leonardomenderes wrote:
g about maxims that comply with the categorical imperative, yes?
Therefore your statement is instantly self-defeating. A CI-compliant maxim
has everything to do with the CI.

Or are we simply talking about any maxim you pull from anywhere?


Ah, this may be a helpful spot for us. If I meant CI compliant maxims then I would be only considering maxims that would be universalized. I was leaving maxim open to any subjective principle of action, regardless of if it would succeed when considered in the Categorical Imperative or not.

We can't determine the list of CI-compliant maxims a priori, but require experience in order to formulate these maxims.

leonardomenderes wrote:
...if we are talking an=bout CI-compliant maxims, I do not "return to the CI".
the maxim is never ever supposed to leave it.


As I said, any maxim judged to in accordance with the CI is never reversed - period, as you say. However, this doesn't prevent new judgments. These new judgments come about from understanding the world under different concepts than we had previously understood.

leonardomenderes wrote:
As to what 'categorical" means, I am quite grounded, and solidly
in the vast majority. It is the model of unconditional duty.
Go patronize a million other people. It isn't a tough definition
at all, as far as reading Kant.


First of all, the majority doesn't determinant of the truth, but a determinant of merely what most people think is the truth. This I am sure we both agree on this.

I provided a definition of the imperative, categorical imperatives and hypothetical imperatives. I provided this while examining the text - I can cite if you would like.

leonardomenderes wrote:
Universal is not conditional, hypothetical, or anything else.

Universal judgments can contain conditions, or be based on a condition. A judgment being universal refers to the form of the judgment (see the table of judgments in the Critique of Pure Reason).

leonardomenderes wrote:

----E.KANT------------
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
--------------------


This is a formulation of the categorical imperative - the Categorical Imperative contains a universal judgment, but it doesn't describe universal judgments.

If we apply your understanding of universal then you are correct, if we apply my understanding then I am correct. So who has the proper reading of this crucial concept in not just Kant, but all of philosophy? I have provided evidence from Kant's text concerning how I understand universality, you have not done so.

To repeat: the definition of universal in Kant is as a form of a judgment wherein the judgment applies to all objects of the type predicated of.

Universal judgments don't change their truth values over time, the judgments we employ concerning the same things change over time. There are two ways in which a new judgment is necessary; first, if the objects involved changes; second, if the concept involved change.

Consider the following:

Joe, Bill and Keith are all male, and are standing in a room together. From this I can judge:

All the people in the room are male.

Now say Sara enters the room. The judgment I made is still true of the objects it was judging about when it was made, but would be false now.

Consider this now:

Kant takes science to make universal judgments, but scientific theories change concerning the same objects.

To explain gravity, the Greeks said all objects lust for the Earth. This is a universal judgment.

After the Greeks, we formulated a new universal judgment concerning gravity wherein all objects mutually attract each other in proportion to their mass. This is a universal judgment.

Both the Greeks, and the more modern theory of gravity claim universality and truth. How is this possible?

The Greeks conceived of objects as being on Earth, and not the Earth itself. Celestial bodies were not considered to lust for the Earth either. According to the contemporary use of the word objects here, we find that the same word has a different domain - everything thing with mass counts as an object in this system. The Greeks had the ability to judge the Earth and celestial bodies as object, but did not consider it in their understanding of object in this case. In this situation the concept of object has changed.

As I said, any maxim judged to in accordance with the CI is never reversed - period, as you say. However, this doesn't prevent new judgments. These new judgments come about from understanding the world under different concepts than we had previously understood.


You can come up with new CI-compliant maxims, if you like.
The preconsiderations are the game...

Yeah...that's OK. Nobody (including Kant) is saying
you can't have a go at making new CI-compliant maxims.

You could challenge an existing example by saying it doesn't
work universally, too. I personally think the 'do not lie'
was too hastily and narrowly flesh out as to preconditions.

I thought you were saying the CI test didn't really mean
always everywhere. If you mean...the testing wasn't great,
let me do one that bears up better....cool. I haven't
been defending Kant's examples as infallible...perish the thought.
Sorry if it looked that way.

Bear in mind...I'm wondering whether it's a truly achievable test.
It's a good guiding light, perhaps.

neither/nor wrote:
At best a Kantian is reduced to, "I just know down to the bone this is a manifestation of the Moral Law."

No, because that would be to make an intuitive, not a discursive, kind of statement. But Kant's "Moral Law" is a form of discursion, so it must be something I can make the other person aware of through communication.

Suppose giving people the right to vote expresses respect for them as ends in themselves. Then since that respect coheres with the first principle of Kantian ethics, that right can be established by arguing from that principle. Now the question would be, "But do I disrespect someone by not allowing them to vote?" Regardless of whether this is the case always, I'm confident that sometimes voting ought to be allowed to some people, including most women.

I can understand this point of view. But, again, the motivation here in my view is largely psychological. We want to be able to resolve these conflicts once and for all. We never really do though and so we extrapolate Kant forever into the future. ... with respect to the hundreds of moral conflicts that have plagued mankind now for centuries... you are reduced to arguing they CAN be [solved]. And, sure, if we both lived forever it might be interesting to so how it all turns out. But we don't do we?

No, but we might reincarnate or get resurrected or get to watch the world as ghosts or whatever. Now I'll admit that there's a degree of reassuring theorization going into my views on this point, but I don't take that reassurance to be rationalizing or self-deceptive. If a Christian finds hope in New Testament eschatology, I'm okay with that in a lot of ways, and I'm okay with my own sort of transhumanist ideas, too.

Yes, and my point is that they must ever remain unclear in the same manner in which the words and concepts "freedom", "justice", "duty", "obligation" must ever remain unclear in judging the ethical parameters of human behavior.

I don't think that these concepts are as vague as that of humanity, though. Or if the words themselves are, there are concepts related to the meanings of those words that are clear in their own right (the concepts are clear, that is). For example, maybe duty is hazy to me. But what about "something stupid for you to do, no matter what you feel about it"? That's simple enough (from my perspective).

I always make it very clear however that I do not exclude my own point of view from my own point of view. I would never insist that an existential perspective on human ethics is the most rational, most morally sophisticated way in which to view these things. I can only state that, based on my own unique, personal experiences "out in the world" to date and the manner in which I have come to give them meaning "in my head" [here and now], this seems reasonable to me.

Alright, but then my own experiences to date point towards a strongly (if not exclusively) Kantian world being the real one (when it comes to morality, anyway), e.g. his talk of "revolutions in the heart" as the antidote to moral corruption inside of us.

It goes only where it can go---by pointing out there are countless other folks around the globe embedded in countless other existential circumstantial contexts who would shrug me off in turn while professing that THEIR God and THEIR "real world" feelings reveal the one true moral law. Then what? Well, hopefully the person is intelligent enough to think, "Gee, we can't ALL be right" and then acknolwedge his motivation may well be a primordial psychological need to anchor the phenomenal in a Whole Truth. His own more likely than not.

This person could just as consistently adjust his or her invocation of moral feelings by limiting it to his or her own life. "I know this is right for ME," might be the response, then, with what's right for others being delegated to others' feelings.

Suppose instead we peel away the existential layers and find out that "I" basically ARE [IS?] the layers. What would the mind's I be able to capture that transcends the phenomenal reality of actual human interaction in Vietnam?

I can appreciate the force of Hume's (or Buddha's) picture of our psyches' make-up, but in not depicting substantiality, or a parallel of it anyway, as determining our nature, this picture always strikes me as unable to explain how people act. When Descartes infers, "I am," from, "I think," and then, "I'm a thinking substance," in turn, he seems to be implicitly invoking a principle like, "Actions imply actors," which itself indicates actors-as-logically-prior-to-their-actions. But that thing standing over our choices, persisting across time independently of its particular conditions, would then be the higher meaning of the word I for each of us.

You go from HER experiences to YOUR rules. And your extrapolation seems to be that, just because you think about these things philosophically and she doesn't, you can. Well, suppose you can't. Suppose you just think you can instead?

I'm not sure there's a lot of distance between "thinking" and "thinking philosophically." Now maybe anyway the only thing I'm obligated to do, as a Kantian, then, is tell Mary to be philosophical about her problem. But you asked what more concrete advice I could give her, and I said that if anything, my best advice would be in the form of either actual or possible rules for Mary to follow in making her decision (like a logician might tell someone about modus tollens).

My point is that the thumping can often occur because, try as we might to win folks over to our side of the "duty" debate with arguments, their arguments continue to seem just as reasonable to them. And there is no "perfect", transcendental argument able to resolve it.

Or it's just that no argument yet devised is perfect. Now you're very well entitled, inductively justified by your empirical knowledge that no attempt to do so has worked before, to not look for that unassailable logic, but so am I entitled to try to come up with it, deductively justified by my a priori knowledge that it's epistemically (I don't want to say "metaphysically") possible that some attempt can succeed.

Yes, but "general" thinking here is precisely the most dangerous in my view. It can lead to the assumption there must be general behaviors to match it.

So there's no general problem of abortion? But if that's the case, no wonder no one's solved it: it doesn't even exist.

But actually there's no way for the law to be totally particular about anything. For instance, the law can't be totally particular about rape. It has to draw some general distinctions or else what will anyone talk about during trial if they have to invent a new word for every single different instance of something?

___________________________________________________
Say you were drawing up a blueprint for a new planetary civilization. According to Kant, if you try to impose this blueprint on everyone else without allowing them to help draw it with you, you're violating the moral law. For the moral law just is the set of rules that go into that drawing as a function of everyone's capacity to draw. The scope of "everyone else" is: everyone you try to get to join you in this project, coupled with the demand that you try to get as many people involved as possible. And your prejudices about who can get involved have to be tested here, too.

Past all that, whatever the blueprint says is right is right. That's the Kantian political ideal. (Or even if not actually his, it IS mine, I think.)

szavieur wrote:

....Kant's "Moral Law" is a form of discursion, so it must be something I can make the other person aware of through communication.

Discursion is defined as:

1] an instance of discursive writing, speech, etc.; a wandering or logically unconnected statement.

2] the process or procedure of rigorous formal analysis or demonstration, as distinguished from immediate or intuitive formulation.

I suspect that, over time, it is not just a coincidence the word has come to mean [for some] the opposite of what it was intended to mean. Indeed, it would surprise me even less that this evolved out of philosophical discusssions regarding what we can or cannot know, uh, categorically. ; o )

Formal logic denoting what is said to be true when the only tool used to disclose it is...formal logic.

Suppose giving people the right to vote expresses respect for them as ends in themselves. Then since that respect coheres with the first principle of Kantian ethics, that right can be established by arguing from that principle. Now the question would be, "But do I disrespect someone by not allowing them to vote?" Regardless of whether this is the case always, I'm confident that sometimes voting ought to be allowed to some people, including most women.

One can view "universal sufferage" as a manifestation of political ideals....or as a manifestation of political power. But, as I noted previously, one cannot demonstrate it is an inherent manifestaion of the Moral Law. No one is literally obligated to respect or not respect another's right to vote.

Although, sure, to speculate that "sometimes" we ought to expand it is reasonable. But that's a far cry from saying what the duty of the governors and the governed with respect to voting IS.

...we might reincarnate or get resurrected or get to watch the world [evolve] as ghosts or whatever. Now I'll admit that there's a degree of reassuring theorization going into my views on this point, but I don't take that reassurance to be rationalizing or self-deceptive. If a Christian finds hope in New Testament eschatology, I'm okay with that in a lot of ways, and I'm okay with my own sort of transhumanist ideas, too.

No one is suggesting you shouldn't be. But I do suggest you might be, well, confused regarding where rational discourse ends and rationalizing begins. We all are. We wish to know what we ought and ought not do. Period. We yearn psychologically for value judgments we can anchor "I" in. When we cannot devise formal arguments that clearly demonstrate this we are forced to take that necessary leap. Some to God. Some to Kant. ; o )

I don't think that these concepts [freedom, justice, duty, obligation] are as vague as that of humanity....

But when discussing the myriad existential vagaries of "freedom", the nearly infinite exigencies of "humankind" are considerably vaguer still. It would seem, therefore, when transcending the phenomenal we are all the more obligated to come to grips with the "mind of man" itself.

How else can we begin to nail down the "universial" in, say, "the universal rights and responsibilties of man".

....but then my own experiences to date point towards a strongly (if not exclusively) Kantian world being the real one (when it comes to morality, anyway), e.g. his talk of "revolutions in the heart" as the antidote to moral corruption inside of us.

But that's when I point out again how your very sense of "self" [which houses your sense of moral duty] is rooted not only in what you did, who you met, what you read, where you've been etc. but in all the things/folks/places you did NOT encounter in turn. Try to imagine how much your life [your sense of reality] is predicated on these critical relationships. Or lack thereof.

I just specualte this is of far less concern or relevance if the discussion revolves around gravity or weather phenomena or rock layers. When it revolves around human moral obligation though it is profoundly pertinent.

When Descartes infers, "I am," from, "I think," and then, "I'm a thinking substance," in turn, he seems to be implicitly invoking a principle like, "Actions imply actors," which itself indicates actors-as-logically-prior-to-their-actions. But that thing standing over our choices, persisting across time independently of its particular conditions, would then be the higher meaning of the word I for each of us.

Actors, yes. Up on the stage of life. But the illusion he did not pursue nearly enough is the one that revolves around the extent to which dasein determines what the script will be. You want to focus on the "autonomy" of a mind that has been in and out of other minds all its life. You want to collate all these existential minds by proffering a noumenal, transendental stage all the minds share in common. And, yes, the one the physicists are up on overlaps considerably. But ever less so the one the ethicists are up on.

I'm not sure there's a lot of distance between "thinking" and "thinking philosophically." Now maybe anyway the only thing I'm obligated to do, as a Kantian, then, is tell Mary to be philosophical about her problem.

That's like saying there is not a lot of distance between a particular lie and lying per se.

And what exactly does it mean to tell Mary to be philosophical about a problem you know little or nothing about situated squarely in your own shoes? Again: her calamity, Kant's rules.

neither/nor original post:

"general" thinking here is precisely the most dangerous in my view. It can lead to the assumption there must be general behaviors to match it.

So there's no general problem of abortion? But if that's the case, no wonder no one's solved it: it doesn't even exist.

A GENERAL abortion problem? Suppose there is a women around the corner from you contemplating suicide because she fears her family will disown her if they find out she is pregnant? She wants the fetus to just go away but she has been taught all her life that abortion is a Sin---murder in the eyes of God.

You are completely oblvious to this women's plight, however. So, how is the "general problem of abortion" applicable to both of you---even if you meet and learn of her terrible quagmire?

But actually there's no way for the law to be totally particular about anything. For instance, the law can't be totally particular about rape. It has to draw some general distinctions or else what will anyone talk about during trial if they have to invent a new word for every single different instance of something?

Indeed. But my point is that the futility of concocting a "general law" to deal with abortion pales next to the futility of concocting a "general morality" to deal with it.

At least human behavior vis a vis the law revolves around actual statutes on the books. When it comes to that which might be contrued as moral and immoral behavior the possible permutations are off the chart. Way, way, way off the chart. As in infinitely....

Szavieur wrote:

Say you were drawing up a blueprint for a new planetary civilization. According to Kant, if you try to impose this blueprint on everyone else without allowing them to help draw it with you, you're violating the moral law. For the moral law just is the set of rules that go into that drawing as a function of everyone's capacity to draw. The scope of "everyone else" is: everyone you try to get to join you in this project, coupled with the demand that you try to get as many people involved as possible. And your prejudices about who can get involved have to be tested here, too.

Past all that, whatever the blueprint says is right is right. That's the Kantian political ideal. (Or even if not actually his, it IS mine, I think.)

But who is the "you" drawing up the specs---a mere mortal?

And from what transcendental source is the blueprint drawn---The cosmos? God? The "mind of man"?

This is all profoundly---abstract.

Still, try to imagine all of us focusing on human behaviors that revolve around, say, our moral relationship with other animals.

What "rules" would the blueprint start with here? Suppose we are considering the use of animals in medical experiments aimed at saving human lives. The representative from PETA is up at the podium reacting to the proposals of a corporate hack defending the widespread use of animals in such experiments.

See the problem? What will the general rules be after these two debate them?! Debating them with "you", the guy/gal planning this new civilzation.

Alas...and all too often...debate over moral obligation revolves around something William Barrett pointed out in Irrational Man:

For the choice in...human [ethical] situations is almost never between a good and an evil, where both are plainly marked as such and the choice therefore made in all the certitude of reason; rather it is between rival goods, where one is bound to do some evil either way, and where the the ultimate outcome and even---or most of all---our own motives are unclear to us. The terror of confronting oneself in such a situation is so great that most people panic and try to take cover under any universal rules that will apply, if only to save them from the task of choosing themselves.

I would only add that even the expression "rival goods" and the word "evil" are profoundly existential [problematic] when the discussion turns to one's duty and obligation towards others.

Hopefully I can diffuse the situation regarding Kant here (even though I admit I am guilty of a discussion regarding it). Maybe settling on how Kant may be employed here can be of benefit first, because there is obviously some gap between both of you (Szavieur and Neither/Nor) concerning Kant.

Maybe these observations will help.

neither/nor wrote:

For the choice in...human [ethical] situations is almost never between a good and an evil, where both are plainly marked as such and the choice therefore made in all the certitude of reason; rather it is between rival goods, where one is bound to do some evil either way, and where the the ultimate outcome and even---or most of all---our own motives are unclear to us. The terror of confronting oneself in such a situation is so great that most people panic and try to take cover under any universal rules that will apply, if only to save them from the task of choosing themselves.

I like the above a lot, and I think this is important for the Kantian to express himself because it helps to clarify the intent if the critical works.

Pure Moral Philosophy of the sort Kant does in the Groundwork and the second Critique only reveal a priori knowledge concerning how moral judgments work, it doesn't guarantee any particular judgments in advance since pure philosophy doesn't guess at the empirical content involved. (Kant gives examples, but these examples don't derive new a priori knowledge.) Humans always need to face the difficulties of ethics in their own life, and it is exactly a lack of responsibility to seek shelter under a universal principle.

As Kant says regarding truth - "But since truth concerns just this very content [from experience], it is quite impossible, and indeed absurd, to ask for a general test of the truth of such content. A sufficient and at the same time general criterion of truth cannot possibly be given."

neither/nor wrote:
I would only add that even the expression "rival goods" and the word "evil" are profoundly existential [problematic] when the discussion turns to one's duty and obligation towards others.

"rival goods" and "evil" can be related to duty and obligation in a quite straightforward way - namely if I feel obligation to somebody or am compelled to act on a duty. We have these moral experiences and we struggle with them. What is problematic isn't the theoretical part, what is problematical is when we are in disagreement with each other.

The formulating of the Categorical Imperative doesn't help the individual here to decide for other people since we don't know what their maxims are. However, in recognizing that we have a common principle that we all judge through we know that we can discuss our understanding of position (maxim), and provide arguments for our empirical concepts so that we can come to a more mutual understanding.