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Something that’s weirdly stuck with me (even though he’s not my favorite philosopher) is Kant’s Categorical Imperative which says, briefly, do only the things that would still be okay if everyone did them.
I think it fills in a nice gap left by the golden rule (treat others as you’d like to be treated) in drawing attention to how some things which don’t seem to do much harm would be a major problem if broadly adopted.
The categorical imperative is cute but doesn't work. It ignores all context for actions and assumes all people are pretty much the same.
A surgeon is allowed to cut open people in an attempt to save them, me a person not medically trained is not allowed to do that. If you applied the rule "to save a person I am allowed to attempt to operate on them and do my best" to every person we would be in serious trouble.
If I do a small bad thing it will prevent a very bad thing from happening. The categorical imperative forces me to ignore that fact.
Also doesn't really match how social animals operate and instead demands that we ignore how we are treated in our responses.
Basically it puts way too much on people and demands that they be lawful stupid.
I think the CI is far from a universal law that solves all problems. But I do think it can be among a set of useful tests to judge an action. I'm not sure the surgeon example is in good faith - a reasonable interpretation might be "Help others to the extent that you are trained and able to", which gets you pretty close to most Good Samaritan laws.
Most imperatives taken literally and expected to fit every situation and interpretation will fall apart quickly, I think this one is no better or worse than others. Probably the way I've internalized it is different from how it was originally intended, too!
Cool. Except the man who came up with it doesn't agree with you.
As I mentioned before. Do what you want but unless you are following it universally you aren't following it.