Joseph Pallattil

As the central figure in modern philosophy, Kant has brought drastic ideological innovations in the philosophical world of his time. The ethical philosophy of Kant was totally against the common ethical system which is mainly based on feelings such as compassion and pity. He tried to promote an obligation of rational ethics rather than emotional motivation. The rational reasons should be the forcing factor of our ethical nature. He associates with the Stoic wisdom doctrine and rejects compassion as a morally inappropriate attitude. His concept of categorical imperative states, “Act according to that maxim whose universality, as law, thou canst at the same time will.” Kant, however, is quite realistic to add: although compassion and, likewise, the fact of rejoicing with others are not in themselves a duty, nevertheless it is an indirect responsibility, for the active participation in the destiny of others, to ‘cultivate’ in ourselves similar ‘feelings’, because this impulse the pure idea of duty would not suffice by itself alone.
Though he taught a lot on ethics of reason as the correct way of philosophical reasoning and he was also seen as the limitations of the ethics of reason. Toward the finish of his Critique of Practical Reason, he formulates postulates- that is, scholarly requests or demands and presuppositions – whose legitimacy isn’t to be demonstrated, yet whose acknowledgment, not withstanding, is essential for understandability and the possibility of morality. Above all, the ‘existence of God’ is part of them. Only God can in fact guarantee the harmony of the morality of man with nature and, therefore, happiness. So, for Kant, God is not the foundation of the binding character of the moral law. In his work, Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone, he narrates that every human being tends to evil and whose hearts are corrupt and misled. Morality here assumes a revolution of mind moreover rebirth or transformation of the heart.
There was a large amount of marginalization of mercy in public life until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries since they considered the practice of mercy as fundamentally disregarding the role of retributive justice. Mercy and justice are in conflict. Here, Kant plays a very significant role in history. From one perspective, Kant is commonly thought of as a mighty and tenacious defender of retributive justice. His reflections on retributive justice as the guidelines for human punishments become the most influential philosophical theories as to the critique of public mercy.
Simultaneously we contend, it is an error to consider Kant’s retributivism as exclusively persuaded by a feeling of obligation to guarantee that individuals get their appropriate reward. The root of Kant’s opposition to mercy states that people get fair treatment and security from self-assertive judgment. The chief authors of the book, The Decline of Mercy in Public Life, writes, “We argue that Kant’s desire to establish a system of law that will protect people from arbitrary treatment provides the underlying explanation for the extreme form of retributivism he ultimately embraces.” Some argue, denial of Eudaimonism and his fidelity to impartiality are the core motivation to his idea of retributivism as well as the enmity to mercy in the Kantian philosophy.