Quote Originally Posted by noparlpf View Post
Oh, okay. Personally I do things for people even when I don't expect benefits, just because it's a nice thing to do. Like that time I dug out a girl's car for her after a snowstorm, and then she and her friend found me later and gave me cupcakes. I totally didn't expect, let alone, want, any kind of reward. Does that still count as a selfish act because I ended up with cupcakes?
Nope. But Kant goes even deeper than thatg - he's an example of a philosopher who takes an idea and presses it to the extremes (Locke would be an example of the opposite). He takes the maxim "use no person as means to an end, but as an end in hirself." Then he says that no person includes yourself, so using yourself (or someone else) in the hope of achieving something is not a moral act. It's not necessarily an immoral act, of course. Instead, all of our actions should be undertaken from a reverence for the moral law. And he claims that this law can be derived by reason.