According to Kant, why is helping someone bad if its to look good to someone else?

Do you mean that Kant is saying that there is no pure altruism?

@janbb Well he likes motives…
The motive of an action need to be out of duty to the moral law…
So helping someone to look good to someone doesn’t seem like something he’d like but i wanna know why. like is it cause if everyone helped people out of that motive then there wouldn’t be any real value in helping people?

WEll, it’s not pure altruism if you are doing it to boost your own standing. So it sounds like for him he doesn’t want you to have any extraneous motive when doing good.

Kant believed in good for good will.

Simple it’s called hypocracy

This is a common misconception. What Kant says is that an act does not have moral worth if done for any reason other than duty. But that doesn’t make the act bad. It just means that you don’t deserve moral praise for it. On Kant’s view, an act is only bad if it violates the moral law (aka “the categorical imperative”). But plenty of actions are neither praiseworthy nor wrong. Those actions are morally neutral, and there’s nothing wrong with the so long as you aren’t shirking your moral duties.

The example Kant gives is of two philanthropists. One gives money to the poor because it makes him feel good about himself. The other gives money to the poor because he believes it is his duty to use his vast resources to help the less fortunate. According to Kant, the first action does not have moral worth because it is not done for any moral reason. It’s just a coincidence that the action helps other people (which is great, but doesn’t make the person morally praiseworthy).

Another common misconception that often comes up here is that an action can only be good if it is done unwillingly. This also arises out of Kant’s philanthropist example, specifically due to the way he contrasts a happy philanthropist (who enjoys giving money away) with a sorrowing philanthropist (who would prefer to keep his money but gives some away out of a sense of duty). Because we know the sorrowing philanthropist has no other motive than duty (since he does not want to give the money away), Kant says we can know that his act has moral worth.

But he never says that we can know the happy philanthropist’s action does not have moral worth. Instead, he says that it will be unclear to us (and possibly even to him) because we can never know if he’s acting out of personal desire or out of duty. Part of the lesson is that if your desires align with the good, you still have to train yourself to act out of duty and not just out of desire (otherwise, you might fail to act out of duty when faced with a situation where duty and desire are no longer aligned).

@SavoirFaire first GA from me.

My understanding of Kant is that he believed acts are right or wrong irrespective of their consequences. As long as you do the right thing, you should not be concerned or motivated by what impact it has. A frequent criticism of this viewpoint relates to Kant’s belief that lying is always wrong. Following Kant, a German family harboring Jews during WW II would have been obligated to inform on them if asked about their whereabouts by an SS officer.

@SavoirFaire Splendid work!

Kant doesn’t say that helping someone is bad if done merely to impress others. What he says is that it is impossible to judge the morality of a right decision made for reasons other than ethical requirements. For example, if a man helps others simply because he enjoys doing it, Kant believes there is no way to determine the morality involved, whereas the fella who helps out, while whining and bitching about it is clearly morally superior because he complies with the “universal law” of helping “because it is right”.

@SavoirFaire @stanleybmanly Thank you for making me think!!! And Thank you @dopeguru for asking this!

Please help me with a small conundrum.
Consider these four cases of moral (doing a good deed) behavior.
Person A behaves morally because he thinks a higher power will reward him either in the present or the after-life.
Person B behaves morally because he fears he will be punished by a higher power either in the present or the after-life if he does not.
Person C behaves morally because he believes a higher power is watching and wants to show he is a good person.
Person D behaves morally because he simply sees a need and knows he can fill it easily.

The same act takes place but the motives are different. How does Kant view their morality?

Please do not tell my engineering coworker I asked this. They would take away my engineering license for sure. :-)

@LuckyGuy. I’m sure you’re wrong about your colleagues scorning your competence for pondering what at heart is a barely disguised logic problem. That’s the mistake a lot of scientific folks make about the murky business of philosophy. I shy away from it myself, because I hate fuzziness and indeterminate shit. It drives me out of my mind. And some of the questions here drive me up the wall because our language has so many slippery words.

I believe Kant would look at your 4 examples and conclude that none of the 4 can be judged morally as opposed to the others. To Kant, motive is irrelevant. Kant says you don’t stop at a stop sign to prevent accidents. You stop “because it’s the law”. Take the last example, the guy who helps because it’s the right thing to do. When stated as such, he would be the clear winner “ethically” according to Kant. But the addition of the qualifier “and knows he can fill it easily” knocks guy D back down to the level of his 3 competitors. D is “morally superior” only if he helps without regard to the difficulty or consequences of acting. To Kant you can claim moral superiority if you stupidly stop at the sign realizing that it will result in your certain death. So much for the utility of Kant. You can keep him!

Slippery words—Is “right thing to do” the equivalent of “the law”?

@SavoirFaire This is tricky… Because if everybody did an action that had a good result, like helping an old woman, out of selfish reasons, then nobody would find “helping” to be an act that is good. So it would actually be bad, if everyone did it with negative motives.
Kant says before you act think of what would happen if everyone acted that way…
That confuses me.

So it makes me think someone who acts out of selfishness but achieves something good GOES AGAINST the universal law rule because nobody would find that action good anymore.

Ah so?

Kant went further. He said that if you help someone only because it makes you feel good, even if you do not benefit in any other way, then it is not a proper moral action.

@LostInParadise “My understanding of Kant is that he believed acts are right or wrong irrespective of their consequences.”

Indeed. Kant was a supporter of the Latin proverb fiat iustitia, pereat mundus (which means “do what is right though the world should perish”). Even though Kant’s first formulation of the categorical imperative (the formulation of universal law) asks us to think about what the world would be like if everyone did what we are thinking about doing, we are supposed to be looking for logical contradictions rather than negative consequences.

“Following Kant, a German family harboring Jews during WW II would have been obligated to inform on them if asked about their whereabouts by an SS officer.”

As it turns out, this does not actually follow from Kant’s views. To lie is to make a statement that one believes to be false with the intention of making someone believe the false statement. Since lying requires one to make a statement, one could just stay silent. And since lying also requires us to believe that what we say is false, we could attempt a misleading truth (as there is no such thing as a lie of omission on Kant’s view).

Therefore, the duty not to lie does not entail a duty to tell the truth. We do not have to inform on innocent people, and we can even say things like “I saw them traveling south down this very road last week. I think they were trying to escape you!” You just happen to leave out that the journey ended at your front door. The officer may end up deceived, but not by you. Rather, he is deceived by his own mistaken assumptions.

Lest this seem like getting off on some ad hoc technicality, let us look at a different example that Kant gives in his Lectures on Ethics. There he discusses an attempt to catch a thief by packing one’s bags (as if preparing to leave one’s house) and then waiting for the criminal to break in. Packing one’s bags typically indicates that one is going on a journey, but it is no way a statement or assertion of such an intention. It’s just a sign in the sense of an action that typically accompanies such an intention.

@LuckyGuy In cases A, B, and C, Kant would say that the action is morally neutral. Obviously, it is not morally wrong to do the good deed, but the actions are not morally good because they are not done from the motive of duty. Case D is a bit trickier. If the person sees the need and says “someone has to do it, and it might as well be me,” then they very well may be acting out of duty.

Consider a similar case: if a man is having a heart attack in the middle of a crowd, someone ought to call for help. Yet we cannot say that any particular person has more of a duty to do so than any other one. If I’m in the crowd and already have my cell phone out, I might shout “I’m calling 911 right now!” to let everyone know that the situation is being handled. It’s easy for me to do, but I’m not doing it just for fun. If my response is generated by a sense of duty (because someone has to do it, and I can do it easily), then the action would count as morally good/praiseworthy on Kant’s view. The ease doesn’t undermine the goodness.

Let me know if this didn’t fully answer the question, though.

@dopeguru “if everybody did an action that had a good result, like helping an old woman, out of selfish reasons, then nobody would find “helping” to be an act that is good. So it would actually be bad, if everyone did it with negative motives.”

Well, we wouldn’t want to live in such a world. But that doesn’t mean that helping out of selfish motives would be morally bad. It might just tell us that we sometimes need to help others for non-selfish reasons. Kant actually addresses this with his distinction between perfect and imperfect duties. Perfect duties are “always on.” They are the things that we must always do or never do (these being ultimately the same thing: a duty to never murder is the same as a duty to always refrain from murdering). Imperfect duties are things that we have to do, but not on every occasion. So it might be wrong for us to never donate to charity, but we don’t have to donate every time we have the opportunity.

How might we distinguish between perfect and imperfect duties? According to Kant, we can use the formulation of universal law (“act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction”). The issue is what sort of contradiction we run into. A world in which everyone breaks their promises, for example, is said to be impossible because the institution of promising relies on some people keeping their word. If everyone broke their promises all the time, there would be no institution of promising for the promise breakers to exploit in the first place. Since this world is impossible, our duty to keep promises is perfect.

But not all contradictions are logical contradictions (i.e., impossibilities). Sometimes they are practical contradictions. These are contradictions in our will: we cannot consistently do something while also willing it to be the case that everyone acts the same way. Universal selfishness is supposed to be like this, according to Kant. It is not impossible that a world should exist where everyone acted selfishly all the time. But we cannot consistently will that this be the case because our selfishness is best served by the altruism of others. That is to say, a selfish person ought to want a world in which others are not selfish. This is inconsistent with universalizing our (proposed) selfishness, however, so there is a practical contradiction here. Thus we have an imperfect duty to sometimes act unselfishly.

“So it makes me think someone who acts out of selfishness but achieves something good GOES AGAINST the universal law rule because nobody would find that action good anymore.”

This is why Kant doesn’t think we ought to evaluate actions on their own. We evaluate them along with their motives (that is, the maxims of our actions—our reason for doing them). A useful example here might be cutting someone open with a knife. It’s terrible when a criminal does it to rob and/or kill you, but it’s great when a doctor does it to save your life. Evaluating the action in isolation is no good. We have to understand the motive, too. So Kant would say that you shouldn’t think of the selfish action just in terms of the action, but in terms of the action/maxim pair. We go wrong if we stop thinking of the action as good just because we don’t think it is good when done selfishly.

“Kant says before you act think of what would happen if everyone acted that way… That confuses me.”

Well, “what if everyone did that?” is more a slogan used to help people understand the formulation of universal law and not anything Kant actually said himself. I agree that it is confusing insofar as it tempts people to think of Kant in consequentialist terms. What the slogan is supposed to mean, though, is just what I have explained above: consider what the world would be like if everyone acted on a particular action/maxim pair at every opportunity. If that world is impossible or if there is an inconsistency between willing the action for oneself and willing it for everyone, then it’s wrong (according to Kant). It’s not about consequences, but logic.

@SavoirFaire, I think the Germans would not have been tolerant of evasive answers. I can very well imagine an officer saying, “This is a very simple question with two possible answers. Are there any Jews in this house?” Refusing to answer, while permissible under Kantian morality, may have resulted in punishment that not everybody would have cared to suffer.

@LostInParadise Well, now you are making a different claim. Originally, you said that Kant would tell us to inform on the Jews under our protection. This is false. Now you are making a different claim (and changing the scenario in the process). It’s certainly an important challenge. Indeed, I spend four slides on this exact challenge every fall when I teach introductory ethics. If breaking promises undermines the institution of promising, then we might think that lying by omission undermines the type of indirect use of language that leaves us with such opportunities. But if so, then it seems like we are left with some sort of contradiction when we apply the formulation of universal law.

Perhaps Kant would suggest we say something along the lines of “there is no one here that you ought to be looking for” (technically true as the SS ought not to have been looking for innocent Jews). But if the officers demanded a straight yes or no, then I agree that Kant would be stuck answering “yes.” I get that you think this is a problem for Kant. I think it is, too (I am no Kantian, after all). But in his view, this isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. For Kant, the sorrowing philosopher who mourns his lost intuitions while knowing they were sacrificed in the name of reason is like the sorrowing philanthropist who mourns his lost money while knowing it was sacrificed in the name of duty.

In the end, Kant doesn’t care about our moral intuitions. That way lies Aristotle — and Hume. He only cares about where the argument leads. So if the analysis of our basic moral concepts and what reality would have to be like in order to align with them forces us to shed some of our existing beliefs along the way, so much the better in Kant’s view. Besides, most people believe that there are things worth dying for. Kant agrees and thinks that moral rectitude is one of them (which is easier to swallow when you believe—as Kant does—that there is a just God who guarantees that justice is always served, even if only in the afterlife).

@SavoirFaire But in regard to LuckyGuy’s example D: “If my response is generated by a sense of duty (because someone must do it and I can do it easily) only is morally superior if “I can do it easily” just happens to be a lucky coincidence. The fact that you acted first may be because your cell phone Is up and ready, but are you calling because it’s right, or are you calling because it’s easy? Doesn’t your hold on morally correct vanish when “easy” is considered?

By the way, congratulations on a first class job in wrestling this!

@stanleybmanly Yeah, case D is tricky. What I am trying to get across is that being easy to do doesn’t necessarily undermine an action’s moral worth. But we do have to ask what role the easiness plays in the decision making process. In most cases, I don’t think that “it’s easy” is actually the purpose of our actions. We don’t just go around looking for easy things to do because they are easy. More likely, the easiness is used as a way of counteracting passivity. That something is easy reminds us that we don’t have any good countervailing reasons to opt out (which is more relevant when the duty in question is an imperfect one).

What might be confusing here is that both of these notions (i.e., what makes you want to do something and how you psych yourself up to do it) could be referred to as the motivation for our action. This might be partially a translation problem. Ultimately, Kant is more concerned with the principle on which we act than the internal argument we have with ourselves before acting. The latter is only relevant insofar as it reveals the former. So if my internal argument is “it’s easy, and everyone will think you’re totally awesome,” then there’s no moral worth to the action.

But if the internal argument is more along the lines of “it’s the right thing to do, and it’s not even inconvenient,” then we would seem to be in the position of the sorrowing philanthropist (who doesn’t want to be charitable, but convinces himself to do it out of charity). The sorrowing philanthropist very well might remind himself that his vast resources make giving to charity easy for him to do as part of an effort to psychologically prepare himself for doing his duty despite having desires to the contrary.

I keep thinking of Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. At the end of the book, he urges students to think about what happened to Cedric Diggory whenever they are faced with a decision between “what is right and what is easy.” But choosing what is easy in these cases isn’t really a matter of choosing it just because it’s easy. It’s choosing what is easy on the basis of it also being safer or self-promotional. Basically, Dumbledore is warning them against using easiness as an excuse for not doing the right thing. He’s not warning against it as a motivation in and of itself.