Abstract
Recently a student—I’ll call him Rafael1—in my course “Ethics and Law” drew heavily on personal experience to defend Kant’s theory of the autonomy of moral reasoning. Citing that he has lived his entire life in a poor and violent neighborhood, that his family is heavily involved in selling drugs, that as a young Latino he has had oppositional interaction with the authoritarian and overtly racist police presence in the neighborhood, Rafael argued that Kant must be correct in asserting that there is a universal moral law, and that we can use reason independently of inclination to formulate this moral law. Rafael pointed out that despite the fact that in his “world” selling drugs is not only permissible but advisable, he knows that dealing is unethical and he therefore refuses to participate in the narcotics industry. Since he could not know through experience that dealing is wrong, Rafael continued, he must have made this moral judgment through reason alone. Therein, he concluded, is strong evidence of the truth of Kant’s moral theory.
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Macdonald, A.A. (2002). Feminist Pedagogy and the Appeal to Epistemic Privilege. In: Macdonald, A.A., Sánchez-Casal, S. (eds) Twenty-First-Century Feminist Classrooms. Comparative Feminist Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107250_5
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