QUESTION

1.Explain the Kantian perspective, and explain whether your personal perspective agrees with the utilitarian or Kantian perspective.

In the Week 3 Final Project Milestone assignment, you explained how to apply the principle of utility to the case you selected for your Final Project.(see attached)

For this final portion of the assignment, apply Kant’s categorical imperative to the case, and explain how you would approach the case, explaining whether your position is utilitarian or Kantian. Justify your position.

Be sure each point below is included:

Part 3:

Analyze the case using Kant’s categorical imperative.

o  Justify your position.

Explain how you would approach the case, including an explanation of whether your approach is virtue ethicist, utilitarian, or Kantian and why.

o  As part of explaining your approach, reflect on your responses to the Virtual Philosopher exercise in Week 1 (see attached), and explain how your approach to the case differs (or does not differ) from your thinking at the beginning of this course.

                                                         SAMPLE SOLUTION

Normative ethics are foundational propositions used in decisions making, especially when people are faced with a dilemma. Kant’s categorical imperative provides a way in which people can evaluate their moral actions which result in the making of moral judgments. Kant argues that, by nature, people are expected to follow the common law which is not only universal and impartial, but also rational. The categorical imperative thus seeks to formulate the criteria by which any of our actions can be tested for universality, impartiality, and rationality. One of the categorical imperatives expressed by Kant (2014) is that people should act according to the maxim that they would wish other rational people to follow as if that was the universal law. Additionally, Kant proposes that there would be the perfect duties which people are obliged to do all the time and the imperfect duties which people are not expected to follow all the time. This paper provides the analysis of a case selected using the Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

Analysis of a case using Kant’s Categorical Imperative

The case selected is that of the Sheriff’s Department in Virginia asking its police officers to pose as customers and solicit paid sex so that they could obtain vital evidence for the conviction of Moon Spa, an alleged perpetrator of prostitution. Applying Kant’s categorical imperative, people should cat to the maxim that they should wish other people to follow their actions as if they were rational and universal (Kant, 2014). In such a case, the police officers were expected to act in a manner that they would have wished other people to follow as universal law. However, clearly, the officers would not have expected that other people would engage in paid sex as a universal law. As such, based on the Kant’s categorical imperative, then the actions of the police officers were immoral.