Kant Affirmative
1AC Kant
1AC – Framework
Moral principles must be requirements of reason because only reasons can motivate us independently of desires, which are arbitrary.
Reath 13 [Andrews, Professor of Philosophy at UC Riverside. “Contemporary Kantian Ethics.” http://philosophy.ucr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Reath-Contemporary-Kantian-Ethics.pdf] LADI//AA
Contemporary Kantians reject the Humean view of reasons and motivation because they believe that moral principles are requirements of reason that apply to agents independently of desire. They are committed to holding that human beings can be moved to act by reason alone. Kantians hold that it is part of rational agency that one can be motivated to act by one’s application of rational principles and one’s judgments about what one has reason to do, without the intervention of any desire or further source of motivation. In the above example, the fact that I need to begin saving money in order to afford my trip is a reason to begin saving, and the judgment that I ought to begin saving money now by itself can motivate me to do so. Likewise the judgment that I ought to take steps now to ensure my well-being later in life can motivate me to do so, without any further felt desire. (Note that the claim is that one can be motivated by one’s judgment of what one has reason to do – that is not to say that one always will be motivated by that judgment.) Since the reasons in these two cases ultimately stem from some desire (e.g., some future desire), the full significance of the Kantian view of motivation comes to light in moral cases. Here Kantians hold that moral requirements apply to us simply as rational beings independently of our desires, and that the judgment that we ought to perform (or refrain from) some action can motivate us to do so, without the stimulus of any further desire. So for example, judging that I ought to refrain from taking unfair advantage of a competitor or that I ought to help someone in need can motivate me to do so. The Kantian view here is that the application of principles of reason (or the judgment about reasons) produces the motivation to comply with the principle and does not simply redirect or elicit a prior motivational state that exists independently of any reasoning.
And, agency is grounded not in desire, but in choosing reasons for action. To be the cause of your own actions requires deliberating on and choosing a law to guide your behavior.
Korsgaard 89 [Christine, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. “Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit” Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring, 1989), pp. 101-132 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265447] LADI
The second element of this pragmatic unity is the unity implicit in the standpoint from which you deliberate and choose. It may be that what actually happens when you make a choice is that the strongest of your conflicting desires wins. But that is not the way you think of it when you deliberate. When you deliberate, it is as if there were something over and above all your desires, something that is you, and that chooses which one to act on. The idea that you choose among your conflicting desires, rather than just waiting to see which one wins, suggests that you have reasons for or against acting on them.20 And it is these reasons, rather than the desires themselves, which are expressive of your will. The strength of a desire may be counted by you as a reason for acting on it; but this is different from its simply winning. This means that there is some principle or way of choosing that you regard as expressive of your- self, and that provides reasons that regulate your choices among your desires. To identify with such a principle or way of choosing is to be "a law to yourself," and to be unified as such. This does not require that your agency be located in a separately existing entity or involve a deep metaphysical fact. Instead, it is a practical necessity imposed upon you by the nature of the deliberative standpoint.21
Only this grounding of morality is authoritative – you can ask why into regress. But you can’t ask why reason because that’s a closed question insofar as it demands a reason to act on reason, which concedes reason’s authority.
Hodgson 10 [Louis-Philippe, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Glendon College, York University. “Kant on the Right to Freedom: A Defense.” Ethics 120 (July 2010): 791-819] LADI
That is not yet the contentious part of Kant’s position (although these ideas have come under attack recently).18 The contentious part— and the part that is central to the rest of my discussion—is Kant’s further claim that rational nature is the only such authority that a rational agent has to recognize and, hence, the only source of practical necessity. How Kant can make such a claim may appear puzzling. Aren’t there ends— appreciating the arts, say, or understanding the major scientific theories of one’s time—that have sufficient independent value to set a requirement that rational agents must recognize, regardless of what they actually choose to pursue? Here I take Kant’s response to rest on a form of skepticism about the claim to authority of purported objective values. The general idea is that, for any given value that is claimed to be authoritative—appreciation of the arts, pleasure, happiness, or what have you—a rational agent can always ask, why should I care about that? Why should I take that to have authority over me? And for values like appreciation of the arts, pleasure, or happiness, there will be no conclusive answer to give. Of course, there is much to be said in favor of all these things. But the point is that, in the first analysis, these are not values that a rational agent has to accept—they are not values that she has to view as independently authoritative simply by virtue of acting.19 By contrast, a rational agent cannot reject the authority of rational nature itself without involving herself into a kind of contradiction. That authority is a precondition of her acting’s making sense at all; it is the one authority to which a rational agent is necessarily committed by virtue of acting.20
But these reasons can only make sense in the context of a human community. Freedom for an individual person alone is unthinkable; we are brought under the influence of reasons, and find freedom, only through the influence of other persons.
Wood 6 [Allen, Ruth Norman Halls professor of philosophy at Indiana University. “Fichte’s Intersubjective” Inquiry, Special Issue: Kant to Hegel, edited by Susan Hahn Volume 49, Number 1 (February, 2006)] LADI//AA
How can a summons, in this sense, be considered a transcendental condition of free activity? We have seen that Fichte describes the summons as “contain[ing] within itself the real ground of a free decision” (GA 4:2:179). To act freely, on this conception, is to act in response to grounds or reasons. Reasons have the peculiarity that they are the only possible determinant of what we do that does not compel or causally necessitate what we do, or restrict in any way the possibilities we have open to us. A good reason explains why I do what I have reason to do, but never takes away from me the possibility of doing otherwise. In fact, it makes sense as a reason only as long as this possibility exists. Accordingly, there are two fundamentally different ways that facts in the world might be given to us as agents: first, there are facts that causally necessitate what we do, restricting our freedom to do otherwise; second, there are facts that determine what we do by presenting themselves as reasons for acting. I think Fichte was struck by the fundamental importance of this difference, and inferred from it that there must be something quite distinctive about the way that facts are given to us as reasons. His bold thought is that such facts can be given to us only through a distinctive kind of not-I that we regard as containing within itself the understanding of a reason, and hence free activity – in other words, through a not-I that is itself an I, namely, an I other than my own I. Only another rational being would be capable of having the concept of a free action and a ground or reason for free action. This is in fact the claim through which Fichte establishes this part of his argument. 22 “I could therefore find a certain self-determination only through ideal activity; through imitation of one that is present at hand, and present at hand without my doing (Zuthun)…I cannot comprehend this summons to self-activity without ascribing it to an actual being outside me that wills to communicate a concept of the action demanded, and hence is capable of the concept of that concept; but such a being is a rational being, one that posits itself as an I, hence an I” (SW 4:220-221). At times Fichte gives this last point what we may call a genetic presentation: Being an individual I, placing before oneself an end, is something a rational being must be educated to do, through the influence of another rational being. “A human being becomes a human being only among human beings.” Freedom is possible only through upbringing (Erziehung) through the influence of other free beings (SW 3:39-40; cf. SW 4:221). The summons should be understood as that kind of object through which something like a reason for a free action can first be given to us. Fichte’s argument is that application of the concept of another I is the transcendental condition for the possibility of our awareness of a reason for acting. “It follows that if there are to be human beings at all, there must be more than one…The concept of a human being is not the concept of an individual – for an individual human being is unthinkable – but rather the concept of a species” (SW 3:39). “Self-consciousness therefore originates with my act of selection from a general mass of rational beings as such…[A free individual] subsists only in the whole, and by means of the whole, as a portion of the whole” (GA 4:2:177). 23 Acting rationally, even acting autonomously, in other words, is not something a human being could do alone. Autonomy thus consists not in rejecting the influence of others, but in being influenced by others in the right way. Education, and being given reasons for action, constitute an essentially different way of being influenced by the world from any merely causal influence, through which one may be coerced, or manipulated, or conditioned to behave, but not enabled to act freely or autonomously. If we embrace some conception of mind and action that cannot distinguish what Fichte calls a ‘summons’ from being causally influenced in general, then we should not expect to understand human freedom or rational action at all. Fichte’s argument implies that those who think of human individuality and freedom as somehow distinct from, or even in opposition to, human community, understand neither the nature of individual freedom nor the nature of community
Therefore, my ends must be consistent with the ends of other subjects.
Siyar 99 [Jamsheed Alam, “Kant’s Conception of Practical Reason” Tufts University, 1999] LADI
What we have so far is that by virtue of rationally determining their choices, a subject conceives of itself as imposing objective constraints on others in the form of ends. At the same time, and for the same reason, it must see itself as bound by the ends of others. Further, the subject’s representation of all ends as objective constraints is a reflection of its recognition of all rational beings as ends in themselves, i.e. of subjects’ rational self-determinations as giving rise to standing constraint on all its choices. The question, then, is how these representations amount to the representation of “a systematic union” of all subjects? The answer lies precisely in the relations of demands and recognitions of ends that end-representing subjects necessarily represent. The “common objective laws” binding the totality of subjects together just are the ends through the representation of which subjects enter into relations of mutually recognizing these very ends as to be done. Indeed, it is these relations of mutual recognition through which ends come to function as objective laws binding all subjects equally. More precisely, my demand that my end be recognized as to be done and my corresponding recognition of ends in general as to be done just is my representation of ends as common objective laws. Since every subject qua rational being represents ends in this manner, every subject sees itself as systematic related to all others subjects qua end-representing rational beings. Thus, every subject conceives of itself as at the same time legislator of its own ends and subject to the ends legislated by others. The subject’s representation of itself as legislator of laws, i.e. its own ends, is thus inseparably connected to its representation of itself as subject to laws, viz., the ends of other subjects. Now I can represent myself as legislating objective constraints only insofar as I recognize reason’s authority over choice. Hence, my self-conception as simultaneously legislator and subject rests on my more fundamental self-conception as subject to the laws of reason. Similarly, I can see myself as subject to others’ ends just insofar as I recognize these ends to be rationally determined, so that I represent other subjects as equally subject to rational laws. In other words, I represent other subjects as recognizing practical laws as the determining grounds of their choices and hence as legislating objective constraints in the form of ends. What I then represent is the community of all rational beings as fundamentally subject to the ends of reason and consequently as legislators of their own ends and subject to the ends of others. Given that I recognize other subjects’ ends as rationally determined and so as constraints on my choices, my own determinations of choice will be sensitive to those of others. My ends will be thus necessarily consistent with the ends of all other subjects, the latter being constraints under which I choose the former. In practice, this will roughly mean that my choices take into consideration the ends of those close to me in time and space.