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Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill supposedly represent competing theories in moral philosophy.
That's actually true.
And supposedly they represent competing theories on which actions are right and which ones are wrong.
That's not true.
They do have different starting points in the study of ethics: Mill starts with the results of our actions and happiness. Kant starts with the intentions behind our actions and the concept of moral law.
But they aren't polar opposites. (It's a bit of a giveaway that they both teach the Golden Rule.)
To get right to the point, they disagree on some things, like on what makes a good action good, but their methods of knowing a right from a wrong action agree completely on which ones are which. Mill wants us to promote the greater happiness, and it turns out that what Kant thinks is right is what he thinks would do just that. Kant wants us to act in ways that it would make sense for everyone to act in, and Mill thinks so too.
Took me a while of teaching ethics classes and writing stuff down, but I got it all explained now in a new publication in a journal called Metaphilosophy. It's open-access here.
Discussion (14)
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If you are interested in formal logic, I have a question for you. If not, then please ignore this Comment.
Do you think that it is possible to express Kant’s or J. S. Mills’s moral theory as a mathematical structure, as conventionally defined in formal logic?
(A mathematical structure is a way of expressing a philosophical theory simply and unambiguously. In the case of your paper, it would allow someone to state unambiguously and concisely all the common features and all the differences between the two moral theories.)
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I don't rightly know, but I have my doubts about it.
(At least it should be possible to write out various statements from their theories and symbolize them, as one does in formal logic.)
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I would say that symbolic logic is just math for Philosophy majors.
Symbol manipulation based on a set of rules. Not different from Mathematics.
Perhaps a path to truth, but so much depends on the selection of symbols, I am not so sure.
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It is wonderful how the truth has multiple paths to find it.
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In either case, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems assure us that both will be flawed. Incomplete.
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