Study guide: Moral Philosophy: Kant and Virtue Ethics

📋 Course Outline

1. Kantian ethics and universal law
2. Human dignity and moral duty
3. Kantian strengths and criticisms
4. Virtue ethics and character
5. Philippa Foot and the trolley problem

📖 1. Kantian ethics and universal law

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Universalisation of actions: Universalisation is the idea that an action’s moral acceptability depends on whether you would want everyone to do it.
• Deontological ethics: Deontological ethics holds that morality depends on the action and its required duties rather than on outcomes.

📝 Essential Points

• Kant’s method asks whether the action you are considering could be willed as a universal rule for all people.
• Kant rejects the view that the consequences decide rightness because the future cannot be reliably known.
• Kant links the wrongness of lying and murder to the kind of world you would end up endorsing through universal practice.
• Kant’s framing is often tested with cases where someone pleads for an exception, like an axe murderer seeking your friend.

💡 Memory Hook

Universal law check: “Would I want everyone to do this?”

📖 2. Human dignity and moral duty

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Human dignity: Human dignity is the moral requirement to treat every person as having interests of their own, not as a tool for your goals.
• Moral duty: Moral duty is the obligation to act in line with what reason requires, regardless of personal convenience or expected results.

📝 Essential Points

• Kant argues that people should never be treated as slaves because they must be respected as persons with their own interests.
• Kant’s principle says humanity must never be used merely as a means to an end but always also as an end in itself.
• Kant’s view connects dignity to moral decision-making even when someone pressures you to help through wrongdoing.
• Kant is often associated with inspiring modern human-rights thinking through his focus on rights of each person.

💡 Memory Hook

Dignity rule: never use a person only as a tool.

📖 3. Kantian strengths and criticisms

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Rights of each person: The rights of each person is the Kantian focus on protecting what every individual is entitled to morally.
• Reason over emotion: Reason over emotion is the Kantian emphasis that moral judgement should be grounded in logic rather than feelings.

📝 Essential Points

• A key strength of Kantian ethics is its concern that each person’s rights are respected and protected.
• Kant provides a clear decision model: if you want others to help you, you should help when you can.
• Kant is criticised because moral decisions also involve emotions, not only reasoning.
• Kant is criticised for downplaying consequences, since some argue that lying may be acceptable to save someone in danger.
• In the axe-murderer scenario, critics claim your responsibility could include helping even if it requires lying.

💡 Memory Hook

Duty-first, but critics ask: “What about emotions and saving lives?”

📖 4. Virtue ethics and character

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Virtue ethics: Virtue ethics is an approach that judges morality by the kind of character a person has rather than by isolated acts or outcomes.
• Good character: Good character is the set of stable traits that make a person a moral human by living up to the best version of being human.
• Virtues: Virtues are character qualities such as honesty, courage, and justice that shape how people act.

📝 Essential Points

• Virtue ethics emphasises that people can develop good character traits over time.
• A naturally good human is described as living up to the best version of being human.
• Virtue ethics includes developing traits like honesty, courage, and justice.
• Virtue ethics also involves respecting positive rights such as fair pay and protecting negative rights such as freedom from injury.
• In the trolley problem discussion, virtue ethics holds it is not right to kill one to save others.

💡 Memory Hook

Virtue ethics asks “What kind of person would do this?”

📖 5. Philippa Foot and the trolley problem

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Philippa Foot: Philippa Foot is presented as a modern virtue ethicist who developed virtue-ethical thinking for moral dilemmas.
• Trolley problem constraint: The trolley problem constraint is the claim that killing one to save others is morally wrong.

📝 Essential Points

• Foot supports the idea that protecting life reflects virtue-based morality rather than instrumental calculations.
• Foot’s approach is used to argue against sacrificing one person to save others in the trolley case.
• The strength attributed to the view is that many people instinctively judge killing one to save others as wrong.
• A training-based strength is that if people are raised to tell the truth and respect others, acting well becomes easier.
• A major challenge raised is that without shared laws and rules, it is unclear how to ensure someone is acting virtuously.

💡 Memory Hook

Foot’s trolley line: protect life, don’t sacrifice one.

📊 Synthesis Tables

Kant vs virtue ethics

⚠️ Common Pitfalls & Confusions

1. Universalising an action can be confused with predicting outcomes, but Kant treats moral rightness as not determined by consequences.
2. Treating “duty” as just following rules can mislead, because Kant’s framework also ties morality to respect for humanity.
3. Confusing virtue ethics with “doing what feels good” is common, since it instead centres stable virtues like honesty, courage, and justice.
4. Using the trolley problem example incorrectly can happen by assuming Foot endorses killing one to save others, but the source denies this.
5. Thinking virtue ethics gives objective answers can be mistaken, because the source flags uncertainty about who decides what counts as virtuous.
6. Assuming that emotions are irrelevant to morality can mislead, since Kant is criticised for underplaying their role in moral judgement.

✅ Exam Checklist

1. Explain Kant’s universalisation test for whether an action can be willed as a universal rule.
2. State what makes Kant’s ethics deontological and why consequences are treated as problematic.
3. Describe how Kant links morality to human dignity and the prohibition on treating persons merely as means.
4. Recall Kant’s claims about never treating people as slaves and the associated rights-of-each-person focus.
5. Apply the Kantian axe-murderer/lying scenario idea and state what critics argue about exceptions.
6. Define virtue ethics as a theory focused on character rather than isolated actions or consequences.
7. List key virtues mentioned (honesty, courage, justice) and describe the role of developing character traits.
8. Explain Foot’s trolley-problem conclusion about killing one to save others.
9. Identify one strength and one criticism of Kantian ethics as given in the source.
10. Identify one strength and one criticism of virtue ethics as given in the source.
11. Explain how Foot is said to connect virtue ethics to protecting life and moral intuition.
12. Compare the moral “test” each framework uses: universal law for Kant and virtuous character for Foot.