Tuesday 3/19
Kantian Case Analysis
Readings
Cases
Synopsis
Today we practiced the application of Kantian Ethical Theory to two cases: "Students' Little Helper", which we've seen before, and the difficult and heartwrenching "A Child's Right to Die", which we have not.
Looming large in both cases is the extremely difficult question of what it is to treat oneself as an end and, conversely, what it is to treat oneself as a means only. There are of course a couple of different interpretations we can use in untangling this knot:
- The Respect for Best Interests Interpretation, whereby we treat someone as an end when we respect their interests--that is, when we take their best interests as if they were our own. This is particularly useful when we are concerned with children, since it is not clear children have the capacity to exercise autonomy in the same way adults do.
- The Respect for Autonomy Interpretation, whereby we treat someone as an end when we respect their capacity to make choices for themselves by not, in particular, manipulating their choices, using them, or otherwise objectifying them.
Our discussions about these cases, which I found insightful and interesting, revealed an important fact about applying moral normative theory. Theories like IAU and KET, say, are not computers into which we plug a case, hit return, and get a moral judgment. In general, applying a moral theory to a case is vastly more difficult than one would imagine. We should probably think of these theories not as 'deciders', but as frameworks which enable us to highlight and weigh important moral features of particular cases. As we move forward, I will be providing additional tools to help, but suffice it to say for now that the theories at best draw our attention to specific, coherent, and defensible ways to think about the moral dilemmas hard cases represent.
Yet thinking, as they say, is hard, even with such rich resources in hand.