The Emergence and Remediation of Moral Weakness from Kant’s Perspective

Moral weakness, or the gap between moral knowledge and moral action, is among the most significant issues in moral psychology and moral philosophy. This problem has served as a major arena for the expression of diverse ideas advanced by numerous thinkers and philosophers. One of the most prominent among them is Immanuel Kant, the German critical philosopher. Kant addresses the issue of moral weakness throughout his works in a scattered and unsystematic manner. Employing the method of content analysis, the present study examines the possibility, emergence, and remediation of moral weakness from Kant’s perspective. The findings indicate that Kant not only accepts the possibility of the occurrence of this phenomenon, but also identifies a number of factors as contributing to its emergence, including ambiguity in the moral law, the misleading influence of imagination, self-deception, weakness in generating sufficient motivation to actualize moral knowledge and belief, and the absence or insufficiency of such elements as well-being and health. In this connection, he also briefly refers to certain remedies for overcoming moral weakness, although these remedies, from the author’s point of view, call for further critical reflection.

کلیدواژه ها:

Kant ، Moral Weakness ، Moral Psychology ، Moral Knowledge ، Moral Action