Actions and Agents

In Anglophone moral philosophy, Kant is often pigeonholed as a “deontologist,” in contrast to “consequentialism,” on the one hand, and to “virtue ethics” on the other. This is supposed to mean that he places the rightness of actions at the center of his theory, as distinct from consequences, or the traits of agents. The main problem with this is that Kant is being too hastily assimilated to with the rationalist-intuitionist school in British ethics, which is where people get their idea of what a deontological ethical theory must be like.

This categorization does get Kant right on some things. Despite the recently fashionable Rawlsian reading, Kant agrees with the British rationalists' endorsement of the idea that values lie in the nature of things rather than being conferred on things by someone's will. Like the British rationalists, and contrary to utilitarianism, Kant thinks that some actions are intrinsically right or obligatory, while others are intrinsically wrong or forbidden, irrespective of their consequences. He also holds, contrary to the Scottish moral sense school, that reason, not sentiment, is the foundation of morality. But on other issues this categorization is wrong or misleading. It is incorrect to think of Kant as focusing, like the British rationalists, on the rightness or wrongness of particular actions. As we saw in Chapter 3, Kant's theory instead places principles at the center, grounded on the objective worth of humanity as an end in itself.