VALUE ANIMALS AND OTHER HUMANS

Value Animals and other Humans have on Machiavelli's Theory and on Kant's Theory



Value Animals and other Humans have on Machiavelli's Theory and on Kant's Theory

Introduction and Statement of Thesis

Does one theory or the other give a more plausible account of the value of animals and other humans? Do they both fail to give an adequate account?

According to Machiavelli, virtue is an excellence in achieving desirable goals, which are, however, not necessarily morally acceptable. The moral indifference of the ruler can help him in various struggles with the changeable circumstances of fortune. The requirements for leading a country successfully are not traditional virtues, like piety, humanity, and honesty, but cleverness in making things useful and efficient (Kant, 1995). In sum, political excellence for Machiavelli presupposes power and intellectual excellences, but it is indifferent to moral ones.

Arguments for Thesis

Kant's philosophical system receives the general name of "criticism" or "critical philosophy" and is exposed mainly in the three major works of the Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of judgment. The introductory elements of this system properly called transcendental philosophy and Kant states, mainly in the Prolegomena and the first of three reviews mentioned. By "transcendental philosophy" means the review to be subjected to human reason to investigate the conditions that make possible a priori knowledge, or simply try to answer the question "How are synthetic judgments possible a priori? "or of" how can the experience? ', or that of "How is nature possible?". Kant also says that transcendental philosophy claims to know "only if it is in principle possible something similar to what is called metaphysics . "

Objections to Thesis

To the proposals of Machiavelli and Kant on an ethic from human passions, Kant makes a rethinking of what really should be ethics, this change does so from the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In Kant's ethics is a science of the laws of freedom, not seen as posing Kant, where he proposed that ethics is found in man and his actions and is thus an analogy with the laws of motion (motion elements equal to the movement of animals, which is the same movement of instincts in man) (Kant, 1995). Kantian ethics is different does not take ethics as an exact science, but predictable, however, both natural philosophy and moral philosophy can each have their empirical part, because it has to determine ...