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For people who've taken philosophy classes, was there something you learned that you now use everyday? (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 7 months ago (12 children)

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.

[–] [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.

[–] [email protected] 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!

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