give annotations and opinion for every point :
title: Major Issues in Philosophy O’Neill, “A Simplified Account of Kant’s Ethics”
O’Neill, Onora. (1985) “A Simplified Account of Kant’s Ethics.” Excerpted in J.E.White (ed.), Contemporary Moral Problems (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Co.)
1. Kant’s moral theory has acquired the reputation of being forbiddingly difficult tounderstand and, once understood, excessively demanding in its requirements
2. I shall compare Kantianand utilitarian approaches and assess their strengths and weaknesses
3.he gives a number of different versions of the principle thathe calls the Supreme Principle of Morality, and these different versions don’t lookat alllike one another.
4. Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own personor in the person of any other, never simply as a means but always at the sametime as an end.
5. To understand this we need to know what it is to treat a person as a means or as an end.According to Kant, each of our acts reflects one or more maxims. The maxim of the act isthe principle [according to] which one sees oneself as acting. A maxim expresses aperson’s policy, or if he or she has no settled policy, the principle underlying theparticular intention or decision on which he or she acts.
6. In practice, the differencebetween intentions and maxims is of little importance, for given any intention, we canformulate the corresponding maxim by deleting references to particular times, places,and persons. In what follows I shall take the terms ‘maxim’ and ‘intention’ as equivalent.
7.Whenever we act intentionally, we have at least one maxim and can, if we reflect, statewhat it is. (There is of course room for self-deception here – “I’m only keeping the wolffrom the door,”2 we may claim, as we wolf down enough to keep ourselves overweight,or, more to the point, enough to feed someone else who hasn’t enough food.)
8. we should look at our maxims and not at how much misery orhappiness the act is likely to produce, and whether it does better at increasinghappiness than other available acts.
9. To use someone as amere meansis to involve them in a scheme of actionto which theycould not in principle consent.
10. I use the teller as a means, without whom I could not lay my hands on thecash; the teller in turn usesme as a means to earn his or her living.
11. But there are other situations where one person uses another in a way to which theother could not in principle consent. For example, one person may make a promise toanother with every intention of breaking it.
12. a mere means – in the false promisor’s scheme. A person who promisesfalsely treats the acceptor of the promise as a prop or a thing and not as a person. InKant’s view, it is this that makes false promising wrong.
13. To make the example more specific: Ifa moneylender in an Indian village threatens not to renew a vital loan unless he is giventhe debtor’s land, then he uses the debtor as a mere means. He coerces the debtor, whocannot truly consent to this “offer he can’t refuse.”
14. In Kant’s view, acts that are done on maxims that require deception or coercion ofothers, and so cannot have the consent of those others. When we act on such maxims, we treat others asmere means, as things rather than as ends in themselves. If we act on such maxims, ouracts are not only wrong but unjust: such acts wrong the particular others who aredeceived or coerced.
15. To treat someone as anend in him or herself requires in the first place that one not use him or her as meremeans, that one respect each as a rational person with his or her own maxims.
16. If I want to make othershappy, I will adopt maxims that not merely do not manipulate them but that fostersome of their plans and activities.
17. Beneficent acts try to achieve what others want.However, we cannot seek everything that others want; their wants are too numerousand diverse, and, of course, sometimes incompatible. It follows that beneficence has tobe selective.
