Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche - Essay Example

However, Kant and Mill also differ in a sense that Kant states that a person’s moral is innate as in a priori reasoning and Mill suggests, however selfishly, that morals are essential to a person’s happiness as people abide to morals for them to be happy. Now, for Nietzsche being good – at least morally good, is a social construct as the upper class and the people who are in control are defining the word with their preferences and activities. It can change as to who controls the social power.

With this notion, evil, or bad, is also arbitrary, as the social class also determines which are bad and those things are generally the ones that do not work for them. For example, if you are an upper class gentleman and your slaves are working well for you, would you consider slavery immoral? No, because it is good for you. You might even think that slavery is important. But if you are a slave, slavery for you is evil because you suffer. However, who holds the social power? For the longest time, it was the upper class, which is why slavery did not become illegal for a long time.

Then when the revolution happened, many people were affected by it. And those “many people” helped slavery become a “bad” thing. . Now these imperatives in turn, determine everyone’s duty. Because of this, morals are not arbitrary because it is universal and it is true to everyone. For Mill on the other hand, has a similar belief to Kant – everyone has innate morals; morals are not arbitrary. But unlike Kant, Mill states that these morals are used to maximize happiness and reduce suffering.

Utilitarian in most ways, he basically says that the right things bring happiness and wrong things bring suffering. In his words, “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness”. Therefore, if an action is morally right if it makes the doer really happy. Therefore, happiness is not a social construct but an innate faculty in humans, and because it is innate, it cannot be arbitrary. Now, given the scenario above, what would each of the philosophers do given the situation?

For Nietzsche, the nurse would just be in a wrong place at a wrong time. If the society urges euthanasia, then she would not have been stigmatized by having outrages towards her action. She will not be treated as a criminal. She’s having these negative connotations mainly because in her society, the people in power have deemed that her action is “immoral”. If we are taking Kant’s point of view, where all morals are innate, then we can conclude that the nurse is indeed wrong, as there are more people who were outraged by her actions than the people who weren’t.

For Kant, there are universal ethical standards that cannot be broken. Now these ethical standards are about killing. Obviously, killing is not very accepted as it has produced crime and outrage. If we are talking about Mill’s point of view, then we should ask the nurse if she was