Upon what does Kant base his case for rights?
Kant bases his case for rights his belief that since we are capable of reason and capable of acting freely, we are worthy of dignity, and with that dignity comes certain rights that should not be violated. He acknowledges that humans often act like animals seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, but they are not the only forces guiding us as a1 Utilitarian believes. Our capacity to reason and act freely set us apart from things or animals and make it wrong to treat humans as a means to an end.

Why doesn’t Kant think that Utilitarianism is sufficient for morality?
Kant thought that utilitarianism left individual rights vulnerable. He also believed that the utilitarian approach of trying to derive moral principles from desires was the wrong way to go about it because what is pleasurable or desired is not necessarily the right thing to do. On a more fundamental level he felt that a moral philosophy which allowed for the sacrifice of the minority for the benefit of the majority was at odds with his supreme principle of morality, which demands that people be treated as an ends in and of themselves and never as instruments to an ends. To instrumentalize a person or a group of people for the benefit of the whole would not treat them with the dignity they deserve.

According to Kant, what is freedom? Explain Kant’s notion of autonomy.
Kant believed that when we seek pleasure and avoid pain, we are not really free because we're acting as "slaves to our appetites and desires". Kant held that to be act freely means to act according to a law set by yourself, not by biology or social convention. So how does one come up with this liberating law that isn’t just a means to satisfy these desires assigned to us by outside forces? Kant says that by following “pure practical reason” we would be forced to abstract away from our individual interests and you would always end up at the categorical imperative, which demands that humanity be treated as an end in and of itself instead of as a means to anther end. A person is free and moral when they themselves arrive at this law, acknowledge it to be the universal moral law, and choose to follow it based on this acknowledgement. If a person were to arrive at a different law, then (1) they would not have applied “pure practical reason” correctly, so they allowed their individual interests to bias this law, (2) since it is based on individual interests it would not be a moral law, more a pragmatic law to fulfill these individual interests, (3) their actions would not be as deserving of moral praise as they otherwise would have if they had done them out of duty to the categorical imperative, (4) they would be acting heteronomously.

According to Kant, what is it that makes an action moral?
Kant thinks the supreme principle of morality is a duty to uphold the categorical imperative. As stated earlier in the answer to question 3, a moral and free person would arrive at the categorical imperative through the exercise of “pure practical reason”, which would not allow his individual interests to bias him as he tries to figure out what the right thing to do is. Once he arrives at the categorical imperative, he would choose to let the idea guide his decisions because he realizes it’s the right thing to do and feels a duty to do the right thing. Other motivations impelled by a hypothetical imperative are permissible (like sense of satisfaction for doing the right thing, or a positive reputation for doing the right thing), but without being choosing by the self-realized categorical imperative, one’s actions do not have moral value.

What is the difference between a categorical and a hypothetical imperative?
According to Kant: "If the action would be good solely as a means to something else, the imperative is hypothetical. If the action is represented as good in itself, and therefore as necessary for a will which of itself accords with reason, then the imperative is categorical." So a hypothetical imperative is a motivation for doing something, while the categorical imperative is something done for its own sake. Kant felt that humanity was the only thing that had intrinsic value because of a person’s ability to reason and act freely, so the categorical imperative demands that we treat people with dignity. Kant: “I say that man, and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will.”

According to Kant, why must morality be based upon a categorical rather than a hypothetical imperative?
Kant ties morality and freedom together very closely in his moral theory. A baseball can't be held morally culpable for killing someone when it falls off a building because the baseball's actions are the result of laws outside itself (mostly the law of gravity). The baseball doesn't have the freedom to choose a different path. But humans have the possibilty of acting morally, but only when they're acting non-baseball-like, ie only when they're exercising freedom. A human sitting down eating a cheeseburger because he's hungry and drinking coffee because he's dependent on caffiene is following a hypothetical imperative, which is not acting freely. A person who decides not to rip off a child buying bread because he worries about the damage that may be done to his reputation is acting like a baseball thrown off a building, guided by laws set outside of him so his action doesn't have any moral value (though it's preferable to ripping off a child). If the shopkeeper sat down and thought about the issue of morality reasonably, abstracting his own interests out of the thought process he would arrive at the categorical imperative. Having arrived at it himself he would demonstrate freedom and be worthy of moral praise if he decided not to rip off the child because he knew rationally it was the wrong thing to do and decided to do the right thing out of duty to what he knows is the right thing to do.

According to Kant, what must a law be in order for it to be a ‘law’? (this was more from lecture, rather than the book)
In the essays he wrote concerning political theory Kant had a theory of justice based on a social contract. He rejects utilitarianism as a basis for law because different people have different views on what constitutes a life well lived, so to base the law on utilitarianism would necessarily involve prioritizing one subjective conception of happiness over others. Doing this would fail to respect the right of those with differing conceptions of happiness. Kant’s idea of a just constitution “harmoniz[es] each individual’s freedom with that of everyone else. He says a just constitution is derived from an imaginary social contract because bedrock principles of justice cannot rest on the individual interest of some community just as moral law cannot rest on the interests of an individual. His imaginary social contract would abstract away from the individual interests of different groups in a society, producing laws that “could have been produced by the united will of a whole nation.”

How does Kant’s Categorical Imperative tell us the right thing to do?
Formulation 1: Universalize your maxim. A maxim is a rule or principle that justifies your action. So when you do anything, you ask yourself whether society would work if everybody had that maxim. For example, if you were to rob a bank, you might have the maxim “It’s OK to rob this bank because the money is insured and nobody will get hurt and I need the money.” If everybody took that position, banks probably wouldn’t be able to function and insurance for banks would be unaffordable since they’re being robbed so often. This first formulation is a litmus test for whether your guiding maxim prioritizes your interests and instrumentalizes others instead of treating them as ends in and of themselves.
Formulation 2: Treat persons as ends. This means, don’t treat people as tools to get what you or some other party want, but treat them as people worthy of respect in and of themselves.

How does Kant connect the notions of morality and freedom?
He sees them as very close. We are neither free nor acting morally until we come up with a law that is not based on the desires we set for ourselves and then decide to follow that law just because we recongnize it to be the moral truth. We are all capable of coming up with this law because we are all capable of "pure practical reason" which seeks a worthy end in and of itself (in contrast to instrumental reason, which seeks a means to a given end).

How does Rawls answer the question “why are we obliged to obey the law?”
Rawls imagines a body of people, or just a single individual, in a state he calls “the original position”, where people are behind a “veil of ignorance” and don’t know where the social or natural lotteries have placed them. When this person or group of people get together to try and figure out what bedrock principles should guide their society, they will come up with a fair and just set of principles because they’re stripped of their biases. Laws derived from these principles are just and therefore a citizen is obligated to follow them.

What is ‘the veil of ignorance’?
The behind a veil of ignorance people would not know their social, economic, or political positions in society. They wouldn’t  know how educated they are, their race, their gender, their religious affiliations, their political positions, their social class, their intelligence, etc. We would still be self-interested, rational people, but behind this veil of ignorance we wouldn’t have any biases that would cause us to value our own desires over the welfare of everybody as a whole, because we wouldn’t know where we would be in society after the veil is lifted. Rawls considers this original position of equality behind the veil of ignorance the ideal position from which people can figure out a social contract.

What is Rawls’s idea of the social contract?
Rawls’s idea of the social contract involved a person or a group of people all behind a veil of ignorance putting them into an original position of equality. These people would try and decide on a foundational set of principles upon which to base the rules of their society. Because these people can’t access their biases and there are no power differentials between the participants, Rawls believes any given set of self-interested people would try to choose a set of principles that would make their position in society as free, fair, and happy as practically possible wherever they happen to be once the veil is lifted. By making it as fair and free as possible for whoever they may turn out to be, they make it as fair and free as possible for all people regardless of where they land on the social and natural distribution curves and they make the fairest functional society possible given the facts of nature and nurture.

What two principles of justice does Rawls believe that we would choose behind ‘the veil of ignorance’? Explain these principles.
The two principles of justice Rawls reasons we would chose behind ‘the veil of ignorance’ are (1) basic equal liberties for all citizens, such as freedom of speech and association; and (2) social and economic inequality permitted only as far as they benefit the least well-off members of society. He felt that in cases where the two principles were in conflict the first principle would categorically take precedent over the second one.

What is the difference between ‘consent-based’ obligations and ‘benefit-based’ obligations?
A consent-based obligation is an obligation that is based on a person agreeing to a contract, whereas a benefit-based obligation is an obligation based on gaining a benefit. For example, sometimes when I’m crossing the TJ border line there will be people who offer to clean your car while you’re in line. If I were to hire one of these people to clean my car there would be a consent-based obligation for me to pay this person. Sometimes these guys attack your car with a towel even when you wave your hand no and ask them to stop. This happened to me once, and I paid him even though I didn’t want him to clean my car because he did get the thing clean, and I felt a benefit-based obligation to pay him.

What does Rawls think is the right way to think about justice? Is he correct? Why, or why not?
Rawls believes that the natural distribution of talent and the distribution of social capital are in fact unfair. Because these distributions stem from morally arbitrary factors outside of the control of the individual, a society should order itself such that the goods of society are distributed as equally as is practically possible. This means that differentials between social position and wealth between people should be no more or less than what is necessary to bring the most benefit to those worse off (the difference principle) and that people who happen to be better than others (more intelligent, better looking, more leaderly, etc.) should be entitled to their higher distribution, but not morally deserving of it. I’m not sure if he’s correct — I am not at a level of understanding where I can judge a moral theory to be correct or incorrect. I do agree with his basic premises that it is unfair that factors outside of an individual’s control should lead to such a huge disparity in the distribution of wealth and honor, and I liked the though experiment as a setup for the perfect constitutional convention. Obviously we can’t really know if he’s right unless we run the experiment in real life.

According to Rawls, why is a ‘meritocracy’ not enough to correct for ‘moral arbitrariness’?
Rawls set out four theories of distributive justice in ascending order of fairness. The first is a feudal system where who you were born to determines your entire life outlook regardless of your innate abilities or talents. Few today would argue that this is an ideal way to set up a society. The next theory is a libertarian system, where as long as the initial distribution of material resources was evenly divided all subsequent trades were done without force and fraud, the final distribution is considered just. Given a few generations we would see different people starting from different starting points on the race for wealth and respect because of the fortune or inclination of their parents. The next theory is a meritocracy, where these social and economic differences between the starting positions of different people are corrected (through high quality schools, universal material and nonmaterial support). So using the race analogy, different people would all start from the same starting line, but some people would innately be faster runners and would win the race. All of these theories of distributive justice distribute wealth and honor based on morally arbitrary factors. A meritocracy will distribute the goods of society based on innate talent and skill, which are not a result of the individuals possessing them deciding to choose them. Rawls considers this unfair and proposes the difference principle to make things as fair as practically possible.

Explain the concepts of: the natural and social lotteries, and the original position.
The natural lottery: the distribution of talents, skills, proclivities, physical characteristics set by nature, genetics. The social lottery: the distribution of social resources that are factors in the development of a human potential. Since what you get out of these lotteries is determined by birth, Rawls considered them to be morally arbitrary and that different people being distributed the goods and honors of society differently based on these morally arbitrary factors to be unfair. That society allows this systematic unfairness is unjust. Rawls felt that if people could get together and decide upon principles to govern society in an original position of equality, they would choose a just way of society to deal with the facts of inequality of ability and upbringing. In this original position we would not know anything about any characteristic that would set us appart from each other, that would bias us towards the interests of a certain group of people, or that would give us a higher bargaining position over others.