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Kantian Ethics

Beneficence

Duty in Practical Love

Love is Feeling

Practical Love

Opposite Counterpart: Envy

“To be beneficent, that is, to promote according to one’s means that happiness of others in need, without hoping for something in return, is everyone’s duty.” (572) *30

“This virtue is greater when the benefactor’s means are limited and he is strong enough quietly to take on himself the hardship he spares the other; then he is really to be considered morally rich.” (572) *31

Duty of love = Absurdity

“love is not to be understood as feeling . . . It must rather be thought as the maxim of benevolence (practical love), which results in beneficence . . .The duty of love for one’s neighbor can, accordingly, also be expressed as the duty to make others’ ends my own” (569) *25

Practical Love = philanthropy

“Someone who finds satisfaction in the well-being (salus) of human beings considered simply as human being for whom it is well when things go well for every other, is called a friend of humanity in general (a philanthropist).” (570) *26

“For in wishing I can be equally benevolent to everyone, whereas in acting I can, without violating the universality of the maxim, vary the degree greatly in accordance with the difference objects of my love (one of whom concerns me more closely than another).” (571) *28

Sympathy

Gratitude

Opposite Counterpart: Malice

“In fact, when another suffers and, although I cannot help him, I let myself be infected by his pain (through my imagination), then two of us suffer, though the trouble really (in nature) affects only one. But there cannot possibly be a duty to increase the ills in the world and so to do good from compassion. This would also be an insulting kind of beneficence, since it expresses the kind of benevolence one has toward someone unworthy, called pity; and this has no place in people’s relations with one another. Since they are not to make a display of their worthiness to be happy” (575) *34

“But while it is not in itself a duty to share the sufferings (as well the joys) of others, it is a duty to sympathize actively in their fate; and to this end it is therefore an indirect duty to cultivate the compassionate natural (aesthetics) feelings in us, and to make use of them as so many means to sympathy based on moral principles and the feeling appropriate to them.” (575) *35

Opposite Counterpart: Ingratitude

“But gratitude must also be considered, in particular, a sacred duty, that is, a duty the violation of which (as a scandalous example) can destroy the moral incentive to beneficence in its very principle.” (573) *32

“But the intensity of gratitude, that is, the degree of obligation to this virtue, is to be assessed by how useful the favor was to the one put under obligation and how unselfishly is was bestowed upon him.” (573) *33

How is gratitude in direct connection of what Kant defines as moral law or duty?

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a Heaven in a wild flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake

Who was Maria von Herbert?

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Further questions?

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