The Concept of Disinterestedness as Central for the Ethics of Kant Essay

The Concept of Disinterestedness as Central for the Ethics of Kant - Essay ExampleAccording to the research findings, it can, therefore, be said that the chief take on of the school of purview of Kant is that the mind can know objects existing in the extraneous world only via notions of infinite and time, which are sensible forms produced by the mind itself. Kant maintains that these forms, by virtue of structuring the sensual information, enable the knowledge as such, and concludes that all we know about objects is their appearance in time and space, in this way drawing perplexity to the fact that the mind adds something to its knowledge, fundamentally limiting itself in the process. Kant used these views as an argument in his clean-living philosophy to show that humans are free because it is the power of their motive that posits a clean natural law for their actions. In frames of the classical tradition, moral philosophy was viewed as ethics based on the human status in th e world, and on the realities external in relation to mind. Under this view, moral respectableness is rooted in the nature of man, the nature of things, and God. This approach gave rise to Natural Law theory of ethics, and since the classical period, the moral philosophy offered few new perspectives. It was Kant who offered a truly new perspective in the moral philosophy as he reasoning(prenominal)ized ethics by his exaltation of Pure Reason as a system of beliefs that does not depend on sensual experience, and at the same time used his Christian background to absolutize his moral ideal. He grounded morality not on the traditional notion of good and on the splendid obligation, akin to his perception of knowledge as based on some a priori, i.e. independent of experience, forms ingrained to mind. In this way, Kant replaced the traditional Christian ethics with reason, which became the factor that shapes human life, and ascribed to morality absolutized and sacred status. Thus, as the external reality has been demoted as the source of morality, a total change of the foundation of moral philosophy occurred and the rational ethics had to be separated from external objects and had to be inferred only from the internal qualities of the human mind. In Kantian disinterestedness, love is absent, which makes the ethics based on Pure Reason distinct from the traditional Christian morality. Indeed, Kant thought that to have a truly disinterested motive, any striving for good, including love and our desire for pleasure and happiness, as the end of an action must be disqualified as being not moral but as the one which is inevitably interested. Of course, the desire for pleasure, our self-interest, our self-love, and after all our prudence may seem to be related to morality, as these elements of our motivation accompany most actions of man, but for Kant they cannot constitute even slightest motives of the moral act, and preferably deprive it of morality. As Kant says tha t the only possible thing which can be considered unqualifiedly good is a good will, therefore human desires cannot be motives for the pure and autonomous moral will. Similarly, goodwill remains good only because it is an exposition of Pure Reason, and because it conforms to obligation exclusively for the sake of obligation, forming the only possible mode of a truly moral motivation. There is just one impulse that can lead us to this accredited motivation - reverence of the moral law because such a respect is the only factor that reason lets into moral life.