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hakimashou posted:Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. Ok, I'm getting a little frustrated with your interpretation of Kant. You're, ironically, trying to let there be exceptions to rules here, which isn't how the CI works; you're misunderstanding the categorical imperative and maxims here. The CI doesn't let you permit certain circumstances that would otherwise be forbidden. Basically, if you're attaching an "if" to it, it's not a maxim anymore. "You can kill people" would be a maxim. "You can kill people IF they do X, Y, or Z" isn't. "You can steal" would be a maxim, "You can steal IF you're hungry" isn't. Either an act is ok, or it isn't, and there's not a set of circumstances that suddenly makes an otherwise forbidden thing permissible. Either it's morally permissible to kill people, or it isn't. If you create the maxim of "Murderers can be killed," you're no longer universalizing. Try it out by swapping other people in there. "Black people can be killed." "Women can be killed." "Jaywalkers can be killed." The problem becomes obvious. Let's we take it further, the categorical imperative absolutely forbids killing. "It is permissible to kill" is absolutely not universalizable. The idea of killing relies on people being alive. If killing were universalized, there would be no one left to kill, and so the idea negates itself. edit: ok I've read more replies and yeah please stop citing Kant you totally do not understand Kant, in no loving way does doing a morally impermissible act suddenly allow other people to commit morally impermissible acts to you, that's not even remotely close to how Kant works. Dog Fat Man Chaser fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Feb 27, 2017 |
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Feb 27, 2017 07:45
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twodot posted:I don't know anything about Kant, but this doesn't make any sense. Presuming you believe that locking up criminals is acceptable, but that locking up random innocent people isn't use whatever it is that allows you to make that distinction to justify killing people who have committed murder, and not other people. Yeah, I left a lot of Kant's system out there because I'm not terribly interested in teaching a course on it. There's definitely more to it than just "is this act universalizable", there's also questions of using people as ends, whether it respects their free will, and lots of poo poo on duty. I was more just upset to see even that part being sorely misused. To your example, "People can be punished for their crimes" is universalizable, nothing about punishment in a general sense is self-negating, and "people can be put in prisons / isolated" also works, for the same reason. It'd be a hosed up awful horrible world if we actually universalized those, but it's not literally impossible. Killing people is. To your other point, we generalize to people because those are the moral objects worthy of consideration. Kant stopped his system at people because he didn't have animals as moral objects, they held the same status as things. They were effectively, to him, irrational objects that just so happened to also be animate. So there's your mechanism, basically, is it a moral object? I realize that's intensely unsatisfying an answer, but hey that was a lot of philosophy's treatment of animals at the time  Also I should probably be clear, I'm not defending any of this system as correct or right, it has some problems, I just don't like seeing it used inaccurately. Ironically enough Kant himself seemed to be totally okay with the death penalty, which I've always seen as a pretty drat big self-contradiction, and there's been some good writing to that effect, basically that he arrived at a bad conclusion given his own premises. Dog Fat Man Chaser fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Feb 27, 2017 |
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Feb 27, 2017 23:31
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