Lectures on Ethics [Paperback]

I have used this book as a freshman-level text in my Introduction to Ethics course for years. Unlike many of Kant's books, this one is quite easy to read and understand. It is a translation of his students' notes taken from his lectures on ethics, so it is in the language of undergraduate students. (There is some minor debate as to its accuracy, since it is composed by his students, but I find nothing contrary to books witten by the master's own hand.)

This volume should not be read from the first page to the last. Rather, you should browse through it. The table of contents lists specific topics, such as sex, suicide, prayer, and rights. The novice will enjoy selecting topics of particular interest from that table. As one becomes more familiar with the easier issues of interest, the more challenging sections are less difficult. (The one drawback is the lack of an index.)

Everyone interested in any moral issue should carefully read this vital work in classical ethics.

"Lectures on Ethics" should be more well-known and studied critically, as the Kantian ethos and code of morality is expressed with clarity and intelligence in these writings, sometimes with more intelligibility than is usual for Kant.

Basically, Kant posits his theory of normative, universally-binding intuitions of the interior moral organ, whose essence is *noumenal*, allowing for the civilized self-mastery of ethical behavior--moral elevation, or lack thereof, being the master-key to grading civilization in its deepest, most important significance.

Kant is supremely moralistic, to my delectation and anti-modernist felicity.

In the realm of sexual morality, Kant takes no prisoners and outlines the way of light against the way of darkness. "Dualistic moral authoritarianism", ye bark, intelligentsia of contemporary academe. Sure, and why is that "bad"? How awesome and beautiful and refreshing Kantian moral authoritativeness is, and how depressing it is realize how far the West has fallen in virtue only in a few centuries.

Kant is "conservative traditionalist" in his critique of human sexuality and how sexuality can degenerate into mere object of sensual appetite, resulting in a subhuman process. Kant upholds the very fabric of civilization, in asserting how sexual impulses all-too-frequently transform the ensouled human being into a *thing* of commodified barbarian egoism. Kant correctly observes the sexual impulse in man is "the principium of the debasement of humanity", and tirelessly condemns the masculine mistreatment of the female gender for its mere satyr-like inclinations--"prudery", ye bark, modern anarcho-relativists and skeptical nihilists? No, herdlings: Kant's gems of thoughts on sexual mores only express a pessimistic realism of honor. Kant has nothing to do with Utopian-Rousseauian, primitivist illusions of a sinless "noble savagery"--Kant forthrightly discourses upon the sex-impulse presenting the spiritual danger to the upward-striving spirit this impulse is psycho-spiritually, the impulse civilized man carries as a test of ultimate spiritual self-governorship. The bestial yet lurks in the blood as a karmic poison, in all realism--no Utopian, chiliastic liberalizing movement of "emancipation" can cleanse humanity of this "peccatum original," which forms the inner duel of every soul. Sublimating self-transfiguration through rigorous moral ascesis is the only medicine against these uncivil, soul-darkening urges.

Kant was no "prude", but a penetrating psychologist and anthropologist in his sexual ethics--objectification in sexuality Kant rightly wages passionate war against, contra mundum. Sexual inclination, more than any other human passion, can set aside the humanity of the other, and, as Kant states the matter, "humanity becomes sacrificed to sex"; and in unchaste acts, mutual bestiality is created in an ontological and moral "dishonoring" of the transcendent personal moral value of the other. Kant rightly sees in sexuality the regressive possibility of spiritual degeneration resulting in putting ourselves "on a par with animals", sexuality constituting a potentiality of endangerment of blackening our souls in moral self-extinction, and lacerating the *imago dei* of the noumenal supernatural core-self we incarnate, destroying the transcendent in the human subject in succumbing to brutish self-subhumanization.

Kant states, plainly, fornication is equivalent to selfish mutual Onanism, reinforcement of the lower self in its downward propensity, and utterly depersonalizing. Lust is *innately* damaging to the soul and intellect. Who dares to speak these timeless truths in our aeon of Nihilism?

Kant condemns the practice and existence of prostitution, expressing most flamboyantly the amoral "instrumentalization" of humanity, and de-spiritualizing of our nature. Concubinage is also justly attacked as a distortion of person-hood, self-giving of the lowest, vilest kind, in which ownership of ourselves is not truly exchanged and compacted in a holistic, total unicity of self-giving, but fragmented in a vacuous exchange, corruptly serving the worst part of ourselves. Sodomite inversion is absolutely morally outlawed additionally, to the hypocritical outrage of the entirety of modern humankind, I'm sure...

The Kantian argument is thus: we own ourselves only in a certain, limited way--the inner moral self of our ontic center is not ours to misuse or abuse in irrational licentious acts. The moral will enclosed inside us is our commander and noumenal connection to the "Kingdom of Ends" of the Divine, and treason against our very selves is the essence of sexual irregularity.

The solution to sexual concupiscence, which is nothing less than "surrendering our humanity" to Kant, is the conformance of the inclination to right morality. *Matrimonium* is the only genuinely human relationship in which the sexual impulse can exist without censure, as purified, monogamous matrimony is a higher contract of genuine, and total, intermutual self-sacrifice of personal selves in a custom and ritual satisfying the demands of practical reason and our inner moral nobility. Extramarital sexuality is a priori debasing to humanity and violates the objective moral order.

Kant is most unfashionable in his strong statements and ethical beliefs about "crimina carnis." The whole neo-Sodom of modernity is destroyed by Kant here. Contraceptive-mentality Onanism Kant manfully asserts is a transgression by which one "forfeits his person, and degrades himself lower than a beast." All non-generative sexual acts are categorically condemned by Kant as debasing and dehumanizing intrinsically.

Practically no one but certain remnants of Catholicism and Eastern Christian Orthodoxy have retained these moral truisms, in the face of the modern assault of Nihilism...

I could go on and on, but, in short, Kant is as *delightfully unfashionable* and *anti-modernist* as possible in his ethical lectures, and this book is a jewel of moral insight providing dwellers in modernity a glimpse of MORAL NORMALITY before ABNORMALITY become the ANOMIC NORM in NIHILISTIC modernity.

Kant disposed of the post-modernist libertine sophists of today before they even existed...

This book contains what Kant believed concerning Ethics and Morality. It is a good book and I found it a easy-reader too. A must for philosophers and people interested in ethics.

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