Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Right Or Duty: A Kantian Argument For Universal Healthcare, Joseph Crisp

Journal of Health Ethics

Much of the political rhetoric about healthcare in the United States is couched in terms of healthcare as a right or entitlement. Healthcare as a right, like all welfare rights, carries with it the obligation to pay for it. This paper proposes that healthcare be considered, not a right, but rather a duty within the framework of a Kantian approach to ethics. The categorical imperatives of rational beings include the duties of self-preservation and self-development. As a precondition for these duties, health is essentially bound up with the nature and duties of physical, rational beings. The complexity of healthcare ensures …

Private Requitals, Bailey Kuklin

Cleveland State Law Review

Previously, I examined the establishment of a person’s substantive rights and, correlatively, duties. But this was only the first step. This Article addresses the second step: the means for recognizing requital rights violations, including their articulation, adoption, and implementation. Taking a deontic, individualistic perspective on rights, this Article aims to delineate and protect one’s personal freedom, one’s autonomy. To do so, this Article, using a formal understanding of the categorical imperative, will examine whether an agent’s chosen maxims are deontically acceptable. The maxims need to be both first-order, substantive ones that establish autonomy boundary baselines, and second-order, requital ones that …

Kantian Ethics And Socialism, Harry Van Der Linden

Butler University Books

This study argues for three main theses: (1) Immanuel Kant’s ethics is a social ethics; (2) the basic premises of his social ethics point to a socialist ethics; and (3) this socialist ethics constitutes a suitable platform for criticizing and improving Karl Marx’s view of morality.

Some crucial aspects of Kant’s social ethics are that we must promote the “realm of ends” as a moral society of co-legislators who assist each other in the pursuit of their individual ends, which requires in turn that we seek the realization of the republican state and peace between the nations. Thus hope for …