Kant's Theory and Objection
The Ethical Theorist Immanuel Kant, was born in 1724 and died in 1804 at the age of 80. He was the first philosopher to publish in Germany, and his theory in which he devised was called Deontology. Deontology was a theory that discussed duties and obligations and even further, to figure out what duties we have. His central idea was also what makes actions right is that the person has right motives and intentions. He defined duty as an act type, which would be morally wrong for person S to avoid if person S knew they had to do that duty. For example, a US citizen has a "duty to vote", in this case it would be morally wrong for that person to not vote. He also defined right as an act type that person S is entitled to, and it is morally wrong for anyone to prevent person S to do that act type. In this example Kant stated that ever human has a "right to life", so consequentially it is morally wrong for anyone to prevent a human from living. Kant went even deeper with duties and developed Perfect duties Vs. Imperfect duties. He stated the person S has a perfect duty to do an action, so whenever S can do an act of type A, S has a duty to perform that act no matter what. Then he explained that an imperfect duty is somewhat similar but differed in the sense that the person has the duty to do an action only sometimes, but he does not have a perfect duty to do act A, for example one should give to charity sometimes as an obligation, but not entitled to all the time.
Kant also discussed Maxims; he assumed that whenever a person engages in any given action, she acts according to a maxim. In other words, if a person find themselves in a particular circumstance more ...