Kant and falsifiability

Is natural rights theory the only possible falsifiable moral theory, or can deontological theories, such as Kant's be falsifiable, for example? Well, Kant would claim that we have certain duties of virtue on the basis that we have a rational faculty. In particular, we must act as if the maxim of our actions were to become through our will a universal law of nature. Presumably, this ethic would be falsified if we did not have a rational faculty as well, because it presupposes a metaphysics in which we do have a rational faculty.

Of course, the ethic is definitely not falsifiable on that basis alone. Kant is trying to develop an ethics based on necessary presuppositions of a rational being. It seems strange that reflection on the logical requirements of a rational being could lead one to the kinds of substantive conclusions about morals that Kant wants to make, and that it should not be too difficult to prove that those logical steps are not deductively valid. Hence, the strong version of Kantianism, where these imperatives are entailed by our conception of the rational self, seems likely to be falsified.

Nevertheless, there is indeed a weaker version of such claims, whereby the imperatives are not necessary presuppositions of the rational self. They simply find their grounding in the fact that we are indeed rational beings. This kind of approach will prove fruitful in the same kinds of ways that natural rights were grounded in notions of us having a rational faculty.

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