I agree with perspectives of both Romanticism and Enlightenment. I think a romantic perspective doesn’t focus too much on reason and that’s what I like about it. A solely logical perspective is devoid of emotions and imagination, which would make life very dry and boring. Romantic perspective has a certain kind of beauty to it because it focuses so much on vivid imagination. I believe that Romanticism evokes imaginative thinking which leads to creativity. However, too much of anything is not ideal, and I believe Enlightenment definitely balances out Romanticism. Enlightenment focuses on rationality which definitely adds essential and much needed practicality to any perspective.
Romanticism and Enlightenment gave birth to contemporary western culture’s notion on government, literature, philosophy and art. Western way of thinking was born out of these two perspectives. Hence, we can say that these two perspectives have heavily influenced western culture and society.
Kant’s perspective on duty free of self interest was a very interesting topic and I really enjoyed reading his take on morality.
Kant’s philosophy of treating people as an ends in themselves instead of as a means to an end resonates powerfully with my idea of how politicians and governments should ideally treat people in a democratic country, or any country for that matter. This is a very important idea because it strongly emphasizes on the value of human life. I find this philosophy very interesting because Kant doesn’t just state the maxim out of a personal whim or opinion; he actually provides a logical explanation to back this categorical imperative. He reasons that since morality is determined by reason, moral law is universal because reason is universal. Hence moral law applies equally to everyone. Therefore, acting morally means to treat every person as a moral agent and therefore as an end in itself, not as a means to an end.
The reality, however, is far from Kant’s ideal. Some governments and politicians around the world regularly abuse human rights. For example, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is one of the most repressive and undemocratic states in the world. Kim Jong-un exercises absolute political power over the country. The authoritarian government restricts all forms of human liberty and freedom in the country, including freedom of speech, assembly, religion, and the freedom to form political parties. The government systematically forces citizens (including women, children and prisoners) to provide unpaid labor , who are forced to build the country’s infrastructure and participate in events extolling the Kim family’s ruling and the Workers’ Party of Korea. The government uses arbitrary arrests, punishments, torture and execution to incite fear in people’s minds and gain control over them. The government partners with Chinese authorities to capture North Korean refugees and punishes the refugees for making international contact. The government does not care to protect and promote the rights of marginalized and weaker communities like women, children and crippled people. Kant would be devastated and horrified by the of abuse people, and most importantly valuable human lives, in countries like North Korea.
In answering what “enlightenment” is, Kant claims that it is to think for and only for yourself and for no one else. In order to be “enlightened”, one must only consider their own feelings and disregard the feelings of others. For example, if someone were to make a large decision that would impact not only themselves but others around them, they should disregard everyone else and only think about what the impact will be on themself. This is interesting as most would see this as selfish or inconsiderate while Kant finds this to be freeing. This begs the question: Is thinking solely for oneself a selfish act or self-enlightening?
This philosophy can be seen today as birth rates are steadily declining and one of the major reasons for the decline is due to the cost and time of raising a child increasing. This has led to many would-be parents to choose not to have a child as it not only saves them a ton of time, but money and stress as well. The cost of raising a child has increased over the years as the cost of living and health insurance steadily increases while support systems such as parental leave continues to decline. However, many parents desire grandchildren for personal reasons and also to continue the lineage. If one refuses to have a child for financial and freedom reasons, would it be an act of selfishness to their parents or enlightenment to themselves?
“A lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent.” This statement stood out to me in Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” Civil freedom, or the absence of strict laws and rules that limit what people can or cannot do in a society, leads to a lack of intellectual thought, according to Kant. When there are restrictions that people must follow, their intellect thrives and grows. On the other hand, if people are able to act however they please, they don’t need to think too hard about much, because there is nothing to think about changing.
This statement reminded me much of the political climate in America right now. Many minorities are being restricted in what they can or cannot do, mostly implicitly. This disparity and unfairness, though clearly awful and unfair, has allowed such people to band together in huge intellectual and social movements, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, the Me Too movement, and the Pride movement. If no limitations or restrictions had ever existed, these groups may not have had the opportunity to join together in unity and solidarity with each other. Kant claims that this intellectual enlightening will ultimately lead to civil freedom: “Thus once the germ on which nature has lavished most care – man’s inclination and duty to think freely – has developed within its hard shell, it gradually reacts upon the mentality of the people, who thus gradually become increasingly able to act freely.” This is what we are seeing today; for decades, minorities have been marginalized and discriminated against. Now, as a result of the people’s increasing intellect, we are finally seeing equality and freedom surfacing.
Below is an image of a Black Lives Matter march in Seattle, displaying the enormity of this united movement.
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)?
This past Tuesday, my day ended completely differently than I had planned at the start of the day. I’m deathly afraid of public speaking and my sense of humor is dead-pan at best, so I would have never imagined myself standing in front of a stage of people doing a stand-up comedy set. At 5:30 AM when I went to work, I was scrolling through my socials on the bus and stumbled upon an event at a local restaurant called Herb and Wood. The event was a “Worst Date Ever” themed storytelling competition. Ironically, the prize was dinner for two at said restaurant. Maybe it was the prospect of free food, or perhaps the tiredness of waking up at 4:45 AM for work, but I ended up submitting a set a mere 10 hours before the event.
I really enjoyed the experience so much! I had absolutely no expectation coming into this event, other than to enjoy myself and have a few laughs with my friends. However, I ended up winning $150 of dinner so it was 100% worth the 10-minute stand-up set I threw together in a matter of hours. But, my biggest motivation to sign up was to challenge myself to be out of my comfort zone and maybe learn a new skill. While I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions, at the beginning of the year I always say to myself that I will try something new each month because I never know until I try it if I would be any good. This has led me to discover so many of my current passions and hobbies like cooking, powerlifting, and now maybe even stand-up comedy!
This mindset really reminded me of a lot of Kant’s perspective on untapped talents. He states in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, it is failing to do your duty when “[one] finds himself in comfortable circumstances and prefers to give himself up to pleasure than to trouble himself with enlarging and improving his fortunate natural predispositions” (74). He argues that it is a disservice to yourself to not try and see what talents you have the potential to love. If you go in without any sort of intention of winning (like I did) and do something new purely out of wanting to be happy, even if you fail, it is still morally good to have tried at all. So, I encourage you all to try something out of your comfort zone (maybe even once a month!)
Below, you can see a brief video of me mentioning UCSD as part of a bit 🙂
Kant began section I by saying that there is nothing in the world that is good except good will, “it is impossible to think of anything at all in the world … that could be considered good without limitation except a good will”
People can be good to others everyday but if their intentions are ill intended then their actions cannot be consider good. Consider the following scenario; you are at your relative house for dinner and they are discussing the Australian Fire. Then one of your cousin had a bright idea and told the family, ‘let’s all pull out our phones and donate money to help’, one by one everybody donate 5-50 dollars. You are sitting there with your phone out feeling pressured to do as others are doing so you donate 10 dollars just to do it, while your little bother donated 5 dollars, his weekly allowance. If Kant were to rate your action vs your little bother’s action he would place your bother’s action above your, because he had good intentions and good intentions goes along way. He donate all the money he have now and next week and the week after, soon at add up more than your single donation. Doing one good deed for the sake of it cannot hold up to multiple smaller deed.
Kant’s ideals, compared to the other philosophers we’ve covered so far, seem to be the most idyllic. While he acknowledges the propensity of humans to err, the other philosophers take it as fact that it is simply a fundamental of reality – Kant philosophizes as if this behavior is a choice, not as if it happens no matter what. He encourages people to “act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means”. To me, this assertion seems unrealistic but also worthwhile.
The idea of using others for your own gain is nothing new. Beyond happening on a small level, this type of behavior is pervasive, even in the highest level of government. While it’s a nice idea to rid the world of political corruption, as of right now the President of the United States is still holding his position exclusively because he’s taken advantage of his “party supporters” by making them his political scapegoats. Many influential republicans have taken the fall for him to secure his position as president, and as president the only thing he’s done is avoid catching fire for being corrupt. Trump hasn’t done anything for the country – he has only used his presidential power to avoid scandal. In spite of this, he was just acquitted by the senate of impeachment. Clearly, Kant’s philosophy does not realistically represent how things go down, even if it is a much better vision for how humans should interact. I think it’s a good idea to put it down on paper as philosophy, but to blindly ascribe to this system of belief because it seems like utopia is extremely naive.
Kant’s perspective that consequences of an action are not what matters, but rather the “moral worth” of the action is important really resonated with me. Kant argues that if a person is doing something because they have the motivation to do good rather than bad, then how the action actually results is irrelevant. The most significant part of the action was the motivation itself and the attempt to try to do good.
When thinking about an action’s moral worth rather than the action’s consequence, I immediately thought about charities. We always see things on the news where large charities that get donated millions of dollars. You think how much good work they can do with all that money. I am part of an organization where we do fundraising so that we can donate to charities around San Diego. At a recent fundraiser, we only raised $300 and a lot of the members felt upset that we wouldn’t be making a big enough impact. However, once I read Kant’s philosophy on this, I felt better that though my organization couldn’t donate millions of dollars, we still were trying to do our little part to help out the community.
Through this, I realized that not everyone can donate huge amount of money to charity, but, if we all look at doing an action with moral worth, it doesn’t matter how much money you are able to donate, whether it is $1 or $1 million. It is the fact that people are trying, help even in the smallest way, to make the world a better place.
Below is an infographic on charitable donations in the US in 2018. As you can see, 70% of charitable donations was by individuals rather than the 5% by corporations.
