The Kantian practical Atheism idea of "Infinite Dignity" which apparently means man is equal to God has consequences: Infinite Dignity: Peru FrancisMedia: First Euthanasia patient Ana Estrada “died on her own terms, in accordance with her idea of dignity and in full control of her autonomy until the end” - https://canon212.com/
Infinite Dignity: Peru FrancisMedia: First Euthanasia patient Ana Estrada “died on her own terms, in accordance with her idea of dignity and in full control of her autonomy until the end,” dammit! - https://canon212.com/ How God enters the Ethics that Didn't Allow for Him. Starting from KantLuciano Sesta...But, in Kant's system we can see underneath an inevitable difficulty. He insists in emphasising that the law doesn't need God to motivate the human will to morally act. Nevertheless, Kant seems to recognize that moral law is only apparently autonomous, because if God didn't guarantee the possibility of the highest good, the moral law would remain a meaning-less idea. There is, however, the need to question, with regards this curious rehabilitation of God as necessary guarantor of morality. More so, because it has been exclusively introduced as a "fact of reason."{23} The absence of God staggers the autonomy of the "fact of reason," which cannot to be held "in the limits of reason alone." In Religion within the limits of reason alone, Kant writes that moral law, presenting itself as an irreducible datum of the conscience, "attests a divine origin" (eine göttliche Abkunft) (RL 58; 141). In Metaphysics of Moral, nearly recognizing that an absolute imperative is already a trace of the absolute of God, Kant defines the moral conscience "like responsibility before a holy being distinguished by ourselves, but intimately present within us" (MC, 300). As if God were "always implicated (although in an obscure way) in the moral self-consciousness" (MC, 300) and not just postulated as guarantee of the highest good.{24} ... On one hand, formalizing this mysterious divine presence in the moral conscience would mean a breaking of the autonomy of practical reason. Invoking the existence of God on the other, when the whole power of human freedom is consumed, risks introducing him as a sort of transcendental "stopgap" (plug) of reason. With the purpose to assure the highest good, the intervention of God is, in fact, due a priori, fruit of an almost juridical mechanism of reward, of which God is a gear, however supreme. As it is easy to notice, God risks to become a prolongation of human demands -- too human -- moulded by an ethic that is perhaps not as pure as the historical-social conditionings and philosophical presuppositions, as Kant had thought. The rational faith of Kant seems to lose its object, directing itself more toward the highest good through God rather than towards God himself, and ends up feeding its difficulties without ever leaving a juridical vision of reason and faith. Otherwise, in the Christian perspective that has withstood Enlightenment therapy, the record doesn't belong to ethics, and to man's effort, but to the gift of God. The holiness as perfection of moral life, and the happiness as crowning of this perfection, are not granted but free.{25} God is not, first of all and fundamentally, the answer to the problem of virtue so far un-compensated by a suitable happiness, as if its essence consisted in the ability to meet human limits. God is certainly this, but can also be seen as more than a simple projection of the demands of human reason. In fact God, with his initiative, transcends and transfigures these demands. Often, this whole field of questions regarding Kant, derive from a typically rationalist anxiety to be justified, in the presence of the non-believer. Concluding, in terms of the difficult equilibrium between the autonomy of ethics and theological foundation: the normative character of moral law is certainly recognized through pure reason, without the need to be explicitly related to God. The initial absence of God is, for Kant, the other face of human freedom. In such, this absence is not an exclusion of God, but rather the premise for a morally characterized recognition of him. [ https://www3.nd.edu/~maritain/jmc/ti03/eSesta.htm] |
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