For AQA students, we are close to Paper 1 and for OCR students, we have that Ethics paper next month…let us pause on some of the various criticisms of Kant and consider some you may have missed, and how they interrelate.

Other motives besides duty have moral import

Here we have a family of interrelated objections. You might suggest that acting out of love, compassion, justice, redemption…or simply on one’s own values, as Williams’ suggests with his examples concerning our moral integrity – are all morally important reasons to act. We can reinforce this with clear examples. A classic case is visiting a loved one in hospital: surely doing so out of love is just as, if not more morally praiseworthy than doing so out of (mere) duty.

Morality as a series of hypothetical imperatives

Building on the idea that there are other important moral motives besides duty, Phillippa Foot argued that in fact we never act categorically, and this would not motivate us so we cannot. We (as a matter of empirical fact) act rather for the sake of ends, moral actions are never ends in themselves.

The focus on duty is patriarchal

This fascinating objection from Carol Gilligan gets a brief mention in the AQA textbook but is often overlooked, including by myself until a helpeful student pointed it out to me! If we focus only on duty as the moral good we focus on quite a male-dominated value – obligation that lacks ‘care’. Yet care is highly morally prasied especially in the sphere of women. Perhaps then a feminist critique of Kant is needed to observe that we do in fact have other good reasons to act, out of care, but this is sidelined as the domain of women.

Are we treating ourselves to a means to an end by just acting out of duty?

This thought returns to the first point regarding other motives, specifically moral integrity. What if we ignore our own moral values – what Williams calls our personal ethics – to act out of duty? In what way can this line up with the second formulation of the categorical imperative, given that we, as rational moral agents ourselves, belong in the kingdom of ends too?

I hope these are useful considerations ahead of your exam! Pause and reflect – wich do you find to be the most serious objection to Kant, or can he successfully address them all?