neither/nor wrote:
And my point [ironically] is that not being able to resolve them is actually the good news. Once we acknowledge this we can concentrate more on moderating our views and aiming to negociate our differences into legislation that is bursting at the seams with all the compromises necessary to accomodate different sets of value judgments. Only then will we be willing to moderate our behaviors in turn.

You've yet to explain how this would actually work, though. What would values-free arguments about human action sound like? Why moderate our views? Why not assume that I don't know what's right or wrong for society, but I do know what's right or wrong for me, and just go with that?

At this point, your own description of your own ideal seems like just as much a jumble of words disconnected from the world as mine, maybe.

erosopher wrote:

I was only giving an example of a universal judgment. You have a tendency to want something other than what is given. I was explaining what a universal judgment is so you could understand universality in Kant, and when I use the word.

To call, "all cars should be manufactured by union labor" a "universal judgment" is like saying we can look the words up in a dictionary to determine what they mean.

Yes, but collect and collate the definitions and the dictionary will still tell us nothing at all about whether cars SHOULD be made by union labor, will it? And neither will Kant and his ethical jargon. You either acknowledge the existential implications of that for those engaged in the actual manufacturing of actual automobiles [or for those having abortions or for those engaged in any human behaviors that will be judged as "right" or "wrong"] or you don't.

However, now I can see that you don't want to understand Kant. I would request a favor from you. Please do not speak as if you understand Kant if you do not care to engage in a conversation about him.

When have I ever insisted I understand Kant. Ironically though, in all the years I have engaged others in discussions of Kant, I have come across those who do claim to understand him. And often they are arguing heatedly amongst themselves about what he REALLY means.

Are you the one who really does? ; o )

If we mention Kant and you would rather not talk about philosophers, simply tell us that. You asked how Kantian philosophy applies to my own life and I feel that I addressed that very well - you haven't made any comments on that post still.

You are basically the interpolator here though. Szavieur and I had gotten into a protracted discussion of Kant's words and our world. That is my interest in Kant. If that is not your interest, fine.

And here is your example of how Kant's philosophy applies to you:

For a personal example: I struggle with ascetic tendencies myself. I am a natural lover. People fall in love with me and I fall in love with people – this happens quite a lot. I am in a serious relationship also – the only sort of relationships that I actually find interesting – but I am still very much in love with other people, and certainly at risk for falling in love again. A common sentiment I run in to from myself (though less now), and from others, is that either I do not love my beloved or I should avoid falling in love with people. I certainly do love my beloved, but falling in love with others puts me at risk of doing harm to my beloved. It is this risk of hurting their beloved’s that makes people worry about the risk of falling in love again – this is a type of asceticism....

etc etc etc..........

How in the world am I suppose to relate to that?! It is basically what I call a "subjunctive psychologism". You take us inside a particular psychological state that is really intelligible only to those who know you well enough to fathom its point. I don't...and so I don't

Again, as I stress repeatedly, I want examples of Kant's use value...his exchange value...relating to something we can all sink our existential teeth into---in grappling with what we might or might not be obligated to do when our behaviors come into conflict with the behaviors of others.

If this is not your own interest in Kant, I can respect that. But then why in the world would you continue to engage me?

neither/nor original post:

Can we read Kant and establish whether Mary should be charged with murder or not?

The moral law does not dictate the laws of a state, even though the laws of the state usually have a close resemblance to the moral law.

Okay, now we are getting somewhere. Roe v. Wade. The current law of the land regarding this terrible moral conflict. How does your interpretation of Kant's Moral Law resemble the court's decision?

If you want to understand what Kant means by rational agent (which I seem to doubt from what you've said) I can tell you.

But I want you to put some meat on the bones of Kant's rational agent by attempting to render him or her more life-like in an actual circumstantial context we can discuss and debate. In other words, one relating to an issue we might all be at least somewhat familiar with. For example, how would Kant's rational agent react to a new attempt to revive the draft? How close can you come to fleshing this agent out with respect to a rational argument about the ethical merits of conscription? How, at the very least, would he or she broach this using his or her a priori knowledge of the Moral Law?

you say:

I can't see political factions engaging in this talk, even though I think it would be endlessly helpful for them. I do see them all recognizing each other as rational agents, and only communicating to each other on that basis. It would be silly of them to attempt to communicate if they didn't believe that the ones they were communicating with could understand.

Indeed, only philsophers in places like this would be so engaged, right? ; o )

But who ISN'T a rational agent in these types of discussions? Were the Nazis and the Jews both rational agents? Who gets to decide what constitutes rationality insofar as the communication of a priori, fundamental knowledge is concerned?

And there is a difference between saying 1] I understand your argument regarding rational behavior and 2] I am able to demonstrate what the most rational [and thus obligstory] behavior is. Do you see that as a rational distinction when actual behaviors are being judged [and thus rewarded or punished]?

As I have said, a priori knowledge alone can't decide on issues that contain empirical content. Unless you can show how the concept of abortion is known a priori I can't help you here. If somebody arrests Mary for murder, this is on the basis of the laws of her state, not the moral law.

But what are the state's lawmakers predicating the abortion laws on if not behaviors they wish to punish? And why would they punish behaviors they felt were in accordance WITH the Moral Law? We have laws in order to prohibit behavior deemed by the majority [in a democracy] to be wrong behavior. That assessment must be based on something that most legislators would construe to be an ethical judgment.

neither/nor original post:

And that this "sense of reality----moral and otherwise" is always subject to change [sometimes tumultuous change] without notice. But: Change for the obsetrician is very different from change for the ethicist.

Yes, this is the only way that ethics can be and the only thing that Szavieur and I have seemed to say. If you feel this way, then why do you insist then on requiring a definitive answer to Mary's problem? What time/place does Mary live in and we could dig up evidence about what people there may have thought about it, I can make my own private judgment about it, so you can.

Okay, ethical views changes. But the Moral Law does not. Mary, however, is embedded in both simualtaneously, right? And I don't want a definitive answer from either of you. I want an an acknowledgment of how inherently problematic speculation about Duty and Obligation is in a world where, philosophically, there can be no ANSWER at all. Only prejudices based largely on how we come to understand the world around us as dasein.

Kant's philosophy (and Plato's) coincides with reality. Part of reality that it coincides with is exactly how difficult moral situations are not preventable or solvable on a priori grounds. If you don't want to talk about Kant or Plato, and you don't understand their work, why make such incorrect statements about them?

No, their philosophies coincide with what they think they know reality is.

Are you suggesting that they did, in fact, know...ontologically and teleologically...what existence is? They were able to resolve the mind-boggling antinomies that have baffled philosophers and non-philosophers now for centuries?

And your assertion that their philosophies actually coincide with reality---does that coincide with reality too?

Hey, don't make me quote Rumsfeld again. ; o )

It seems your view of philosophy is disconnected from the reality and purpose of theory.

Oh, you bet it is. But no more so than "the reality and purpose of theory" must eventually be disconnected from the flesh and bone world of human social, political and economic interaction. Kantian ethics is useful or not useful in adjudicating human behavior. But no more or less so than the "theoretical" scaffolding erected by, say, Marx or Nietzsche or Freud or Sartre. The conceptions are relevant until they are no longer relevant. In the end, it always comes down to what each man and woman as dasein decides is appropriate or inappropriate behavior. And that can be anything.

szavieur wrote:

I thought the fact that everyone confronts ethical questions in an extremely personal context was one of your major premises in your argument that impersonal judgments about right and wrong are impossible.

Yes, but if the context is one that no one can really fathom but youself and a few others, of what relevance is it when discussing [either conceptually or for all practical purposes] duty, obligation and human behavior?

And it is never "impersonal judgments" that are at stake here, but judgments made by actual persons situated in actual circumstantial contexts reflecting on right and wrong behavior as daseins.

The only concrete things that are right and wrong are determinate actions or patterns thereof. So the headline-news conflicts, since they involve no specific choice but indeterminate political reflection on multiple, uncoordinated choices, wouldn't admit of deontic representation, maybe.

But that is not always the case. Often newspaper headlines will focus on the behavior of a particular person and then we are inundated with an avalanche of conflicting moral judgments---some around the water cooler at work and some between the talking heads on TV.

For example, consider the recent story of the man who flew the airplane into the IRS building. This precipitated a deluge of commentary on, among other things, domestic terrorism, taxes, the role of government, crony capitalism, Big Brother, patriotism, civil disobedience, extremism...

Now, is there a way we can resolve philosophically whether or not he behaved rationally? How can we ever KNOW this for certain? I believe his behavior was immoral. He killed truly innocent people. But my own sense of existential morality can only reflect the manner in which I view such things. Others however easily rationalized it in discussions I viewed online.

No one can, in my view, read Kant and provide an argument that settles it once and for all. It can not BE settled once and for all. Philosophy is essentially impotent here.

I tried to kill myself once, tried to trip out on X so I'd be willing to try to kill myself another time, starting doing something that would've killed me another time if I hadn't stopped, planned about it for months or years off and on my entire life. In the end, my partly Kantian ethical theory was the most relevant thing to me when it came to deciding how to resolve this conflict within myself.

Then we share this extraordinary mental, emotional and psychological experience in common. And I am glad that Kant helped you to resolve it. But I can assure you that Kant [and I was reading Kant at the time as a philosophy major in college] did not in the slightest factor into my own [conscious] decision. Either before, during or after the attempt. I doubt that a single philosophical thought entered into it at all. Well, except, perhaps, some of the stuff I was reading by Schopenhauer and Camus. And I remember reading Simone de Beauvoir's novel The Blood of Others at the time.

I plummeted existentially and, eventually, I resurfaced existentially.

I'm only arguing against suicide based on being unhappy (and even then not absolutely), here. I don't know why you were led in that direction in your life. If your motivation was just, "I feel bad about life," then I'd say it was dubious, but then I don't know what your motivation was.

My motivation revolved around the death [a suicide] of a very close friend I met in Song Be, South Vietnam. A fellow soldier. He was extremely unhappy at the time. But that always means profoundly different things to different people. And I can't even imagine suggesting it is wrong to commit suicide because one is unhappy. Why? Because no one can measure the pain of another's unhappiness. One can even argue that, if the the pain of a friend is great enough, you may well be obligated to help him end his life. Though not in a philosophical sense surely.

Again, we just can't KNOW these things.

neither/nor wrote:
...if the context is one that no one can really fathom but youself and a few others, of what relevance is it when discussing [either conceptually or for all practical purposes] duty, obligation and human behavior?

It's relevant to the duties, obligations, and human behaviors that took place in that context, but it doesn't inductively support any conclusion about some other case.

And it is never "impersonal judgments" that are at stake here, but judgments made by actual persons situated in actual circumstantial contexts reflecting on right and wrong behavior as daseins.

I didn't say that impersonal judgments are at stake. I said that you thought them to be impossible, which you've sort of reiterated again just now.

Now, is there a way we can resolve philosophically whether or not he behaved rationally? How can we ever KNOW this for certain?

Maybe I can't know everything about the rights and wrongs of other people, but I can know them about myself. I'm introspectively transparent to myself in a way that the internal emotional and thinking lives of others aren't.

Now maybe to this you'd say, "But people often rationalize/deceive themselves. So they often don't know their own motives, etc. any better than they know those of surrounding people." But what kind of proof do you have that people are often self-deceptive?

Philosophy is essentially impotent here.

Well, even granting that this is so, to think "philosophy" was meant to have some ultimate power to resolve interpersonal conflicts might be to criticize it for not doing something that's not its job in the first place.

Then we share this extraordinary mental, emotional and psychological experience in common. And I am glad that Kant helped you to resolve it. But I can assure you that Kant [and I was reading Kant at the time as a philosophy major in college] did not in the slightest factor into my own [conscious] decision.

Kant didn't have to be the one for me, either, though. Considerations of life having inherent value, self-esteem, etc., which Kant offers in his writing, were things I could've gotten from my own beliefs or psychology or whatever. Now to claim that anyone can somehow not be philosophical about something on every level is to make an implausible sort of claim, since a lot of the aspects of existence judged by those doing philosophy tend to be aspects of everything. So there'd be some way to cast some thought you thought at the time as philosophical. The alternative would've been that you didn't think about it at all.

And I can't even imagine suggesting it is wrong to commit suicide because one is unhappy. Why? Because no one can measure the pain of another's unhappiness. One can even argue that, if the the pain of a friend is great enough, you may well be obligated to help him end his life. Though not in a philosophical sense surely.

I don't think (although I'm not sure) that any amount of pain is too much to be worth enduring, even if it were infinite. So my inability to compare other people's, or even my own, pain to the measure of eternal suffering, wouldn't be an obstacle to me judging that their or my unhappiness was not worth dying over.

Again, we just can't KNOW these things.

Depending on your definition of knowledge, yeah.

neither/nor wrote:
To call, "all cars should be manufactured by union labor" a "universal judgment" is like saying we can look the words up in a dictionary to determine what they mean.

Yes, but collect and collate the definitions and the dictionary will still tell us nothing at all about whether cars SHOULD be made by union labor, will it? And neither will Kant and his ethical jargon. You either acknowledge the existential implications of that for those engaged in the actual manufacturing of actual automobiles [or for those having abortions or for those engaged in any human behaviors that will be judged as "right" or "wrong"] or you don't.

I do acknowledge that there are living people who manufacture cars, and people who are struggling with questions of right or wrong. I am trying to provide us with a consistent means of talking about these matters when I define my terms like universal. If we didn't try to understand what we were telling each other any discussion we would have would be likely to be deeply disconnected.

The implications of there being a concept of the universal are incredibly vast existentially. We do talk about groups of things marked by the same concept, and we do judge about these groups in universal form, and without language that lets us talk about such judgments discussing morality would be impossible.

When have I ever insisted I understand Kant. Ironically though, in all the years I have engaged others in discussions of Kant, I have come across those who do claim to understand him. And often they are arguing heatedly amongst themselves about what he REALLY means.

Are you the one who really does? ; o )

I read Kant myself and I put a lot of effort into it. I trust my reading or else I would be looking for a different one. So yes, I really understand Kant and I feel that I can provide reasons for my interpretation.


And here is your example of how Kant's philosophy applies to you:

For a personal example: I struggle with ascetic tendencies myself. I am a natural lover. People fall in love with me and I fall in love with people – this happens quite a lot. I am in a serious relationship also – the only sort of relationships that I actually find interesting – but I am still very much in love with other people, and certainly at risk for falling in love again. A common sentiment I run in to from myself (though less now), and from others, is that either I do not love my beloved or I should avoid falling in love with people. I certainly do love my beloved, but falling in love with others puts me at risk of doing harm to my beloved. It is this risk of hurting their beloved’s that makes people worry about the risk of falling in love again – this is a type of asceticism....

etc etc etc..........

How in the world am I suppose to relate to that?! It is basically what I call a "subjunctive psychologism". You take us inside a particular psychological state that is really intelligible only to those who know you well enough to fathom its point. I don't...and so I don't

I am in love with multiple people. Have you ever been in love? Then you may have some idea of what I am feeling. My inclination is to clearly be in love with people, falling in love is wonderful and so is the anxiety that comes with it. In the past I have felt a duty (Kant) to abstain from love and avoid it if I was in a relationship, but because of studying philosophy (Plato, Kant, Heidegger, and others) I am a more thoughtful person and I could reflect and distinguish between feelings of love from the risks that come along with those feelings.

I don't apply philosophy, like Kant, to my life by looking in the book and seeing what it tells me to do. The study of philosophy itself promotes an enlightened outlook on life, and this is the same if you study any philosophy seriously. I would deeply critical of anyone for using any book as the provider of what particular actions one ought to do or not. Such a person would have absolutely no courage in facing reality. Studying Kant and having a consistant way to think about problems does not disconnect you from reality, it connects you with it in a more thoughtful way.

Again, as I stress repeatedly, I want examples of Kant's use value...his exchange value...relating to something we can all sink our existential teeth into---in grappling with what we might or might not be obligated to do when our behaviors come into conflict with the behaviors of others.

I think that my example is deeply existential, and that I explain its relationship to my study of Kant in leading up to that example very well. In short, I have a clear understanding of my experience of the world, and a consistant way of talking about the features of that experience. I am not worried about finding myself in an existential crisis on theoretical grounds, and I can face my life with that same courage.

But I want you to put some meat on the bones of Kant's rational agent by attempting to render him or her more life-like in an actual circumstantial context we can discuss and debate. In other words, one relating to an issue we might all be at least somewhat familiar with. For example, how would Kant's rational agent react to a new attempt to revive the draft? How close can you come to fleshing this agent out with respect to a rational argument about the ethical merits of conscription? How, at the very least, would he or she broach this using his or her a priori knowledge of the Moral Law?

There is no need to put meat and bones onto Kant's rational agent. When Kant says rational agent he is referring to you and me. You can walk down the street and bumb into these things. Kant provides a consistant way of talking about the faculties and concepts that all rational agents have in common - these faculties and concepts are all known a priori.

Indeed, only philsophers in places like this would be so engaged, right? ; o )

Philosophers would be the sort to engage in these conversations. It is a shame we get caught up in philology like this.

But who ISN'T a rational agent in these types of discussions? Were the Nazis and the Jews both rational agents? Who gets to decide what constitutes rationality insofar as the communication of a priori, fundamental knowledge is concerned?

All humans are rational agents. Rationality is just possessing faculties and concepts which are knowable a priori.

Both the Nazis and the Jews are rational agents. What the Nazi's did in WWII is terrible precisely because they were rational.

And there is a difference between saying 1] I understand your argument regarding rational behavior and 2] I am able to demonstrate what the most rational [and thus obligstory] behavior is. Do you see that as a rational distinction when actual behaviors are being judged [and thus rewarded or punished]?

This is a different treatment of rationality than I am engaged in. All human behavior is rational, so it doesn't make sense to pick behavior based on rationality. We pick our behavior based on what consists in a good life (Plato). What we mean by good life is able to be talked about in Kantian terms: A good life is one in which you do what you judge you ought to do - your duty - you are inclined towards your duty, and you are happy.

But what are the state's lawmakers predicating the abortion laws on if not behaviors they wish to punish? And why would they punish behaviors they felt were in accordance WITH the Moral Law? We have laws in order to prohibit behavior deemed by the majority [in a democracy] to be wrong behavior. That assessment must be based on something that most legislators would construe to be an ethical judgment.

This is a much more complicated issue than just generalizing moral judgments from the populace. Groups of people who are in societies have different ideas about what the purpose of that society is. Ultimately what the purpose of the society is understood to be is going to dictate the laws. We first create a society because it provides us with better lives (it is an advance in technology). When we are raised in a society we are taught the values that it upholds, and form our own beliefs as well concerning what society is about. If we want to talk about a state we need to determine a lot more about it than just the current population's moral attitude and generalizing from there.

Okay, ethical views changes. But the Moral Law does not. Mary, however, is embedded in both simualtaneously, right? And I don't want a definitive answer from either of you. I want an an acknowledgment of how inherently problematic speculation about Duty and Obligation is in a world where, philosophically, there can be no ANSWER at all. Only prejudices based largely on how we come to understand the world around us as dasein.

The moral law is our ethical view, which changes. The principles which make us the sort of beings able to think a moral law do not change. Mary is a human, and she can think morally. Because of this she is able to make judgments concerning what she ought to do, and she does make these. The philosophical answer here is not to speculate about peoples duty or obligation, but to provide a way of talking about how it is possible that people feel like they are moral agents at all. Moral agents have duties and obligations - those are ways of being.

No, their philosophies coincide with what they think they know reality is.

You are taking reality here to be something other than experience. Kant and Plato account for my experience of the world very well, and with incredibly good reasons.

And your assertion that their philosophies actually coincide with reality---does that coincide with reality too?

Yes, it does.

In the end, it always comes down to what each man and woman as dasein decides is appropriate or inappropriate behavior. And that can be anything.

This is what is upsetting, and why I continue to try to engage you. Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Sarte, &c - these thinkers are not trying to recreate people, that would be rediculous. You seem to be taking them to do this, however, by seeing their work as imposing a theoretical order in place of an already existing order; this is just not philosophy.

Systematic Philosophy looks at the world and trys to find ways to talk about it. People who write this sort of philosophy, people like Kant, have motivations and concerns in their own life that guide what they write about and to what end, but they are still properly philosophers as long as they are trying to provide a way of talking about the world that is clear and consistant, and from there trying to provide reasons that are understandable based on their system for why something ought to be.

szavieur wrote:

[My experience] is relevant to the duties, obligations, and human behaviors that took place in that context, but it doesn't inductively support any conclusion about some other case.

Nor does it deductively "support any conclusion about some other case". It always varies from context to context, from dasein to dasein. And both context and dasein evolve over time. From, say, the cradle to the grave?

I didn't say that impersonal judgments are at stake. I said that you thought them to be impossible, which you've sort of reiterated again just now.

Judgments are made BY "persons". Not by rocks or trees. Perhaps we should discuss in some depth what an impersonal judgment might be.

Maybe I can't know everything about the rights and wrongs of other people, but I can know them about myself. I'm introspectively transparent to myself in a way that the internal emotional and thinking lives of others aren't.

How can you possibly know EVERYTHING about your own rights and wrongs when the manner in which you derive this knowledge flows from the manner in which your life has unfolded...existentially...in one way rather than another? You won't concede that had an experience beyond your control occured, you might not have come upon someone or something that dramatically altered the way you view yourself, the world around you and the relationship between them?

And what in the world is an "introspectively transparent" point of view from the the perspective of a considerably less than omniscient mere mortal? You seem to portray your sense of self as though it were a some thing that can be known objectively [in relationship to others] in the manner in which a chemist examines the interaction of elemental matter in nature.

Why don't you focus on one particular right or wrong. In relationship to what? Did you always think and feel this way about it? When did you first know with certainty this was a right rather than a wrong?

you say:

Now maybe to this you'd say, "But people often rationalize/deceive themselves. So they often don't know their own motives, etc. any better than they know those of surrounding people." But what kind of proof do you have that people are often self-deceptive?

True, I can only speak with any sophisticated degree of certainty about my own life. But in many, many discussions I have had with many, many others over the years, I have seen motivations change dramatically. All it takes is a climactic change in circumstances, a crucial seminal moment, one of those legendary epiphanies. Hasn't this been the case in your own life?

It's not a matter of rationalizing or of being in denial so much as sheer commonsense. You think this way. Something happens. You thing another way instead.

.....to think "philosophy" was meant to have some ultimate power to resolve interpersonal conflicts might be to criticize it for not doing something that's not its job in the first place.

What I am referring to, of course, are those philosophers who aim their conceptual tautologies at a higher or transendental reality. The reality of realism. They seek to devise theoretical contraptions that are said to aid and abet us in exceeding or vanquishing the appearance of mere phenomenal reality.

This is what interest me most about Kant. If I am deeply ambiguous about what I should or should not do in my relationships with others, to what extent can Kant's moral philosophy help me to pursue a more rather than less rational [obligaqtory] behavior---when he, of course, could know absolutely nothing about my own [centuries and worlds removed] circumstantial travail.

Considerations of life having inherent value, self-esteem, etc., which Kant offers in his writing, were things I could've gotten from my own beliefs or psychology or whatever.

I think a reasonably objective look at nature, as with a reasonably objective look at human history, shows clearly that the life of any particular existing creature does not have an inherent value. Besides, only the existence of a transcendental, omnipotent being could possess such a vantage point.

Indeed, watch a few episodes of the Science Channel when they deal with all the ways human existence [life itself] can be flushed down toilet in a heartbeat. There have already been four [I think] catastrophic events that nearly wiped from existence all life on earth.

Life is what each of us comes to think it is. There is nothing instrinsically [ontologically or teleologically] valuable about it at all. At least none I have found.

I don't think (although I'm not sure) that any amount of pain is too much to be worth enduring, even if it were infinite.

Try this....

Get yourself a packet of needles. Take one out and stick it under your fingernail as far is it will go.

The pain will be...excruciating.

Now, ask yourself: Could I endure this pain hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month for [possibly] years to come?

Yes?

Take out another needle. Same thing. Then another and another and another.

I predict that sooner or later [sooner I suspect] you will reach a level of pain such that you will literally beg to die.

We all have a breaking poont. Is one more rational [or less moral?] than another?