(May 18, 2012 at 5:01 pm)liam Wrote: well firstly, to say that we must take certain actions for certain goals he meant that we must obey duty. The duty of a human is not to kill another and this is universally true, murder IS bad. The analogy you draw from is true but Kant was not saying that everyone must act in a particular way in every given situation, it's a lot more liberal than that, rather he would say that there are certain ways we definitely SHOULDN'T act. Besides, eating is generally a very neutral act and in this situation we might disregard it as simply a circumstance which has no moral or immoral option. If you were to eat the poisonous food this would not necessarily suggest that every should eat poisonous food, but rather that when placed in a position of poison vs starvation they would make this decision. But i concede that it is an interesting issue.
But, for Kant, morality was derived from the rationality of duty, we may rationally assert that we should not ever kill another person because this is a rationally bad action, thus we have rationally prescribed a morality to this situation that is objective and not from the individual's perceptions but rather their rationale. Yes, it's untrue that reactions don't necessarily occur the same under all conditions but that is entirely different and that argument would compare the noumenological to the phenomenological, a comparison that seems generally illogical as we cannot expect an idea to exist by the same restrictions that an atom does, it's simply not necessary. The universality is a rule on how to act, was that unclear?
It is the "rationality of duty" that Kant has failed to justify. What he is aiming for is both universality and rationality simultaneously, but he is unable to justify them in that way. To be precise, what he is claiming that his ideas and goals are rational under all circumstances - such as killing is bad - without actually giving any rational justification for that. them.
