I am glad to have been entertaining. I enjoy trying to summarize it and make sense.
Your friend, of course, was referring to Kant's dictum that we could only be sure of the morality of an action if it were completely disinterested, because only then would it be motivated solely by reverence for the law, i.e. a sense of duty. It is, of course, impossible to find such obvious purity of motive. The way in which your friend is wrong, however, is that we can only examine the empirical consciousness, which will, by definition, never reveal the pure action of the will, but will portray it as a psychological event embedded in causality. Thus, introspection can never reveal purity of motive, and we are not in a position to draw conclusions from that fact. The "test" was hypothetical, not real. The only matter of interest, then, is whether we act according the moral law or not. In Kant's case, it is the balance sheet that makes the difference. Now, if your friend wants to say that we cannot live up to it, even by outward conformity, that is an interesting argument, but Kant himself seems to be Pelagian on this issue....... |
