Kant on Moral Respect

Kant’s account of the feeling of moral respect has notoriously puzzled interpreters: on the one hand, moral action is supposed to be autonomous and, in particular, free of the mediation of any feeling on the other hand, the subject’s grasp of the law somehow involves the feeling of moral respect. I argue that moral respect for Kant is not, pace both the ‘intellectualists’ and ‘affectivists,’ an effect of the determination of the will by the law – whether it be a mere effect or the motivating cause of action – but is instead identical to it. Drawing on Kant’s general account of feeling as the awareness of how representations and their objects harm or benefit our own powers, I argue that the identity between moral respect and the determination to action contains two elements. Moral respect is, first, a form of practical self-consciousness which constitutes the subject’s recognition of the moral law and thus of herself as intrinsically bound by it, i. e., as a moral agent. Second, respect is a capacity for receptive awareness of particular features of our environment as well as other persons insofar as they benefit and harm us as moral agents. Thereby moral respect affords us awareness in concreto of particular, morally-conditioned ends. In this way moral respect provides the key for a Kantian account of genuinely free practical receptivity.

Plant Philosophy and Interpretation: Making Sense of Contemporary Plant Intelligence Debates

Plant biologists widely accept plants demonstrate capacities for intelligence. However, they disagree over the interpretive, ethical and nomenclatural questions arising from these findings: how to frame the issue and how to signify the implications. Through the trope of ‘plant neurobiology’ describing plant root systems as analogous to animal brains and nervous systems, plant intelligence is mobilised to raise the status of plants. In doing so, however, plant neurobiology accepts an anthropocentric moral extensionist framework requiring plants to anthropomorphically meet animal standards to be deserving of moral respect. I argue this strategy is misguided because moral extensionism is an erroneous ontological foundation for ethics.

Resentment and Retributivism

While there are ways that resentment can be morally problematic there is a morally proper form of resentment, and it has to do with the concern to see that justice is served. The chapter defends this form of resentment, showing that it can actually help encourage civility and moral respect for victims and offenders. The chapter explains some of the most common mistakes made regarding the moral psychology of retributivism, and it defends a non-consequentialist retributive basis for sanction.

Animals in Contemporary Art

With reference to a number of contemporary cases, such as that surrounding the Guggenheim’s Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World exhibition, this chapter argues that some important controversies about the ethics of art can be explained in terms of a disconnect between people who tacitly adopt the perspectivist (or another interpretation-oriented) approach to ethical criticism and people who tacitly adopt a production-oriented approach to ethical criticism. The chapter argues that perspectivism tends to be favored not only in philosophical aesthetics, but also in art criticism and in many art world institutions. In contrast, non-specialists tend to tacitly adopt the production-oriented approach. In the case of the use of animals in contemporary art, current controversies are further explained by the fact that, given some fairly uncontroversial premises about the moral respect that we owe to non-human animals, people who evaluate such work from a production-oriented approach are likely to find much that is prima facie ethically blameworthy. Moreover, they are rationally warranted in doing so.

The Disrespectfulness of Weighted Survival Lotteries

If we can save the lives of only one of multiple groups of people, we might be inclined simply to save whichever group is largest. We may worry, though, that automatically saving the largest group fails to take each saveable individual sufficiently into account, offering some of these individuals no chance at all of being rescued. Still wanting to give larger groups higher chances of survival, we may then say that we ought to employ a proportionally weighted lottery to determine which group to save. In this paper, I argue that this would be a mistake. Given the most plausible way of specifying it, the weighted-lottery view itself fails to treat each saveable individual with equal moral respect.

KONSEP PENDIDIKAN ISLAM MENGENAI AKHLAK PERSPEKTIF AL GHAZALI (KAJIAN KITAB IHYA’ ULUMUDDIN)

Behavior education is important to learn not only in formal but also in non formal education, such as in family. The behavior concept has been formulated by many schoolars. One of them was Imam al Ghazali. The researcher raises the the al Ghazali thought who is classic figure known as theologist, philoshopher and sufi from sunni. Behavior education as explained in Ihya’ Ulumuddin book is prioritized to formulate students’ moral. He discussed some such behavior education, as moral to them selves that is eating and drinking, moral respect to visitors, in trading, in socialization. The morals as if refer to material, but it refers to the future. To implement those moral correctly, it needs some methods for example habitual, modelling, and story telling.

Reason’s feeling: A systematic reconstruction of Kant’s theory of moral respect

In my paper, I shall take seriously Kant’s puzzling statements about the moral feeling of respect, which is, according to him, “a feeling self-wrought by means of a rational concept and therefore specifically different” from all common feelings. I will focus on the systematic position of the moral feeling of respect within the framework of Kant’s transcendental idealism. By considering its volitional structure, I argue for a compatibilist account of the moral feeling of respect, according to which both intellectualist and affectivist interpretations are true. As such, respect can be understood in terms of a process of moral self-consciousness and self-formation, which means that the will must be freed from initial empirical motives, and finally be determined only by rational principles.

After Darwin

In the second half of the nineteenth century, many people lost their faith in the Christian God. Nevertheless, they were eager to show that this move towards a secular world picture did not mean the end of morality and that it could continue as much before. In a Darwinian age this was not possible and the Christian cherishing of the virtue of meekness was replaced by a moral respect for vigor and effort directed both towards self-realization and to the well-being of society. We compare the British moves to those promoted by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. There are significant similarities but also differences that reflect the British industrialized notion of progress versus the German idealistic notion of progress.