Allen W. Wood - Ethics Quotes

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Thus Kantian autonomy, once it is understood, will (and ought to) disappoint those shallow minds and immature souls who are attracted to the doctrine of autonomy for the wrong reasons. They were hoping for some radical individualist revolution in morality, in which paroxysms of human self-will overthrow the divine will's numinous majesty (thereby replacing, as many such revolutions sadly do, one arbitrary and unjust tyranny with another and bringing to power merely a different mob of unprincipled scoundrels). The sober rationalism of Kantian ethics is equally incompatible with voluntarism in its theological and its Promethean forms.

Allen W. Wood
Critics of Kantian ethics sometimes complain that the concept of a categorical imperative makes no sense because there could be no reason for obeying such an imperative. This is usually because they think that the only reason for obeying an imperative must be an end in the sense of an end to be produced. They do not notice that Kant's concept of an objective end in itself is precisely his answer to their question.

Allen W. Wood
In Kantian ethics, the fundamental value is humanity or rational nature as an end in itself.

Allen W. Wood
I think Kantian ethics must [...] reject the unity of the person account. A more consistent Kantian approach is based on the idea that we can treat, or fail to treat, rational nature as an end in itself not only in the person of a rational being in the strict sense but also in the way we treat other beings who are not persons in the strict sense.

Allen W. Wood
Free will is as philosophical a question, in that sense, as there is. Kantian ethics should not represent itself as having a solution to it. If the problem of freedom is a philosophical open wound, then the right way to think about Kant's utterly unacceptable theory of noumenal freedom is that it is the salt that philosophers have a professional obligation to rub in the wound so that they can't forget about it.

Allen W. Wood
Kantian ethics is fundamentally committed to a radical critique of human social life, especially of social life in its civilized form. This critical tendency is not a mere ancillary feature or contingent concomitant of Kantian ethics. It conditions the fundamental conception of Kantian ethical theory.

Allen W. Wood
Those of us who are sympathetic to Kantian ethics usually are so because we regard it as an ethics of autonomy, based on respect for the human capacity to govern our own lives according to rational principles. Kantian ethical theory is grounded on the idea that the moral law is binding on me only because it is regarded as proceeding from my own will.

Allen W. Wood
Help given to others, even on moral grounds, is not the result of sticking to a principle. Beneficence to others carried out from such a mindset is bound to strike us as grotesque. In Kant's own terms, however, the motive of duty in this example would be much more plausibly regarded as love of human beings – that is, the sorrowful man helps others because he has moral grounds to care about them and make their well-being his end. Realizing that this option is open to Kant may help us to correct many common errors about what Kantian ethics must say in such cases.

Allen W. Wood
Kantian ethics [...] certainly may depart freely from what Kant wrote and thought. It may criticize and modify the theory Kant put forward as well as sympathetically interpret or defend it.

Allen W. Wood
Kantians may in turn be skeptical about all such projects, and whether anything deserving to be called either 'morality' or moral 'reasons' could ever be got out of them. A long philosophical tradition claims that there are powerful reasons to meet the requirements of morality, reasons that are necessarily connected with being a rational agent at all, and hence that conduct which violates moral principles necessarily constitutes a significant failure of rationality (even if we don't customarily apply to it the term 'irrational'). Kantian ethics does not need to apologize for adhering to that tradition.

Allen W. Wood
The standard model of ethical theory may seem like merely a necessary consequence of applying to normative ethics the high standards of clarity and rigor prized by all of us who like to think of ourselves as philosophers in the analytic tradition. This way of doing ethics obviously parallels the way analytical philosophers treat many other subjects – by formulating generalizations about this or that and testing them against intuitive counterexamples. But I think the Sidgwickian method of intuitional ethics, or the Rawlsian method of reflective equilibrium, is not the only way to think clearly about ethical theory.

Allen W. Wood
Kantian ethics rests on a single fundamental value – the dignity or absolute worth of rational nature, as giving moral laws and as setting rational ends. The fundamentally valuable thing in the universe is a rational being, a person – or, more precisely, rational nature in a person. The demands made on us by this value depend on the kinds of conduct required to show respect for this value.

Allen W. Wood
It is [...] an elementary misunderstanding to think that Kantian ethics is committed to a system of inflexible moral rules just because it regards moral imperatives as categorical imperatives. [...] It is also an elementary misunderstanding of the concept of a categorical imperative to think that because Kantian ethics grounds obligation on such imperatives, it has no concern for ends or (therefore) for the consequences of actions.

Allen W. Wood