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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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)?