1. To Immanuel Kant, moral behavior is what a person ought to do, rather than what he wants to do. The basis of Kant's ethics is the belief that reason exists and is the tool whereby one determines what is right and wrong, and that the will is what leads one to follow the moral path in choosing the right action. Kant says that the individual considering an action should act as if every other person in the world were going to act in the same way. The basis of his moral theory is the categorical imperative. This imperative "immediately commands a certain conduct without having as its condition any other purpose to be attained by it." In other words, the results of the action do not determine its morality. Kant goes on: "There is only one categorical imperative and it is this: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law" (Kant 156).
Within this imperative, there are two sorts of duties, the perfect and the imperfect. Kant actually describes these duties in negative terms. That is, he gives examples of situations in which one's actions would conflict with the perfect or imperfect duty.
One duty involves a situation in which it is impossible to even consider that the maxim drawn from an action could be seen as a universal law. Kant uses the example of a man contemplating suicide to illustrate this position. The man considering suicide sees such an action as one of "self-love" in which "I make as my principle to shorten my life when its continued duration threatens more evil than it promises satisfaction." 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 other words, the maxim's internal contradiction prevents it from even being considered as the basis for a universal law which would call on all human beings to act in the same way. Such an example "conflic...