Kant and Applied Ethics

Kant and Applied Ethics makes an important contribution to Kant scholarship, illuminating the vital moral parameters of key ethical debates. It offers a critical analysis of Kant’s ethics, interrogating the theoretical bases of his theory and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses.

For better or worse, Immanuel Kant casts a long shadow over contemporary Western thought. The philosophical and historical importance of Kant’s ethics can hardly be overestimated, yet his legacy for the wide variety of issues in applied ethics has still not been fully and fairly appreciated.

In Kant and Applied Ethics, Matthew C. Altman takes a comprehensive look at Kant’s moral philosophy as it relates to the most consequential ethical discussions of our time, including same-sex marriage, corporate responsibility, physician-assisted suicide, health-care allocation, and abortion. This book explains how, by coming to grips with Kant’s legacy, we can begin to work through these debates more productively.

Altman addresses both the strengths and weaknesses of Kant’s ethics, demonstrating the value of his approach for making informed judgments — Kant’s emphasis on freedom, dignity, and mutual respect is particularly compelling — while identifying the ways in which Kantian presuppositions lead us astray or restrict our vision.

Kant and Applied Ethics not only makes a significant contribution to Kant scholarship, but also illuminates the moral parameters of some of our thorniest social and political controversies.