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Response Essay: What is the right thing to do

Kant argues with Bentham's statement that pain and pleasure are 'our sovereign matters,' which is about ‘we dislike pain but like pleasure’ according to Kant, this statement is half right. Reasons could be sovereign sometimes, but when reasons governed by our will, we cannot drive with the desire, which avoids pain and seek pleasure. The ability to reason can be performed with capability of freedom; such types of capacities make us different from the animals. The idea of freedom is vast in comparison to freedom of choice, which connects morality and justice to freedom. It is commonly thought that the consumers' choice and the idea of freedom isn't true freedom; according to Kant, this idea is used to satisfy those desires which are not chosen by us in the first place. As something that makes many people happy doesn’t mean that it is right, Kant also argued that morality is not based on the empirical considerations, which include wants, interests, and desires. The basic point of Kant is based on moral principles such as happiness; desire makes the person happy is completely different from making the person good and prudent.

It is commonly believed that freedom is referred to as the absence of the obstacles in doing what we desire, but freedom notion is more demanding and stringent. When we seek pleasure and avoid pain at that time, we are not free but trying to fulfill our desire and appetite, when we are choosing anything such as flavor of ice cream we satisfy our preferences at that time. According to Kant, in such situations, we are not acting free, but we act in accordance with the determination provided outside us. Once 'Sprite' has a slogan in their advertisement that ‘Obey your thirst’ and in Kant, perspective, obedience is not freedom. According to Kant, autonomously means acting to laws that are given by ourselves not given through social convention and which nature dictates. Linking Kant's idea of morality with autonomy, which is the ability to act freely, can be gained by giving special dignity to human life. For example, if a person falls from the State Building to earth, nobody will say that that person is behaving freely as his movement is governed through gravity law such as billiard ball. In another example, if a person kills another person, it can be said that the first person is not responsible morally for this unfortunate death as this billiard ball is not morally responsible for falling from a great height. In both of the above examples, neither the person nor the falling object is responsible for their actions. This means that if there is no autonomy, then no person is morally responsible.

Kant argued that the actions' moral worth is not based on the consequences in which it flows but in intensions through which the work is performed. The morally good actions do not require to confirm the moral laws, but they should be done for moral law's sake. Through this Kant is not describing the moral commands of supreme principles by this Kant means that through assessing the actions moral worth we use to assess the motives through which it is performed, not consequences which it produces. So, according to Kant, if we do not understand respect, freedom, and duty, then there will be no morality. Human is not required to become morality instruments but should become morality objects themselves. From this point, Kant's morality idea developed devastation critiques over utilitarianism that says that morality's highest principle is to maximize happiness. But the Kant idea objective was completely different, which is humanity, not happiness ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"CiPlV6Gs","properties":{"formattedCitation":"({\\i{}Immanuel Kant: Why Happiness Is Not the Life Goal - Inan - Medium})","plainCitation":"(Immanuel Kant: Why Happiness Is Not the Life Goal - Inan - Medium)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":215,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/vDOrLj7p/items/BG8U579B"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/vDOrLj7p/items/BG8U579B"],"itemData":{"id":215,"type":"webpage","title":"Immanuel Kant: Why Happiness Is Not the Life Goal - Inan - Medium","URL":"https://medium.com/@inananan/immanuel-kant-why-happiness-is-not-the-life-goal-20aff988619a","accessed":{"date-parts":[["2019",11,14]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (Immanuel Kant: Why Happiness Is Not the Life Goal - Inan - Medium). According to Kant, good deeds provide their moral worth, such as principles, not its consequences.

Works Cited

ADDIN ZOTERO_BIBL {"uncited":[],"omitted":[],"custom":[]} CSL_BIBLIOGRAPHY Immanuel Kant: Why Happiness Is Not the Life Goal - Inan - Medium. https://medium.com/@inananan/immanuel-kant-why-happiness-is-not-the-life-goal-20aff988619a. Accessed 14 Nov. 2019.