Kant is very controversial for his views on animal ethics. He states that since animals aren’t rational so they don’t deserve direct moral consideration, and committing a cruel act to an animal is only bad in so far as it is bad for yourself. How does having a capacity for rationality make you worthy of moral consideration. More importantly why does Kant make the argument that rationality is the basis of moral consideration. I simply don’t get it.
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I think it boils down to the problem of freedom. As I understand it, freedom comes from the fact that rationality is not based on the noumena, knowledge is. Rationality tries to go beyond the noumena, so it’s not tied to the phenomenic world, which is causal. With causality you cannot have freedom, so the trascendental aesthetic and the trascendental analytic is tied by it’s own way to operate. But trascendental dialectic is applying categories to themselves, not to the noumena, and so you are not bound by it and you are free of the causality. That’s why humans are free moral agents, and animals are not, animals can’t get to this point, so are tied by causality.
I hope this helps, English is not my native language and this is a complicated topic, also this is my take on the subject and I can be mistaken
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