Kantian Ethics

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

There are few great moral philosophers who have been as much maligned and little understood as Immanuel Kant. Kant is easy to criticize, and he can be hard to defend. In recent years scholars have made efforts to bring out some of the lesser known themes and ideas in Kant’s ethical works. The result is a picture of Kant’s ethics that is much more coherent, plausible, and appealing than the standard reading of the Groundwork alone would suggest. Our course will focus on this “new and improved” version of Kantian ethics. Although we will of course be looking at what Kant actually said about ethics, our main concern will be with what ethics inspired by Kant looks like. The syllabus includes some classic papers by famous Kantian ethicists, as well as recent work produced by the next generation of scholars. Most of the authors we’re reading are Kantians of some sort or other, but few of them agree with everything Kant says. The aim of the class is to take a sympathetic, but not uncritical look at one of philosophy’s most profound and powerful systems of ethical thought.