Allen W. Wood - Rational Quotes

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I suggest that a Kantian should think of any formulation of the supreme principle of morality (including all of Kant's own formulations) as provisional expressions of a principle to the conception of which we limited and fallible rational beings must always aspire.

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
In the First Section of the Groundwork, Kant is attempting to appeal to certain judgments of value that he thinks will be accepted by common rational moral cognition (roughly, healthy moral common sense) in order to motivate a formulation of the moral law.

Allen W. Wood
A moral imperative is categorical because its function is not to advise us how to reach some prior end of ours that is based on what we happen to want but instead to command us how to act irrespective of our wants or our contingent ends. Its rational bindingness is therefore not conditional on our setting any prior end.

Allen W. Wood
Kant's argument [...] cannot and need not rest on the claim that all these alternatives to his interpretation of rational action can be conclusively refuted. It involves only the claim that his interpretation is more natural and reasonable than they are. I also think that so understood, Kant's argument does as much as can possibly be required of any argument purporting to establish a claim about what has ultimate value. In philosophy, as Aristotle wisely tells us, we must not apply the wrong standards to a subject matter (Aristotle 1094b25). This also means we must not expect more of a claim, or an argument for it, than is reasonable.

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
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
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
Treating a being as an end in itself means respecting the value of what makes it such an end. After we see that this value resides in rational nature, we see it implies that, at least in general, rational beings should not be subjected to deception or coercion. Instead, we should seek to harmonize our strivings with those of other rational beings toward their ends.

Allen W. Wood