Morality and Philosophy
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1. The most important contribution to the understanding of morality expressed by Immanuel Kant in his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals is that morality cannot exist separate from a free will. This is as much as saying that an individual who behaves in a manner consistent with moral behavior, who nonetheless is not behaving freely and consciously, cannot be said to be truly behaving morally. In other words, a robot could be programmed to behave in a way which corresponded to moral behavior, but it could hardly be considered a moral entity. Similarly, a human being could be coerced or frightened into behaving in a way resembling moral behavior, but he or she could not be truly called a moral being. This contribution is important because it places individual responsibility at the top of all moral considerations. This idea is so important because it includes the notion of rationality. In other words, it could be said that all creatures are free, including animals. But what differentiates human beings from animals. To human beings, animals appear to be captives of their physical natures. They do not reason, from our point of view, before they act. They do not weigh options and consequences, but merely follow their programmed instincts. They are, indeed, not free, from the human perspective. Freedom, to Kant, requires rationality. The human being, for morality to mean anything in personal as well as communal terms, must be thought and action connected to both freedom and r
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that vitality.
Irony is the enemy of autonomy and youth. Nietzsche writes of "a kind of ironical self-consciousness . . . , a pervasive inkling that there is no cause for rejoicing. . . . " (Nietzsche 43). He writes of an inevitable transition from "irony to cynicism" (58). Irony will lead to a certain cleverness on the part of individuals, but it is a cleverness,m and a cynicism, which separates a human being from his or her own spirit, and from his or her own life.
Irony is the enemy of the sort of passion for which Nietzsche aims. Youth exists in the midst of such passion, before the educational system drives out that passion and replaces it with irony, cynicism, fear, and cleverness, through the teaching of history, or "an excess of history" (58).
Youth to Nietzsche also has a tremendous responsibility not only to itself but to all humankind: "It is their mission to shake the concepts which that present has of 'health' and 'education,' and to generate ridicule and hatred against such hybrid concept-monsters" (63).
The only way that Nietzsche sees any hope for humankind is not through the educational process but through a process of "unlearning" (63). The youth are the only ones capable of imposing such a process on the e
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Approximate Word count = 1264
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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