| | I am not dissenting from Objectivism on the basis of Kant. This seemed like a good place to put the discussion.
For me, this started last week in my Law Enforcement Ethics class at Washtenaw Community College. The textbook places much emphasis on Kant. Frankly, I think that the police are better off firing blanks than to have their minds blanked-out.
However, I understand something of the Seddon-Rawl-Etals discussion here. So, I still keep my mind open on the subject of Kant. One complication is that when I was pretty hot in German, I actually tried to read Kant -- and couldn't. The problem with Kant in English is that I am not sure that we get much more understanding in translation. As the Italians say about Dante, "Tradurre e tradire" -- to translate is to betray.
Necessity and universality, he declares, cannot be derived from experience, whose subject matter is always particular and contingent, but from the mind alone, from the cognitive forms innate in it. Hence the moral law originates in pure reason and is enunciated by a synthetical judgment a priori--a priori because it has its reason, not in experience, but in the mind itself; synthetical, because it is formed not by the analysis of a conception, but by an extension of it. Reason, dictating the moral law, determines man's actions.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03432a.htm
This argument was based on his striking doctrine that a rational will must be regarded as autonomous, or free in the sense of being the author of the law that binds it. The fundamental principle of morality — the CI — is none other than this law of an autonomous will. Thus, at the heart of Kant's moral philosophy is a conception of reason whose reach in practical affairs goes well beyond that of a Humean ‘slave’ to the passions. Moreover, it is the presence of this self-governing reason in each person that Kant thought offered decisive grounds for viewing each as possessed of equal worth and deserving of equal respect.
... the fundamental philosophical issues must be addressed a priori, that is, without drawing on observations of human beings and their behavior. Once we “seek out and establish” the fundamental principle of morality a priori, then we may consult facts drawn from experience in order to determine how best to apply this principle to human beings and generate particular conclusions about how we ought to act.
First, unlike anything else, there is no conceivable circumstance in which we regard our own moral goodness as worth forfeiting simply in order to obtain some desirable object.
Second, as a consequence, possessing and maintaining one's moral goodness is the very condition under which anything else is worth having or pursuing. Intelligence and even pleasure are worth having only on the condition that they do not require giving up a commitment to honor one's fundamental moral convictions.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/
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