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Comparing Kant And Aristotle's Analysis

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Final Essay Both Kant and Aristotle discuss their own interpretations of what morality is and what it looks like. They have very different ways of looking at what it means to act morally and what needs to be done to achieve morality and how happiness factors in to morality however. Aristotle believes that the end goal of morality is happiness. Happiness is the “final end” to all moral actions, it is the thing all humans are striving for even subconsciously. It is the final end because all actions lead to happiness, but happiness can only lead to itself, you build a ship to travel, you travel to trade, you trade to make money, and so on until you reach happiness but there is nothing greater than happiness. Aristotle reasons that since happiness …show more content…
For example: murdering people is wrong not because the Bible says so but because if it was accepted the world would be in a chaos of people getting murdered in the streets. To be morally right every action must be able to be universally applied (everyone should be able to make that same action in that situation), the action should be necessary, and finally the action should be a priori meaning that it we know it to be moral “prior to” knowing our own senses. The paradox with Kant’s argument however is that while it sounds good on paper in practice there are situations where even his “universal” laws are obviously wrong. For example, Kant states that lying, even to save a life is never the morally good thing to do but admits that this cannot be upheld by anyone. If a murderer comes to your door asking if your friend is in so that he may kill them, and you lie and say they aren’t you’ve committed a morally wrong action, the only morally right thing to do is to tell the truth even if it means your friend dies. Allowing another to die is something that is obviously wrong, and Kant accepts that his definition is not perfect and there must be times when following your moral duty is impossible to do. The best anyone can hope for is to mostly act according to moral law as true moral goodness is

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