PHILOS 2YY3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Kantian Ethics, The Foundations, Orbital Inclination
8 Apr 2015
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What we"re aiming to do under utilitarianism is to act in a way that increases everyone"s happiness overall. We might end up sacrificing things that are very important to us because it"s egalitarian. You don"t know in advance if things are right or wrong - you don"t know in advance that murder is wrong, or that lying is wrong. If you"re a consequentialist, you might not say that lying is wrong, since it may or may not be wrong depending on what the consequences are. For the consequentialist, you have to first think about what the good is, and then think about what the right is. If it"s wrong to do something, it is wrong because it"s wrong to lie, or it"s wrong to kill people, not just the result is wrong. For kant, ethics and obligation are not grounded in empirical considerations and circumstances of the world and how things turn out.
