and second moral laws have what is sometimes called 
a prescriptive a practical import that is they tell us what to do in contrast 
to laws of nature which are purely theoretical or descriptive they tell us how 
things are they tell us what is the case human beings then are unusual perhaps 
unique in that they are subject both to natural laws which tell us how things 
are and you express in the indicative er grammatically er indicative mood er 
how things are but we're also subject on this account to moral laws which tell 
us what to do prescribe actions are imperatival in other words we're both 
physical organisms and rational agents we're half animal half angel if you like 
we're half sensual half rational the way we act reflects 
this predicament often our sensual nature our glands and so on pull us one way 
and our rational nature another and the tug of war sometimes goes one way 
sometimes another you know you ought to get out of bed and you don't [laugh] 
right you know you ought to get out of bed and you do who's to tell in advance 
which will work we're tempted when our desires conflict with what we believe we 
ought to do sometimes we resist temptation sometimes we succumb sometimes no 
doubt we succumb with finesse of course sometimes perhaps there's no conflict 
we may want to do something our consciences may not object either way or indeed 
we may think we ought to do something and our desires raise no difficulty so er 
what one might call sensuous impulses are the determining factor in many of our 
actions and here to use the language of David Hume er reason is the slave of 
the passions we use our reason to help us get what we want of course but on 
this account that isn't the only part of the 
story because in moral actions reason plays a different role leading rather 
than following we perform these actions not for some further end given by our 
bodily desires but simply because of the principal they embody the moral worth 
of an action on this account and i quote now from Kant lies not in the purpose 
to be attained by it but in the maxim in accordance with which it is decided on 
er where we're governed by our bodily desires we have an aim we have a purpose 
give-, beset by that desire and er we judge the satisfactoriness or not of our 
action by whether it gets us closer to that desire fine that's a a moral that 
we're all familiar with but not all the time er the moral worth as distinct 
from the other forms of worth the moral worth for Kant of an action lies not in 
its further consequences but in the maxim or the principle in accordance with 
which the action is decided on er a-, and it needs to be of course for it to be 
morally worthy a maxim go back to the 
categorical imperative a maxim which you can will that it should become 
universal let's explain this further Kant held and it seems on the face of it 
not unreasonable that the starting point of moral philosophy must be the 
ordinary deliverances of our moral understanding uncorrupted preferably by 
philosophy so far as that's possible otherwise the danger is that what will be 
studied won't be morality but something else probably a construction of the 
thinker's own invention start with what you actually recognize in your own 
experience well at a very commonsensical level how do we ordinarily distinguish 
moral precepts from other ones well according to Kant we normally distinguish 
them er from precepts which are designed to promote our pleasure or our 
advantage we say if that may bring me pleasure that may bring me advantage but 
is it right we say we can separate them out right just because an action brings 
about something we want doesn't show that it's moral 
again i'm talking at the level of common sense at the moment we distinguish 
between a moral considerations and these other ones associated with Watts and 
you can see that in making this move i'm already beginning to move away from 
certain forms of utilitarianism when we think of precepts which are designed to 
promote our pleasure or our advantage to bring about something we want we 
normally say well do this if you have that goal in mind yeah if you want to be 
rich then follow this regimen if you want that form of pleasure then do this 
and so on these are these do thises are imperatives but they're hypothetical 
imperatives i've touched on this earlier this term a hypothetical imperative is 
one that's governed by an if clause if you want to do something then do X right 
that's a hypothetical imperative and where er the hypo-, where the hypothesis 
comes from relates to your desires or your wants or whatever and these may be 
given indeed by er your s-, er by by your er bodily er er pressures press the 
switch if you want the light to go on you ought to earn some money if you want 
to get on in life 
okay Kant's point is that whilst a-, as a matter of practical reason these are 
perfectly acceptable and we use them all the time of course they're not moral 
reasons not to say they're wrong but they're just not moral ones in 
distinctively moral situations these sorts of hypotheticals are out of place in 
a moral situation we say you or possibly i ought or ought not to do such and 
such and not if you want X or Y but rather there's no reason of that sort you 
just ought and this there's no reason is designed to exclude these sorts of 
appeals to consequences so common sense reflection uncorrupted by philosophy it 
is suggested indicates that duty is distinct from pleasure or indeed utility 
further Kant thinks that er being prepared to follow the dictates of morality 
as so understood being prepared to do what you know you ought to do moral 
virtue or what he calls good will what's sometimes called er conscientiousness 
that is acting out of a recognition of duty according to Kant 
being prepared to do that having a good will being prepared to and actually 
acting out of a recognition of what is your duty is in a a very important sense 
for Kant the supreme good to which everything else is to be subordinated so on 
this account the highest good is that of the good will which seeks to act 
according to the dictates of the moral law that is not to say that doing that 
doesn't have consequences of course everything that you do has consequences but 
the sort of effect or the reward of virtue is not happiness as er er Aristotle 
said a long time ago he who says that a man is happy if only he be good even 
when he's being tortured on the rack is talking nonsense whether he knows it or 
not it may be that someone resisting their torturers because they know they it 
is their duty to er keep faith with their comrades may be doing what they 
believe to be or even know to be the right thing is not to say that that's 
giving them happiness it may not at 
all it may give them the reverse of anything that could be plausibly called 
happiness but they are retaining their dignity and they are showing that degree 
of freedom of refusing to be er er forced to do what the torturers are wanting 
it may end in their death sure but that is a choice yet again of course it's 
said that everybody may be i don't know but with a skilled torturer forced to 
submit that may be true and if it is true that removes their freedom but the 
reward of virtue certainly is not going to be happiness in all circumstances we 
hope it will in many but we need to go right back to that distinction i 
mentioned to you between Plato and Aristotle Aristotle is indeed concerned with 
finding a form of society where in general happiness goes together with virtue 
Plato who remembers person that he respected most in all the whole world 
Socrates obeying his duty was f-, was executed says well one needs to give an 
account of how one should live which takes account of the situation in 
which the good person may be made to drink the hemlock if you're going to say 
that Socrates remains happy then you're going to redefine happiness in quite a 
significant way [sniff] so this again is fairly common sense reflection er that 
the er er er th-, th-, good will er in a certain sense is what we may quite 
reasonably subordinate the other values to and of course often we don't but we 
respect the person who stands up for what they believe to be right despite loss 
of all the normal goals we don't always reckon that we could do that but we can 
see the value in it other things that we ought and really and quite properly 
call good riches talents worldly wisdom comfort and so on they are only good as 
far as Kant's concerned on concer-, er o-, on condition that they are used 
compatibly with a good will when riches or talents worldly wisdom or anything 
else are used maliciously by a bad will the evil of the situation is greater 
than if the malicious person were less well endowed that after all is 
why in mythology the devil is a fallen angel so on this account then we are 
both animals plainly and also rational beings and in so far as we are rational 
because we are rational beings we can recognize ourselves as subject to the 
moral law the moral law expresses not hypothetical imperatives of prudence but 
categorical imperatives prescribing actions regardless of the informations of 
our animal nature the highest good is that of the good will if you like 
conscientiousness but i don't like that as a translation because the word's 
come down in the world and good will attempts to act according to the dictates 
of the moral law in so far as we are moral we can form our will to the moral 
law acting as reason tells us and to that extent free of our purely animal 
nature our animal nature plainly is subject to the regularities of the laws of 
nature in so far as we are immoral we are irrational slaves to our natural 
inclinations and that's why the capacity 
that we have as human beings to consider rationally what we should do to ask 
ourselves can i really will that be a universal law and adjust our action to 
suit provides us with the ability of moving against what our natural 
inclinations will lead us it frees us it gives us a space of freedom to say no 
to our natural inclinations and that is why our recognition of the moral law is 
in fact the condition of our freedom the reward of virtue is dignity and 
freedom dignity interesting word dignity in er Kant's terminology something has 
dignity if it has no exchange value most things have exchange value some think 
and some cynics say everything has exchange value every man has his price Kant 
says no there are some th-, there are people that think that of course and that 
shows that they're immoral there is nothing that can be exchanged for virtue 
there's nothing that can be exchanged for a good will without loss of course 
people do exchange that's a practical er er it's a rhetorical matter but in 
terms 
of value there there is er there is inevitable loss you can't just say well 
that was an unjust act but lots of people were made happy by it so it's okay 
it's not okay if it was an unjust act even if people were made happy by it that 
sort of moral loss t-, er lo-, loss adj-, er adjusting is for Kant a symptom of 
corruption we can set ourselves against Kant our perceptions and beliefs about 
what would be nice for us or good for us even we can move against the dictates 
of our bodily nature and recognize that some things are incumbent on us and 
some are not and that provides us with our dignity it provides us with our 
freedom it may not lead to happiness but it is liberating mankind indeed one 
might say in fact Kant does say has dignity to the extent that it is capable of 
morality of recognition of and hence living in accordance with er rationality 
and in the practical sphere rationality involves living according to the moral 
law the categorical imperative so to summarize this ethics for Kant 
articulates the laws of freedom which a rational being imposes on her or his 
own actions and expect other rational beings to recognize and obey and the 
justification for these rules lies in the fact that moral rules are those which 
can be followed consistently by all rational beings so to determine whether my 
action is right my proposed action perhaps is right i have only to consider 
whether the principal upon which it's based what Kant calls the maxim i need to 
consider whether the principal upon which my action is based is such that i 
could will that that maxim become a universal law governing not merely this 
particular action of mine but the action of all agents similarly circumstanced 
and an action is only permissible for me if it is permissible for anyone in my 
situation to put it in a very simple and commonsensical fashion moral rules 
hold without distinction of persons not without distinction of position of 
course people may have a certain 
role and therefore have certain responsibilities for them but that's the 
position if you were in that position rather than her then you would have that 
similar role now plainly some of these are physical impossibilities unless er 
er unless science gets a move on pretty fast i'll never be able to be a mother 
but that's er that's a misfortune of mine no doubt but while rational being it 
is merely a contingency it'll probably help if i took one of Kant's own 
examples and i'll follow the summary which is a quite nice and elegant summary 
er provided by Alasdair MacIntyre in the book i recommended A Short History of 
Ethics er suppose i'm tempted to break a promise the maxim on which i'm 
considering action might be er formulated as i may always break a promise when 
it's in my interest to do so we all know people who seem to act on that now can 
i consistently will that this precept i may always break a promise when it's in 
my interest to do so can i consistently will that this 
precept should be universally accepted and acted upon by all if all people 
acted on this precip-, precept and broke their promises whenever it suited them 
the practices of making and relying on promises would of course break down 
because nobody would be able to trust the promises of others and consequently 
utterances of the form i promise to would cease to have point so to will that 
this precept should be universalized is to will that promise keeping should no 
longer be possible but to will that i should be able to act on this precept i 
may always break a promise when it is in my interest to do so and clearly i 
must will this as part of willing that the maxim should be universalized to 
will this is to will that i should be able to make promises and break them and 
that of course is to will that the practice of promise keeping should continue 
so that i can take advantage of it so to will that this precept i may always 
break a promise when it's in my interest 
to do so to will er that this precept should be universalized is to will both 
that promise keeping as a practice should continue and also that it should not 
so i cannot universalize this precept consistently and so it cannot be a true 
moral rule think through the consequence of universalizability and in this 
particular instance you actually lodge yourself in a self-contradiction and 
that is indeed er i i'm quoting or citing MacIntyre but it is in fact er er one 
of Kant's leading examples and it's quite an interesting one so on this account 
i can't universalize that precept and so it cannot be a true moral rule in 
accordance with the categorical imperative on the other hand a rule such as do 
not make false promises can in principle be followed without exception can that 
is in the logical sense and thus may qualify as a moral duty okay so far so in 
determining what the moral law commands i have initially at my disposal no 
other resources than that it must be 
universalizable and that is applied impartially but of course in practice this 
criterion is held to carry others with it and Kant thinks it does if the moral 
law applies without distinction of persons it follows says Kant that i must 
treat all human beings as equally entitled to rights under it must treat them 
as persons too and therefore i must regard other people as ends in themselves 
not just means to my own ends if they are centres of moral agency as i am then 
we're in the same boat and so since er the moral law applies without 
distinction of persons all moral agents are ends in themselves so another 
version of the categorical imperative is er treat er other persons er never as 
means but only as ends there are about five different versions i'm not going to 
go through all of them you'll find them laid out in the material i circulated 
er last time at the moment i'm trying to get at the nerve of what's going on 
here further once i recognize that other people are morally in the 
same position as i am myself once i recognize that we all belong to the same 
moral community in virtue of our being rational agents and therefore under the 
aegis of the moral law and of course the criterion for being a moral agent is 
potential pot-, er er capacity to recognize er and act on maxims that we can 
universalize once we recognize that i'm in the same position as others i 
recognize both that i can legitimately pursue those of my purposes that do not 
conflict with the moral law okay if it doesn't conflict with the moral law i 
can follow those purposes and therefore i have a duty to facilitate the likely 
pursuit on the part of my fellows and so in another version of the categorical 
imperative er Kant speaks of what he calls the kingdom of ends the point about 
kingdom is it's a form of polity not there has to be a literal king er the 
notion of a community in which each sees a responsibility to facilitate each 
other's ends well so much for the moment for 
exposition and although it is more complicated as i say there are five 
different versions of the categorical imperative and i've only touched on three 
er so you can get the detail from that Paton summary the main line of thinking 
is as i've laid it out and i think there is a great deal to be learned from 
Kant's ethical thinking and indeed Kant is one of the great masters of modern 
philosophy and his moral thinking has provided the dominant image for most 
subsequent debate and er i should mention i mentioned right at the beginning of 
term that the words ethical and moral were used in a lot of different ways i 
told you the way i wanted to use it but i said there was another way where er 
morality is seen as a subclass of ethics and ethics is seen as the general er 
enquiry into how one should live and the subclass some people have picked out 
as being er er morality is precisely that subclass picked out by Kant those 
considerations subject to universalizability in Kant's 
fashion that is er er those of you who've read er Bernard Williams' book Ethics 
and the Limits of Philosophy where he criticizes morality but defends ethics 
he's saying within the sphere of practical reasoning the Kantian model that 
i've been sketching is deeply flawed and we should move away from it yes he 
says Kant is dead right it does capture many of our central intuitions which 
have arisen out of a historical context and that historical context is damaging 
and those of you who are into Nietzsche in a big way who sees himself as an 
immoralist what does he mean by morality when he describes himself as an 
immoralist given that he clearly has his own views about how to live nobody and 
so on it's Kant he once again has in his sights Kant as providing the clearest 
model of what the intuitions of morality amount to and Nietzsche has a a 
slightly curious story where er he er relates this back to er the history of 
Christianity and the christiani-, and the history of classical Greece er 
which is flawed in a number of ways leave the history aside for the moment 
again er h-, h-, what i-, however it came about the model of morality with 
which Kant is operating provides a recognizable model today about which there 
is a good deal of debate and Kant as i say focuses that er supremely well er 
there are however many difficulties both external to the system people can 
criticize from outside and also internal to it and i'm just going to in the 
closing minutes of this lecture mention four first er the insistence on the 
fundamental principle of morality being categorical not a hypothetical 
imperative you may well challenge er and that's precisely what people who say 
morality is a defective subclass within ethics more generally will often say 
you may certainly the notion of duty detached from any particular role in the 
singular rather than the plural what is my duty not what are my duties as such 
and such the notion of duty er is one often found in popular thinking sure but 
historically it only emerged a century or so before Kant and it's arguable that 
it only represents the ghost of a dead concept that only lived when embedded in 
particular social situations which was disintegrating by Kant's time and have 
disintegrated by now perhaps someone said Kant's duty is rather like that 
concept of decay justice in the sophist's time it at this stage remained a 
central moral notion everyone agreed that justice was a good thing but the 
descriptive content had been eroded by social change perhaps the notion of duty 
people say made good sense in a feudal set-up where everybody had their 
respective rights and duties and this provided the framework within which 
everyone lived their lives so it's clear what your duties are and it's best to 
fulfill them but the shift to thinking of duty in the singular out of any such 
social context empties that concept of all significance and the refusal to give 
any reason for the 
dictates of the moral law it's categorical you just ought reflects a collapse 
of the moral community not as Kant thinks the key to all moral thinking and 
that line of er argument you'll find in MacIntyre both in the book i've 
mentioned and in subsequent writings such as After Virtue that's the first 
objection the notion of duty is empty second it is possible to object to Kant's 
doctrine that it's my duty to act according to the imperative and not look to 
the consequences might say consequences matter Kant for example says it's 
categorically binding on us we ought not to tell lies and when i've discerned a 
categorical imperative i've discerned a rule with no exceptions so i ought not 
says Kant to tell a lie even from benevolent motives but what if i'm to save a 
potential victim from a murderer some might say no the insistence on keeping 
one's own soul pure at the expense of others is grossly immoral there's an old 
slogan fiat justitia fiat justitia ruat caelum 
approximately let justice be done though the heavens fall fits in with Kant 
beautifully there is however a well known and equally ancient retort if the 
heavens fall justice won't be done there is many would say a genuine dilemma 
here which Kant is insensiv-, to er is insensitive to sometimes consequences 
can override what Kant would see as the moral law and surely it is blind to 
ignore it third just giving four standard objections third although Kant 
interpreted his principles in this very rigorous manner it's often agra-, 
argued that his system doesn't really require that but in fact it's much too 
loose he doesn't really provide conclusive reasons for doing rigorous arguing 
on Kant's manner on the contrary can sanction almost anything for how am i to 
decide what is the correct description and hence maxim of any proposed act the 
Kantian test of a true moral precept is that it's one i can s-, consistently 
universalize but with sufficient ingenuity perhaps one can find a 
consistently universalizable maxim for almost any action just specified in 
enough detail er just characterize the proposed action in such a way that the 
maxim will permit me to do what i want whilst prohibiting others from doing 
what would nullify the maxim if universalized however i don't think this is to 
say that nothing can be salvaged from Kant's approach or even from the notion 
of universalizability because what Kant is getting at or part of what Kant's 
getting at in his categorical imperative is that a person who says he or she 
ought to act in a certain way is guilty of an implicit contradiction and this 
may well be true once a maxim has been specified then if it's to be a moral 
maxim it must be universalizable now as i've mentioned to you the 
prescriptivists like Hare have taken up this approach and have argued that a 
person isn't genuinely making a moral ju-, er judgement unless he or she is 
prepared to universalize the maxim for to judge that something is 
right is to commit oneself to choosing that course of action even if it's open 
to one er er er if it is open to one and approving of others doing so when it's 
open to them so if the Nazi's judgement that gassing Jews is right is to be a 
genuinely evaluative judgement not just a descriptive one then he must be 
committed to the position it would be right for he himself to be gassed if it 
were unexpectedly discovered that he were of Jewish parentage if he's not 
prepared to universali-, er universalize his maxim in this way he is not 
genuinely accepting the imperative let Jews be gassed he's hence not making a 
moral judgement of course it's possible for him to change his mind and if his 
Jewish ancestry were discovered he might well do so the point is you cannot 
genuinely hold that gassing Jews is right unless you accept the er er maxim er 
is in principle universalizable and of course more generally bringing home to a 
person what might be involved in certain circumstances in 
universalizing a maxim may be a way of bringing people and often is to change 
their minds now as you know there are well known objections to prescriptivism 
but and this is the note i'm going to end on the type of argument i've sketched 
doesn't stand or fall either with Kant or with prescriptivism if you take the 
line that what a person commits themselves to in saying X is right is not just 
the imperative let me do X but there are sufficient reasons of a moral kind for 
doing X then you could still argue that to the extent the two situations are of 
the same type what are sufficient moral reasons for doing X in one situation 
are sufficient in another if there are sufficient moral reasons for gassing 
Jews when i happen to be the executioner then there are sufficient moral 
reasons for doing so when i happen to be a victim and with this we come back to 
the heart of the Kantian enterprise and what i want to leave you with Kant is 
concerned to 
establish ultimate moral principles which are at once autonomous that is 
determined by the agent's own rational will not by anything external to that 
will whether the will of another or even one's own desires establish moral 
principles once autonomous and objective not depending on the desires or even 
the nature of the agent moral principles bottom of this are at once autonomous 
and objective and this meets the dual sense we have of morality that in facing 
moral decisions it's important to get it right and yet no one has the right to 
tell us what we ought to do the point at which McNaughton starts his book er we 
are autonomous beings but these two requirements it would seem of objectivity 
and autonomy can only be met if certain moral principles are demanded by the 
formal character of morality itself a morally good action must be rationally 
chosen in accord with a law rational er v-, valid for all rational beings 
universally and determined by nothing beyond itself so given 
that a correct moral judgement is one that could in principle be reached by 
anybody so such judgements must be made in terms of features which the actions 
or situations possess so any feature picked out as relevant must be one that's 
always relevant unless there's some special explanation why not so what anyone 
ought to do in a given set of circumstances is what anyone else ought to do so 
long as the case isn't relevantly different and this gives us Kant's insistence 
on universalizability and of course the principle that one ought to treat 
similar cases similarly is a general formulation of the particular requirement 
of justice that any form of treatment thought right for one person must be 
right for all others unless the others are significantly different and this 
thesis about justice is what i shall begin to consider next time thank you very 
much