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Descriptive

What a human being can bear

On the axis: Moral demandingness · human nature

Does a demand beyond our strength breed discouragement and hypocrisy, or must the ideal exceed what we are precisely in order to pull us upward? What morality may ask depends on what human beings can give.

Philosophers' positions

Kant

inferable
+0.6
Justification

The moral demand is high: always act from duty and not from mere conformity, subjecting all one's maxims to the universal law. Kant tempers this by distinguishing perfect duties, strict and without exception, from imperfect duties such as beneficence or the cultivation of one's talents, which leave latitude to judgment, holding back from an extreme maximalism.

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, section II · Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue

inferable
+0.4
Moral plasticity
Justification

Kant maintains a : there is in human nature a propensity to subordinate the moral law to self-love, and "unsocial sociability" mixes in each a tendency to oppose others. This diagnosis, tempered by the predisposition to good and by perfectibility, leans toward a moderate anthropological pessimism.

Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, Part One · Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, Fourth Proposition

Anchors: Kant · Hume

leads to: Vision of humanity (How far can human beings be changed?)