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LECTURE 5
IMMANUEL KANT

As I’ve told you since this course began, we like to
draw on opposites. We’re not looking for middle of the
roaders as we study these men. We’re looking for people who
had positions out on the point. The idea being that it is
more sensible to identify the mainstream of philosophical
thought by knowing where the boundaries are, than where the
centerline of the road is. Certainly today with Immanuel
Kant we go all the way toward ethics of motive and as you’ve
been told time and again, this is followed by the other wing
of the discipline, John Stuart Mill who goes all the way
toward ethics of consequences. Now that doesn’t do much
good just to remember those two things. It sounds like a
vacuous statement – sure we’ve got a guy who thinks one way
and another who thinks another. But today’s lecture I hope
will point out, if nothing else, that Kant was a very smart
man. I hope a week from today I can make equally forceful
the point that Mill was also a very smart man and here you
have two very smart men being widely separated. To understand
that is education. Going right down to the bottom line with
Kant's ideas of the categorical imperative in which when a
moral act is to be considered, a man should act in a way that
he would have all other men act, comes down to his position
on life. This is the most bizarre way in which one can spot-

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