The Perfect and the Imperfect Ways of Life

" However, this maxim contains a contradiction: the "very same feeling" of "self-love" which calls for suicide is at the same time the source of that self-love. In some other words, the maxim's inner(a) contradiction prevents it from even being considered as the basis for a public law which would call on all gracious beings to act in the same way. Such an example "conflicts with grim or narrow [ completed] irremissible) avocation" (Kant 158).

Imperfect duty involves follow outs "in which this internal impossibility is indeed not found." Such a situation or do "conflicts only with broad [imperfect] (meritorious) duty" (Kant 158).

The perfect duty, then, is that which the reason determines to be applic up to(p) to the categorical assertive not because it will bring the actor a in- psyche benefit, unless because it fits that categorical assertive. The imperfect, or hypothetical imperative, is that which is made polluted by the presence of soulfulnessal benefit which will moment from the action.

To Kant, reason determines duty and duty is the basis of the categorical imperative and moral action, not the results of the action or the ways in which it might benefit the individual considering what action to take. The moral action involves two requirements, that the action could become a universal law, and that in the action taken the individual wills that it become such a universal law.

Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. Today's moralistic Issues. Ed. Daniel Boneval. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 172-180.

The individual must consider, using his reason, whether he would want everybody else in the world to be gift in the same way that he behaves. If he were strangulation on a bagel, in other words, would he want another person to behave agree to his or her like or dislike of him? Or would he want another person to act according to the universal law and the categorical imperative? What if he were choking on a bagel and the only other person act were his sworn enemy? Would he project that the other person is not obligated to save his life because the other person does not like him?

Or would he suddenly understand the categorical imperative and cry out--if he could speak eyepatch he was choking--"I would save you if you were choking even though I dislike you!"?

Therefore, for Mill, unlike for Bentham, utilitarianism must be seen as part of a social fabric in which the safe of the community replaces the pleasure of the individual, and even replaces the greatest pleasure of the highest fleck of people. Goodness is not necessarily a forerunner to pleasure. The correct man who hides a Jew in Nazi Germany might inhabit that he is going to be tortured and/or killed when discovered, but he operates according the principle of Mill's utilitarianism because he knows hat adhering to the sumptuous rule will develop his higher faculties in a way that ignoring or denying the imperiled Jew will never be able to do.

The chance is good that in such circumstances, choking on a bagel and nearing death, he would suddenly understand perfect duty and the categorical imperative. If he considers this, prior to his own choking to death, he would apply the maneuver to the choking person, even though he does not like him. he will have expanded his moral consciousness and moral code to acknowledge taking the right action even though that action is not, in at least one sense, in his self-concern
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