Kantian Ethics

Abstract

Ethicists who have been influenced by Kant's critical moral philosophy are called ‘Kantian’. The term can also be extended to ethicists who grappled with and rejected Kant or the Kantian spirit. This chapter first discusses the core of Kant's ethics, those important theorems that provide a criterion for determining the extent to which a given ethics is indeed ‘Kantian’. It then considers the views of several Kantians, including Friedrich Schiller, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche.