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Kantian Categorical Imperative: Its Implication In Nigerian Ethical Order
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So far, we have
seen that goodwill is manifested in acting for the sake of duty; and
that duty is acting from respect of law as an obligation says by J.
Omoregbe. According to him, “duty is what a person has as an obligation
to doâ€7 Hence, we can identify a goodwill with that which acts in
respect of moral law.
Kant’s notion of duty has attracted criticisms and objections which could be summarized under these questions.
i. Must an action be absolutely excluded from feeling and inclination in order to possess moral value?
ii. Does an action done for the sake of goodness and not for the sake of duty have any moral worth?
Professor
Paton reacted to these criticisms in his book,†The Categorical
Imperative.†He tries to make explicit, the relation of inclination to
duty as Kant conceived it. According to him, Kant never divorced
inclination from duty or moral motive, but rather accepted as moral,
those actions which though done from duty, have bearing of inclination.
He therefore gives the two senses of an action done from duty.
i. That an action is good precisely in so far as it springs from a will to do one’s duty.
ii.
That we cannot confidently affirm an action to be good except in so far
as we believe that the will to do one’s duty could by itself have been
sufficient to produce the action without the support of inclinations8.
What
Paton precisely means is that in so far as the sufficient reason for
our action is the will to act for the sake of duty, our additional
inclination to such an action does not affects its morality. That is,
our inclination or emotion does not affect the morality of our action,
rather our acting for the sake of duty. Kant extols action done for the
sake of duty and places it above the one done from duty. This is very
clear in his distinction between a holy will which performs an action
from its goodness and human will which performs from duty. However, Kant
believes that a human being can never act from sense of goodness,
because such an action is so noble and magnanimous that it cannot be
achieved by man.
Summarily, for Kant, duty implies a constraint, a
restraint. This constraint is of consequent to the imposition of the
universal law, dictated by the practical reason to an imperfect will-
the human will. The relation of the law to the will is that of a
command, an imperative. Kant gave an elaborate treatment of this
imperative to which we now turn.
CHAPTER ONE -- [Total Page(s) 4]
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