100% Existentialism
75% Utilitarianism
70% Hedonism
60% Strong Egoism
50% Kantanism
50% Justice (Fairness)
20% Nihilism
10% Apathy
10% Divine Command
Can someone explain Kantanism to me? I'm 50% into that but I don't even know what it is...
Also, I think this is a decent quiz compared to most. It's comparable to a personality quiz I think and those can be pretty accurate.
Kantianism, with regard to ethics, is the belief that intentions and means are what matter, and the ends are less important. The main concept behind this is the Categorical Imperative, which states that every action you do should be so perfect that it could be made into a universal law. A key question for that on the test was when it asked if it would be ok to steal food for a starving person, knowing that if everyone stole that society would cease to function.
I have some sympathy for this idea since people confuse the means and ends all the time. The recent scandal regarding US torture policies is a prime example. How can we defend freedom by becoming torturers? Perhaps it may be justifiable in temporary extreme circumstances, but when it becomes codified as policy, you have just routinized some pretty anti-freedom practices. Think: "The banality of evil."
Of course Rule Utilitarianism provides some good guidelines for avoiding such problems, but Kant's ideas were instrumental in the establishment of the idea of normative Human Rights. They have a symbiotic relationship to one another, much like the jeffersonians and the hamiltonians did... without always recognizing it themselves. The Bill of Rights without the Constitution doesn't make much sense, and the Constitution without a Bill of Rights isn't worth very much.
Edited by progressive, 18 January 2009 - 05:53 PM.
