Kant in Plain English

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

I will explain my interpretation of Kant ethics and epistimology in PLAIN ENGLISH.

Ethics

see Criticism from Nietzsche,

“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” (Ibid., 422)

“What are Kant’s arguments for the Categorical Imperative? First, consider an example. Consider the person who needs to borrow money and is considering making a false promise to pay it back. The maxim that could be invoked is, “when I need of money, borrow it, promising to repay it, even though I do not intend to.” But when we apply the universality test to this maxim it becomes clear that if everyone were to act in this fashion, the institution of promising itself would be undermined. The borrower makes a promise, willing that there be no such thing as promises. Thus such an action fails the universality test.”

Kant basically says this, action is wrong because it is wrong if everyone does it. It is wrong to kill because if everyone kills then we are left with world destruction which is bad, so killing must be wrong in all circumstances to avoid the argument from heap.

My counter is this, 1) why is world destruction bad 2) killing one man is different from world destruction, so how does world destruction show killing one man is bad?

Duty

“We have seen that in order to be good, we must remove inclination and the consideration of any particular goal from our motivation to act. The act cannot be good if it arises from subjective impulse.”

This is just plain ridiculous. People are not machines. Kant wants to turn everyone into machines. Don’t all our actions and beliefs “see grey issues” stem from our psychological tendencies? Why do we act, but not for our impulses? Why should I do something when I am not compelled by anything but Kant?

priori, phenomenon, thing in itself

What kant says is this, even though he does not and CANT define existence.

But let’s just go with the error for time being.

Kant assumes,

  1. a table “EXIST”
  2. we have knowledge of the table “EXIST” through our senses
  3. our senses are limited
  4. therefore our knowledge of the table is limited.
  5. since our knowledge of the table is limited, we can not know ALL aspect of the table.

I raise the follwing questions, 1) what does “ALL aspect of the table mean?” 2) what does “existence” mean? 3) we have 5 senses, how do you know we are going to have 6?

The idealists are right. Existence is Awareness. No one has being able to define existence without resorting to use the word “exist” see ardent, hahha. But the question we should be asking is that “how do we REACT to our AWARENESS”. If you are Aware of hunger, you react to it by Eating FOOD! ok!!!

A priori is proven false by Hume and the idealists! According to Kant, a prior is knowledge without appealing to particular experience. It goes like this, “It’s freezing outside, you must be cold” is an example of a priori reasoning. as you can see, it is false.

I dare any Kant supporter to rebuke me in PLAIN ENGLISH, otherwise we’ll get into the mess of language game.

2

Dude, you want a Kantian to use plain English? Isn’t that asking a bit much? I will not argue with you, I think Kant is a boob. I will give you the great philosopher Ernst Werklempter’s reformulation of the CI. “Act always as if your mother is watching”. Scary. Werklempter’s own maxim was “Act as if all your former girlfriends are watching”. A different kind of scary.

Kant is making a common mistake. He is confounding universality and agreement. Some agreement is good, more is better, so complete agreement must be best. (Just that problem of how to get it.) Nowhere in his writing does he explain why this should be so. He tries, with the only positive normative value he can come up with - Duty. It’s not a bad play, and it is definitely capitalised, even in translation. If he shows it for what it really is, then he has made no movement from Plato. In fact, he has made no movement from Plato. Plato’s and Aristotle’s blind allegience to the state must have seemed quaint and harmless to Kant, as it does to us. But Kant couldn’t really just repeat this quaintness. No one wants to be quaint. He’d look like a…a…momma’s boy. Werklempter’s the greatest.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative is really just a Superlative Imperative.

But how to explain the thing-in-itself in plain English? I’m not sure that “all aspects” really cuts it. This might be a toughy.

Hope there’s a Kantian or two about. This might be amusing.

3

Years ago, I spent months reading Kant in english.
It was the the worse reading experence of my life.
Later I found out english actually helps Kant
because in german he makes no sense whatsover and
english for some reason smooths out the really
ugly writting of his.

Kropotkin

4

faust, Peter Kropotkin

Completely agreed. I mean, most people read Kant because they do not understand him, and they feel Kant has said something important because they can’t understand him, which is nonsense.

“Act as if all your former girlfriends are watching”

well, why should I conform to the moral standards of my exgirlfriends? They are my ex, so why should I still act in fear of them? I’ve said this many times, everything is psychological.

5

I think Werklempter means “try to act impressively”. There may be a Werklempter scholar about who can help.

6

It isn’t fear, but the desire for respect. Act in a way which gives people little choice but to respect you.

As to the first - in muddy waters one has no idea how deep the pond is. Too many writers deliberately obscure what they are saying to give the illusion of ‘depth’ whateverthefuckthatis. I don’t think Kan’t has this problem, I just think he really wasn’t a good writer.

But I’m not going to try to refute what you’ve said because I’m no Kantian.

Good luck finding a Kantian

7

I think that your interpretation of Werklempter is right on the money. Don’t be too surprised about a Kantian showing up. John Rawls, still au courant in the U. S. if nowhere else, is a Kantian in some important ways.

8

  1. Unless you are saying that you would like to live on a planet where everybody kills eachother then i don’t know how else “world destruction” couldn’ be bad?

  2. Ok, let us imagine that i say “killing one man is ok”. Why should i act in a way that could not be universalized? People know that not “everybody” is going to become homosexual but is that a reason to allow it? Should we wait for homosexuality to become universal before we forbid it? Or should we do as we have done with “stealing” and forbid it because it cannot be universalized, same applies for killing.

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Rami - Are you acting immorally when you vote Tory? No, of course not. It can be universalized then, right? It would be okay if everyone did it. So, voting Labour must be bad. Life is simple with Kant. Unless you’re living it.

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Same about being a mailman. Being a mailman is a respectable job. But, what if everyone were a mailman? Who would deliver the groceries?

Obviously, the CI needs some refining.

11

Obviously but you cannot deny that it’s determination of right/wrong via is capability of become a universal law is the most moral. I don’t deny what u have said in the above.

12

Kant said,

“act as though your action would become a universal law”

so I can, murder as though murder would become a universal law. What’s wrong with mass murders? i.e wars.

Nietzsche got here before me. darn!

13

Well wars is inhumane and it restricts ones freedom. Only act in a way that you would be happy and willing for it to become universal. I can see that this law doesn’t always work but i don’t see why war is not bad.

14

With respect to this idea you’ve got to differentiate between an action and a maxim, obviously become a mailman is not a maxim so we don’t need to ask about what would happen if we universalise it.

What could be considered a maxim for this case would be try to go into whatever profession your desires and talents are best suited for.

One of the major problems with Kant is trying to find out exactly what a maxim and given that I’ve only briefly studied him I don’t know but it is not the same thing as an action.

I blieve the thought with this idea is that if you kill someone say for the sake of killing them then you are effectively saying that killing for the sake of it is a good thing, obviously if something is a good thing we want as much of it as possible, therefore since world destruction is a massive amout of killing then if killing for the sake of it is good a fortiori world destruction must be good.

Again Kant is not something which I am particularly well informed on but this is how I percieve what he is saying.

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ondupe - one thing you should know is that the action itself is never morally right to Kant. Even if the consequences of an act are those he would deem morally acceptable, this would be coincidence only - it is only acting in accordance with a moral priciple (his maxim) that can be morally correct. Kant is a little weirder than you suppose. In fact, the consequences are irrelevant to Kant. If you can show that your actions are in accordance with his maxim, the destruction of the world would be okay with him. I know this sounds odd, but it is so. Contrast this with any pragmatic approach, acting in acordance with the will of God, or (in the main as it was at its later stages developed) utilitarianism. Read his "On Duty - to me the seminal work of his moral thinking.

It is much like the will of God approach, however, in that we are, under that model, expected to kill our own son, if God wills it. And, in fact, Kant is trying to get us to see that the will of God is consistent with our most rational means of determining right from wrong. Kant is a religious rationalist. Or an idealist - take your pick. It is not clear to me which he thought he was, although to me the distinction is minute, anyway. Hope this helps.

16

Sorry I obviously haven’t expressed myself correctly, of course Kant is not concerned with the consequences of actions, and I agree totally with him, why should it seem odd that consequences are not important?

It’s always been my intuition that you can only praise/blame someone for something within them and consequences are only within you in the sense that usually you intend for them to come about.

17

hi, look im not arseing off kantian ethics but why dont you listen to the full story (just providing an alternative)

kant i think is trying to defeat the moral relativist, he doesnt want a world in which morality is subjective he wants moral objectivity. to archieve this moral objectivity he gives us his theory dealy one must act according to maxims (you could claim here that everyone has a different idea of morality he however claims that we should act according to Gods will this is a way he universalises morals and makes a set of rules) so he claims that we should live our life to a set of maxims and that we should not break these rules for any reason, furthermore we should be concerned only with our actions and that they are morally correct as the outcome is not determined and we have no control over it, a classic problem here is of the housewife who is hiding jews in her house from the germans the nazis ask the housewife if she is hiding any jews according to the kantian code of conduct the housewife must admit to the german soldiers and tell them she is hiding the jews of course this seems like an immoral act but wait for a second, if we were all to live to kants moral code the german soldiers would have no intention of killing the jews. So if we all followed kants maxims (whether we believe in God or not as noone can disagree even me as a non believer that the christian code of conduct would lead to a happier society if we all followed it) it would seem we would have a utopian society.

the main problem with this is whether or not God exists however i believe that whether or not you believe in God you could see that following christian rules would improve society as a whole and i think even none believers (me being one of them [a non believer that is]) should sacrifice their own moral rules to live by a set that would create a society in which people do the correct thing because if we all lived by these rules the world would be a much happier place. a further problem is PEOPLE IN OUR SOCIETY ARE FUCKING TWATS AND IT WOULD NEVER WORK COS EVERYONES A FUCKING COCKFACE TOO CONCERNED WITH GETTING WHAT THEY WANT AS QUICKLY AS POOSIBLE!

p.s sorry if my style was a bit sloppy but this is my first post on a philosophical forum

18

I believe Kant’s idea of universal maxims come from the idea that the world is governed by laws, i.e. physics, and that since things move and act in ways that are congruent to these laws, law-abiding must be the best way, or something like that. Thus, our actions must be governed in a law-like fashion. As far as that goes, we all must understand that idea since most of us agree on living in societies with laws.

What kind of follows from this is a sense of consistency in action, more maxims/intentions/reasons of action than action itself, and although it is difficult to determine whether having certain (“right”) intentions would ultimately bring about the desired (“right”) results, it may be that humans are at least given the benefit of the doubt that their intentions are good enough in moral situations. How this consistency is brought about, from my understanding of Korsgaard’s intro to Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, is that if a law forbids us from doing X (intentions=action, thus not allowed intentions= not allowed action), then everyone (ideally) would be consistently not doing X. Obviously it is easier to forbid someone from doing something than telling someone that this is the way to do it right (some of you will agree, most of you probably won’t). Either way, consistency in thought, intention, and, hopefully by result of having these, action is to be law-like, thus consistent with the governed world, thus ‘good’, I think.

19

Post resurrection.

20

Kant didn’t even understand what he wrote, it would sooner be easier to learn fluent German and try to read it in German.