this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
133 points (97.2% liked)

Ask Lemmy

27006 readers
1480 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

But not everyone wants to do the same thing or be treated the same way. In fact, people all want to do different things. You can't get 100% of people to agree on anything. If you walked down the street with a hammer and asked 100 people "do you want to be hit in the head?" you couldn't get them all to say "no".

There are other objections that are more specific:

One of the first major challenges to Kant's reasoning came from the French philosopher Benjamin Constant, who asserted that since truth telling must be universal, according to Kant's theories, one must (if asked) tell a known murderer the location of his prey.

In this reply, Kant agreed with Constant's inference, that from Kant's own premises one must infer a moral duty not to lie to a murderer.

Kant denied that such an inference indicates any weakness in his premises: not lying to the murderer is required because moral actions do not derive their worth from the expected consequences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative

Basically, the categorical imperative is too inflexible to be practical.

[โ€“] wyrmroot 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I can't disagree, except to the extent that I don't personally view the CI as a means to reaching some objective, universally "good" set of actions. I think Kant was way off the mark with a lot of that pursuit. I do think, however, that an action which fails to satisfy the CI (meaning as I see it, "I want to do this but I don't think others should") is often one that should be re-evaluated.

But also I took like 3 philosophy courses so I'm officially in way over my head now but enjoy the discussion!