what are Kant's reasons for opposing locating the moral worth of an action in its consequences?

Answer 1

We should judge a moral act in terms of the intention behind it. The intention should come from a sense of moral duty to do good.

Answer 2

Because accidents happen, but should not be the desired objective.

Suppose, for example, I decide to go on a killing spree. My objective is to maim, destroy, and hurt, so I go to a local mall and fire a gun several times into a crowd.

Kant argues that we need to know no more than this to determine if my actions were good or not, and most people would tend to agree. My intentions were malicious, my actions supported this... to an extent it hardly matters where any of the bullets fly at that point. But let's consider one possible outcome:

By a freak occurrance, I manage to kill nobody. Instead, one bullet takes a small sliver of skin of one passerby which happened to harbor an undiagnosed skin tumour which was about to become malignant and kill the fellow. And just to make things fun, let's say the rest of the bullets stop a gang of international terrorists and reveal a lost Spanish treasure which is given to orphans.

If the CONSEQUENCES were important, then my killing spree would then be one of the greatest acts of heroism imaginable. Kant finds such a scenario ludicrous to say the least. A proper ethic, he argues, transcends the subjective and the accidental. And thus the consequences of an action are without any particular meaning.

Hope that helps! There's a link below for a longer discussion of this aspect of Kant and of 'deontology' (goal-based instead of outcome-based philosophies) in general.

Answer 3

Because we have limited knowledge, we cannot ever know all of the possible consequences of an action. Thus, we cannot base our value judgment of the action on these consequences, not knowing what the total sum of them may or may not be.

Answer 4

morality is only an idea to the individual alone. no one can truly decide what morality is because everyone feel differnetly to what is right and wrong