Is Your Legacy To Yourself Or To Others And What Is Important For Morality? Modifying Kant's Categorical Imperative.

Abstract

This thesis builds on a conditional claim that Kant’s prudential account of happiness has implications for his account of morality and a new taxonomy of prudence and morality is proposed. Other-regarding and self-regarding contexts are distinguished as moral and prudential respectively. It is argued that morality is other-regarding only because self-regarding contexts do not meet the criteria for universalisation and the humanity formula only applies to other-regarding contexts. The primary exemplar is suicide. On Kant's own classification system the landscape around suicide changes significantly in both self-regarding and other-regarding contexts. This also has implications for Kant’s account of moral duties to self. In a self-regarding context the matter, when rational, is prudent and non-moral. It is argued that there is no moral basis for interference with a rational person’s decision about suicide and that there is no moral duty to self against suicide in this context.