Kant's Deontological Theory
The existence of God is something that most people take for granted. In your upbringing you are taught that God is the most Supreme Being, the creator of all, infinite and eternal. Taking into account the type of society in which we live in and the fact that it is usually our parents who teach us about God, most people do not even question his existence. Many philosophers who believe in God have tried to prove his existence using many different types of argument. One of these arguments is the ontological argument. It was made famous by the 11th century philosopher Anselm. The ontological argument has three properties: 1. It is an a priori argument. 2. It treats existence as a property. 3. It is a reduction argument. The problem with this argument is that it treats existence as a first order property. Kant picked up on this flaw, and therefore criticizes the argument. Existence can not be a first order property. First order properties describe the object itself. Existence does not add to an objects description, it can not be added to the concept of the thing. It just posits the existence of such a thing. Let us now take a more critical look at Kant's argument (some things will have to be stated again.) In the concept of God we find
the idea that he is a perfect being. From this idea alone the existence of God is supposed to follow a priori. It is not so hard to say that it is impossible for God not to exist. "But this yields no insight into the conditions which make it necessary to regard the non-existence of a thing as absolutely unthinkable. It is precisely these conditions that we desire to know, in order that we may determine whether or not, in resorting to this concept, we are thinking anything at all." Through examining the ontological argument we are supposed to come to the conclusion that the judgment "God does not exist" is self-contradictory. Existence is one of the properties included in the concept of God, and if we reject that, then we are contradicting the idea of God. But Kant says that this is not so. Existence is not a property of a thing. If we reject the existence of thing, we reject the thing itself with all its properties. Therefore, there is no contradiction because there is nothing left to be contradicted. The defenders of the ontological argument have a comeback though. They say that the person who rejects the existence of God has not grasped the concept of God correctly because existence is part of the concept of God. In conclusion, the person does not understand what he is denying. But Kant comes back with an even stronger argument. As we already know, existence is not a first order property, it just says that something is actually there. In Kant's own words, "'Being' is obviously not a real predicate: that is, it is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations, as existing in themselves." Kant's argument makes perfect sense. Let us use a triangle to prove his point. Say that right now I have the concept of a triangle in my head. A triangle is a geometrical figure with three angles. Under the condition that I have the concept of the triangle in my head, it necessarily follows that I must have the idea that three angles make up the triangle. Otherwise I would not have correctly grasped the concept of the triangle. Now, regardless of whether the object exists in my reality or not, I still have the concept in my head. Regardless of whether I believe that the triangle exists or not I have not come to any contradictions. We have just proved that the ontological argument is incorrect. Again, existence can never be treated as a property which describes an object. We now come to the question of morality. How does Kant's deontological theory view morality and how does it compare to other moral theories? As we have seen, for Kant, it is the thought (concept) that counts, not the thing itself. The reason being that the objects in our world are subject to our own individual experiences. We do not see the things as they are in themselves. If we keep this in mind we see that the deontological theory tells us that the moral rightness of an action is determined independent of its consequences. Again, it is the thought behind the action that counts. As a comparison to Kant's deontological theory we will use a consequentialist theory, utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is basically the opposite of the Kant's deontological theory. It says that the moral rightness of an action depends on the consequences of that action. In defining the good, it defines it in terms of happiness or pleasure. An act can be said to be morally right so long as it provides the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people. We can already start to see that this theory has many negative implications. For one thing, what if in trying to maximize the amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people, in any given situation, you hurt many others in the process. There are two types of utilitarian theory, Act and Rule, but again, they are only con
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Kant Existence,
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Approximate Word count = 2587
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)
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