Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · yt0.817

   And so ruling and being ruled becomes part of humanity for Aquinas. Then we come to Immanuel Kant who says now I say that man and in general every rational being exists as an end in himself not merely as a means. Now I do this with a diagram for you. What he means by that is that man is a rational being. That's exactly what Aristotle said he's a being an animal with logos that thinks. Kant says he's a rational being. But what Kant means by this is a little different because he says we are a split being. On the one side we're rational. We act and think like God rationally. On the other side we …

   yt/OxavWGRTDtM-roger-berkowitz-exploring-the-human-condition/transcript.txt

2. 02 · blog0.813

   Kant writes: …every rational being, exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will…Beings whose existence depends not on our will but on nature have, nevertheless, if they are not rational beings, only a relative value as means and are therefore called things. On the other hand, rational beings are called persons inasmuch as their nature already marks them out as ends in themselves. (Kant [1785] 1998: [Ak 4: 428]) And: The fact that the human being can have the representation “I” raises him infinitely above all the other beings on earth. By th…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/the-moral-status-of-animals.md

3. 03 · blog0.808

   Kantian constructivism holds that practical reasoning yields unconditionally authoritative moral claims, whereas contractualism does not. O’Neill agrees with Kant that only reason itself can verify the credentials of its own claims. The process of identifying the principles of reason is avowedly circular, yet this circularity is not problematic, since the process of verification is reflexive: it involves reason critiquing the claims of reason itself. More specifically, the critique of reason uncovers a basic principle of reasoning: we should rely only on principles that other rational agents c…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/constructivism-in-metaethics.md

4. 04 · blog0.804

   In the first Critique , Kant had argued that the categories are justified, because they are necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. But in the Critique of Practical Reason , he argued that the moral law cannot be justified as a necessary condition of experience, because we can experience ourselves only as beings whose actions have natural causes, and cannot experience ourselves as free moral agents. Thus, Kant insisted, the moral law must be the sole “fact of reason”—a fact that has no, but needs no, justification beyond the force with which it impresses itself on us (Kant 1999…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/hermann-cohen.md

5. 05 · blog0.794

   The Categorical Imperative comes in different formulations that Kant regards as equivalent (G 4: 421, 429, 431, 433); ultimately, it is the requirement that in deliberating, we test our motives by considering whether the principle they express can be adopted as a universal law, a principle that applies to and binds all agents endowed with rational capacities. To this extent, Kant is committed to the “constitutivist view” that the source of the categorical force of moral obligations lies in the constitutive features of rational agency (Rawls 2000: 263–265; O’Neill 1989a, Korsgaard 1996a: 236ff)…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/constructivism-in-metaethics.md

6. 06 · blog0.789

   In this way, autonomy serves as both a model of practical reason in the determination of moral obligation and as the feature of other persons deserving moral respect from us. (For further discussion, see Immanual Kant and moral philosophy .) Recent discussions of Kantian autonomy have downplayed the transcendental nature of practical reason in this account (see, for example, Herman 1993 and Hill 1991). For example, Christine Korsgaard follows Kant in seeing our capacity for self-reflection as both the object of respect and the seat of normativity generally. On her view, we are all guided by wh…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/autonomy-in-moral-and-political-philosophy.md

7. 07 · blog0.784

   According to Kant, all previous ethical theories fail to account for the objectivity and authority of moral obligation because they fail to explain how reason plays a role in our lives because they misunderstand its practical function and mischaracterize its relation with the ends of choice (Kant G 4: 441–444; C2 5: 35–41, 153, 157). Kant’s arguments specifically address sentimentalism and ‘dogmatic rationalism’. Sentimentalism, championed by Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith, holds that ethical judgments stem from sentiments and regards reason as incapable of moving us to action o…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/constructivism-in-metaethics.md

8. 08 · blog0.779

   This is because, for dogmatic rationalism, moral truths guide us only on the condition that we have a corresponding desire to be guided by what is rational (Rawls 1980: 343–46; Rawls 1989: 510–13). Kant’s general diagnosis is that all such doctrines fail to capture the practical function of reason because they are heteronomous. They deny the authority and efficacy of reason, either holding that reason can only recognize objective ends that exist independently of its operations, or claiming that reason can bind agents only with the help of inclination or interest. For Kant heteronomy is a form …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/constructivism-in-metaethics.md

9. 09 · blog0.779

   Freedom means lacking barriers to our action that are in any way external to our will, though it also requires that we utilize a law to guide our decisions, a law that can come to us only by an act of our own will (for further discussion see Hill 1989; for doubts about this reading, see Kleingeld and Willaschek 2019). This self-imposition of the moral law is autonomy. And since this law must have no content provided by sense or desire, or any other contingent aspect of our situation, it must be universal. Hence we have the (first formulation of the) Categorical Imperative, that by virtue of ou…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/autonomy-in-moral-and-political-philosophy.md

10. 10 · blog0.779

    As an alternative to these readings, some interpreters argue that Kant is constructivist about the authority of moral obligations and practical laws for finite agents, but not about the contents of such laws, which apply to all rational agents as such (Engstrom 2009, 2013; Sensen 2013). For others, Kant is a constructivist about a limited set of general substantive moral principles – and as a constititutivist about moral authority (Reath 2022). According to Schafer, Kant’s constitutivism is more appropriately interpreted as ‘reason-first’ rather than ‘agent-first’ (Schafer 2019, 179). On this …

    blog/plato-stanford-edu/constructivism-in-metaethics.md