Objections to Kant's Argument

      When your assignment in a philosophy paper is to analyze an argument, you'll be expected both to explicate the argument (that is, to identify its premises and conclusion and to determine whether it is valid) and to evaluate it critically (that is, consider whether its premises are true by examining and evaluating reasons for thinking that at least some of them are false).  Here we have concentrated only on the prior task of explicating an argument:  it is prior because if you don't know what the conclusion of the argument is or what premises support it, you'll be hard pressed to find good objections. And, once again, things are not always quite as easy as they seem:  you'll find, for example, that sometimes you need to consider the truth or the plausibility of the premises in order to reconstruct an argument well.  Here we'll only mention a few points that might give rise to reasonable objections to Kant's argument.  We could only see how powerful these objections are by spelling them out more fully and considering what Kant’s response would be.

Objections to Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Section 1

1. Kant claims that the good will is good without regard to its effects or usefulness, but is this always the case? Is it the case that only intentions and motivations matter, and not consequences? For example, are the following two circumstances equally good:
- you jump into a lake to rescue a drowning child but fail to save the child
- you jump into a lake to rescue a drowning child and succeed in saving the child's life
In one instance, a life is saved, and in the other, a life is lost. How can the person be equally praiseworthy in both circumstances?

2. Note premise (6). Kant states that talents of the mind, qualities of temperament, and gifts of fortune are not good in all circumstances, but can this really be the case? Couldn't it be that these characteristics are always good charactersitics? Whether they are being used for bad ends is irrelevant to their innate goodness. For example, how can knowledge ever be bad? It is indeed possible for knowledge to be used towards a bad end, but is the knowledge itself ever a bad thing? What about the absence of pain (an example of a gift of fortune)? Isn't it always good that a creature isn't in pain? Isn't the lack of pain something an impartial rational spectator would always approve of?

3. Take the following two statements:
(1) X is not good in all circumstances.
(2) X is not good unless accompanied by a good will.
Statement (1) follows from statement (2), but statement (2) does not follow from statement (1). Because this is the case, it is not illogical to think that X does not need the good will to be good, even though X is not good in all circumstances. To illustrate, pleasure is not good in all circumstances (when it is pleasure taken in another's pain, for example), but this does not show that pleasure is reliant on a good will to make it good.

Reconstruction from Kant's Groundwork, Section One

Sample Paper on Kant's Groundwork, Section One