This study will examine the moral theories of John Stuart Mill in Utilitarianism and Immanuel Kant in Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. The study will specifically argue that, although there are similarities in the two philosophers' approaches to morality, Kant's is the superior moral theory in part because it places greater responsibility on the freedom of the individual's will as an expression of God's will, discerned through reason, and in part because Mill ignores God's will and puts all power for defining morality in terms of man's slippery definition of "pleasure" or "happiness."
Both Mill and Kant rightly advocate the freedom of the individual in determining moral behavior, but both also rightly connect the behavior of the individual with the good of other human beings.
To Kant, for freedom to mean anything requires the active and conscious involvement of the reason and the freedom of the will of the individual. Similarly, the basic idea of the connection between freedom and morality extends from the individual to the entire human race. Kant's moral imperative requires that the individual act as if his behavior were going to be emulated by all other human beings: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law" (Kant 30). This gives a sense of tremendous worth to the actions of the individual and requires that he or she engage his or her reason and freedom of the will to the utmost in deciding how to act, based on the extrapolation of that act to the whole human race. This is important, again, because, if practiced, it leads to a world in which all human beings would feel responsible for their actions not as isolated events but as phenomena intimately connected to the behavior and morality of all other human beings. The thought cannot be modified without weakening its power. Its very radical nature is precisely its strength, and to modify it would be...