Explain Freud Challenges to Kant's Moral Argument
Explain Freud’s challenge to Kant’s moral argument for the existence of God.
Freud focused on the brain and how that thought processes worked on different levels. One of these levels was called the ‘super-ego’ which was responsible for how we chose and understood the difference between right and wrong; thus suggesting that a divine moral law giver, such as God, may not be responsible for how we act morally as intelligent beings.
Freud’s research was a main challenge to Kant’s moral argument for the existence of God. In the moral argument, Kant used pure reason to argue for the existence of God as he believed arguments based deductively or deductively could not work to prove God’s existence. “We should deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith”. This was written in Kant’s ‘the critique of pure reason’, and in this argument, Kant maintains that a good will or a person with the right moral intentions seeks to bring about the summum bonum, it must therefore be attainable. However, due to the summum bonum being a possibility, we are limited as humans and we cannot assure that virtue is added to happiness to form the perfect state of affairs (summum bonum). There must be a rational moral being, which as a creator and ruler of the world has the power to bring moral worth and happiness together. Those who strive to achieve the summum bonum shall be rewarded with happiness in eternity, despite the evidence of good may suffer and evil may prosper in this world.
Freud’s argument which undermines Kant’s moral argument is successful as it defeats the idea of a divine creator and it opens the possibility of objective morality. When we look at the super-ego, Freud says that rather than morality being innate, we take our references and morals from what our parents teach us what is right and wrong and we imprint this to our brain, which makes it common sense to differ between right and wrong. Due to human’s being taught this by their parents at such a young age, we cannot
Freud focused on the brain and how that thought processes worked on different levels. One of these levels was called the ‘super-ego’ which was responsible for how we chose and understood the difference between right and wrong; thus suggesting that a divine moral law giver, such as God, may not be responsible for how we act morally as intelligent beings.
Freud’s research was a main challenge to Kant’s moral argument for the existence of God. In the moral argument, Kant used pure reason to argue for the existence of God as he believed arguments based deductively or deductively could not work to prove God’s existence. “We should deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith”. This was written in Kant’s ‘the critique of pure reason’, and in this argument, Kant maintains that a good will or a person with the right moral intentions seeks to bring about the summum bonum, it must therefore be attainable. However, due to the summum bonum being a possibility, we are limited as humans and we cannot assure that virtue is added to happiness to form the perfect state of affairs (summum bonum). There must be a rational moral being, which as a creator and ruler of the world has the power to bring moral worth and happiness together. Those who strive to achieve the summum bonum shall be rewarded with happiness in eternity, despite the evidence of good may suffer and evil may prosper in this world.
Freud’s argument which undermines Kant’s moral argument is successful as it defeats the idea of a divine creator and it opens the possibility of objective morality. When we look at the super-ego, Freud says that rather than morality being innate, we take our references and morals from what our parents teach us what is right and wrong and we imprint this to our brain, which makes it common sense to differ between right and wrong. Due to human’s being taught this by their parents at such a young age, we cannot