Lectures on Ethics
Date
1963
Authors
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Publisher
New York: Harper and Row Publishers,
Abstract
Friendship; Enmity; Duties dictated by Justice; Equity; Innocence; Injury; Vengeance; The Slanderer; Jealousy and its offspring – Envy and Grudge; Ethical duties towards others: truthfulness; Poverty and Charity; Social virtue; Haughtiness; Scoffing; Duties towards Animals and Spirits; Duties towards Inanimate Objects; Duties towards Particular Classes of Human Beings; The Ultimate Destiny of the Human Race; Duties of the Virtuous and the Vicious; Duties arising from Differences of Age; The Ultimate destiny of the human race;
Description
The book is a propaedeutic to the study of both jurisprudence and morals. Ethics is the division of universal practical philosophy which deals with the intrinsic goodness found in some but not in all actions, dispositions, and maxims. The source of the moral law is internal; legal prescriptions require an external lawgiver. Ethics, then, concerns our actions only insofar as they evince a certain motive which no external lawgiver can require us to have, but which we may freely assume; the law, on the other hand, requires certain actions, and it does not take thought of the motives from which they are done. Naturally a ready obedience to law is a moral virtue; but the external lawgiver requires obedience and does not require what he cannot enforce, a certain virtuous disposition. While this distinction between statute and moral law and, per corollary, that between universal practical philosophy and ethics were established in philosophy before Kant, it is absolutely basic to an understanding of his theory of law, morals, and religion. Though Kant does not slavishly adhere to this distinction in these lectures as he does in the Metaphysics of Morals, if the reader keeps it in mind the major division in Kant’s discussions will become clear, and some of the apparent but not real repititiousness will disappear. The explanatory footnotes in this edition are selected from those in the Menzer edition; in some of them Infield is followed, but in others we have gone back to the Menzer source. Otherwise the present translation is entirely Infield’s.