Influences on Kantian Deontology

A.C. Grayling, in his book What is Good? discusses the influence of Kant's Pietist upbringing on his moral philosophy.

"Commentators and biographers alike are apt to make much of Kant's Pietist upbringing as a source of his stern morality of duty. The Pietists were numerous and highly influential in eighteenth-century Königsberg, where Kant was born and lived all his life. His parents were strictly observing members of the movement, so he attended a committedly Pietist school, the Collegium Fredericianum, and then the city's university, a centre of Pietist theology. Pietists believed in Original Sin and its concomitant, the human tendency to evil; but this had a further concomitant in the form of a doctrine of salvation through spiritual rebirth, good works, and the unremitting pursuit of moral perfection. Kant deeply disliked the obligatory pieties of Pietism, and by extension religion in general, but he carried from his experience of it the idea of inner dutifulness and discipline." -- A.C. Grayling, What is Good?, p. 154


Nevertheless, Grayling goes on to explain that the most important influence on Kant's moral philosophy was not Pietism, but the Enlightenment. Kant was an avid proponent of the Enlightenment; he wrote the seminal work What is Enlightenment? and actively tried to promote its values. He believed that in order for progress to be made, it was necessary to have freedom, specifically, "freedom from external constraints on debate and the diffusion of knowledge, and freedom internally from the timidity and uncertainty which inhibits independent thought"[1]. He further believed that religion, along with some political systems, in imposing censorship or conformity, hindered progress, and demanded that religious belief stand up to scrutiny by reason. Accordingly, he sought out a non-religious system of ethics that was based on reason, the result of which is Kantian duty ethics. [2]


[1] A. C. Grayling, What is Good?: The Search for the Best Way to Live (London: Phoenix, 2003) 155.
[2] Grayling 155.

Love is a Fallacy

I'd like to share something that we read in class way back in Secondary 3 Philosophy. It's a hilarious short story called Love is a Fallacy by Max Shulman, which discusses various logical fallacies. Look out for the twist at the end.

Love is a Fallacy

You'll need to read the start of the story to understand parts of the ending, but if you'd like to skip straight to the part where they start discussing fallacies, you could start reading at the paragraph beginning with "I had my first date with Polly the following evening" slightly less than halfway down the page.