i love your lectures, been listening for a while from Chile! i would've thought that Kant wouldn't be open to the idea of death penalty due to his conviction that life is an end-in-itself, making it so that the life of a murderer for example wouldn't be met with him being murdered to prevent more murder (thus making his life and ultimately death a means to an end). I guess in a perfect Deontological world such things wouldn't exist in the first place for him.
Kokotroko! Thank you for your very kind comments -- I am really glad that my videos can be helpful and worthwhile to you :) . If there is any way I can be helpful in your philosophical journey, please do not hesitate to reach out (either here in the comments or to my email). One wrinkle that can explain Kant's thinking on this subject is that *rational agents* are ends in themselves. Hence, animals are not rational agents because they have no possibility for rationality, and serious violent criminals have (in Kant's view) severed their tie to rationality and the moral community. Ultimately, it is rationality and not life that guides Kant's morality, for better or worse! Fichte is only among the first to notice that Kant's thinking on this issue seems a little bit uneven, and I think most Kantian ethicists working today likely reject Kant's retributivism, and likely embrace a point of view more similar to Fichte (who, admittedly, has some problems of his own in his ethical thinking...).
@@penelopeslectures I love your lectures, too. I just wanted to say that you just anticipated my objection that it's anthropocentric to limit the question to humans. According to rational agents are ends in themselves. Hence, animals are not rational agents because they have no possibility for rationality. Thus, animals can't choose to sever themselves from rational ethics but that just makes them all the more innocent, it doesn't justify their slaughter, right? (I can't claim to be a perfect vegetarian but at least I try). P.S. Kant: If you kill somebody we'll kill you, because it's forbidden to kill people. Fichte: If you kill somebody we'll spare you because you might potentially decide not to kill us.
I think Kant's thought about animals is that they have a kind of prima facie status as moral patients (technical term used to refer to people who we have obligations toward but for some reason do not have obligations in turn to us) in virtue of being an analogue to human beings. But because their moral status is so weak as to be a mere analogue of a rational being, their interests are always secondary to the purpose of any actual moral agent. So we can eat them, kill them, cull populations, etc., as long as it is not gratuitous. As someone who has read essentially all of Kant's moral and political writing, it is not clear at all what sorts of due process rights etc. he thinks are afforded to criminals. His account seems very extreme. Contemporary Kantians try to fix Kant's account on both of these points. The best example of someone trying to fix Kant on animal ethics is Christine Korsgaard's Fellow Creatures, and criminal justice Kantians usually try to spin out a theory of due process from Kant's thinking about human dignity that pushes them in a generally Fichtean direction.
@@penelopeslecturesThanks for the helpful response. As someone who has read very little Kant, I defer to your opinion, but I find it surprising that he takes such a consequentialist stance towards the death penalty: it's okay and even obligatory to execute murderers because the consequence is that other potential murderers are deterred. The deontological approach would be to condemn (or not condemn) murder under any circumstances as a universal maximum, right?
