Fortunately for us all, Immanuel Kant is not an idiot. Kant, if present for the debate surrounding the aforementioned scenario, would no doubt point out that if every person who found joy in murder killed every person who made the world a worse place and had no one who cared for them, our would be less than ideal. It is through this appeal to universally applicable reason that the true understanding of morality is attained.
If an action cannot be generalized and applied to all similar situations, it is immoral. Happiness is fleeting. Happiness is not concrete. Two plus two will always equal four. What is moral will always be moral, regardless of context. Kant’s position needs no more defense than gravity; it is inherent. Isaac Newton does not get credit for causing objects to fall to the Earth. He merely recognized the truth that already existed. More precisely, Pythagoras is not remembered as an inventor, but as a discoverer. The only truth worth knowing is that which exists beyond ourselves.


I enrolled in college to please my father. I was 18, I had a legitimate desk job, a girlfriend, and I was renting a decent house. I was content. But I knew that if I did not go to school, my father would feel like he had failed as a parent, as a man. So I chose to do that which I was not obligated or naturally compelled to do, in order to honor the man who had given me life. This tendency toward pleasing my dad, not for gain, but out of gratitude, is a principle that has been overlooked in the conversation regarding morality. But I will demonstrate that this principle, already similarly seen in nature, is true morality’s sole motivator.
	It should be noted that it is difficult to defend the concept of a non-subjective, consistent moral standard without acknowledging some higher power, presumably a creator, who put such a standard in place. For the sake of brevity, we will assume the existence of such a god or gods, since such an assumption was presupposed by the majority of the philosophers that we have studied so far in this course. To make such a presupposition is not a leap in the logic of the subject at hand, since we are not discussing what morality is, but rather why one ought to be moral, a question that is irrelevant, or at least trivial, if morality is subjective.
	In A. J. Ayer’s “Emotivism Affirmed,” he asserts that “ethical judgments have no validity,” a concept that he spends the majority of the passage defending and explaining. But much more importantly, he concludes with the statement: “One of the chief causes of moral behavior is fear, both conscious and unconscious, of a god’s displeasure, and fear of the enmity of society.” In this statement, Ayer echoes the conclusion of a story Socrates told Glaucon of a magic ring that made it’s finder, Gyges, invisible at will, allowing him to do all sorts of unjust things for his own gain, with no repercussions. 