Kant argues that to act rightly is to act from duty. One’s maxim of action ought to be none other than one’s adherence to the “law,” namely the law of morality and what it prescribes, which is good in and of itself. Actions are therefore not analyzed or evaluated with regards to their consequences, but instead with regards to whether or not they are performed out of a sense of duty. Kant’s deontology is strictly concerned with the intentions and motivations for actions, and so it dismisses that the outcomes effectuated by those actions are of any import in moral evaluation. To help better bring out the intuition, consider three cases:
- In acting out of a sense of duty, I donate food to charity. One unfortunate homeless man who received my food ended up choking while eating it and he died as a result.
- I am walking along a crowded street, and there is a child on the side of the road who is in need of help. With the intention of gaining applause from the crowd, I help the child. Absent the crowd, I may have hesitated helping the child or even not helped her at all.
- A rich businessman donates one million dollars to charity, barely noticing the hit in his bank account. A poor man donates one quarter to charity, causing him to take severe precautions in his spending for the rest of the month.
Each one of these cases is meant to bring out the moral sense of actions in deontological terms. In the first case, while my donating food to charity ended up causing the death of the homeless individual who ate that food, I still acted from a sense of duty–out of respect for the moral law–and so performed morally. Even though there ended up being bad consequences, my action was still good. In the second case, it seems as if my action was bad (or at the very least, problematic), even though there were good consequences as a result. Think of whether or not you would feel treated as a proper human being if someone saved you simply because they thought it would afford them fame or money–it seems like one may be justly offended by such a notion, even though the action resulted in good consequences. In the last example, it seems that it would be morally objectionable to say the businessman did something “more morally” simply on account of his having more money–one’s financial standing is trivial with respect to one’s capacity to act morally.
With this in mind, to what extent do you think social media causes actions that are counter to deontological morality? We see people often posting about their “passion” for certain activist causes, celebrity deaths, and so forth, yet, is it reasonable to assume they all do so out of a sense of duty? Furthermore, with a system that has algorithms garnered towards getting more likes, comments, shares, or whatever (depending on the platform), might we be suspicious of not only the maxims of other peoples’ actions (via their posts), but even our own? Given the uncertainty of knowing pure motives when there are all of these confounding and external variables, do you think social media can still be a platform that encourages moral behavior (within a Kantian deontological framework)?
I definitely think social media encourages people to polish their actual day to day life before posting online. I think that disingenuous use of social media posting about works of charity could still possibly work within a deontological framework. Even if the social media influencer posting does not actually have pure moral intentions, the people they reach through platform will most likely not know the difference. Those people might be encouraged to copy the person whose post they saw but do so with genuine intentions.
I think it is a very difficult thing to determine what other people are truly thinking behind their social media posts. Of course generalizations can be made, but the true motive is not known unless the poster actually vocalizes their motives behind the post. That being said however, I tend to take a more cynical approach when it comes to viewing posts on social media. I recognize some actually do care for celebrity deaths, activist causes, and other events that may hold their passion. But in reality, I think people are to detached from situations of great impact if they can use it to garner even more clout from a social media post (this is in reference to celebrity deaths and other tragic events that doesn’t share news, just feelings). With posts regarding events and don’t involve celebrities to gather more attention, I think they are genuine and done out of duty for their organization.
Despite how social media is designed to feed into our desires for social validation, I definitely think that social media can still be a great platform to use to advance moral behaviors (if by “moral behaviors” you mean things like increasing awareness, sharing fundraisers, and anything else along the lines of taking action to make a positive difference) because it enables you to have a far-reaching influence to spark and encourage in viewers a sense of duty to participate.
I can see that your evaluation of Kant’s idea over what dictates our actions and how intentions should overpower the consequences is a case of what is defined as our duty. With that in mind, social media is this gray space where one may feel obligated to adhere to what is socially acceptable to society but may feel that this adherence fails to align with their duties or their morals. I can see this being the case if someone were to give backlash to someone on social media for bullying an individual online but if that person who does the bullying takes it the wrong way the consequences can be more severe. This comes back to why do people feel they need to do this. Is it because they feel it having moral motivations or being that it is there duty to protect? I think you can also explore the motivations in this case being whether or not they feel inclined to do so for personal gain such as praise from others. Kant’s ideas explore what actions have moral worth but situational factors make the idea rather ambiguous and hard to define with absolute certainty.
I agree with your interpretations of Kants belief on actions based on duty and how personal inclination renders an action immoral. I believe social media platforms have the potential to encourage moral behavior however in most cases there is hidden agendas maybe even within the platform itself. Take for example, Instagram has considered removing the like button in support of mental health and people trying to reach certain standards. Is this the true reason? or may they be removing it for financial gain. Removing the like button will limit Instagram influencers scope forcing companies to pay for sponsored content. Also take into account large charitable donations by companies. Are they donating because they are truly trying to support and make an impact or only for tax write off purposes not to mention the good publicity.