From, Immanuel Kant: Ayn Rand’s Intellectual Enemy, by Edward W. Younkins:
The main philosophical issue as viewed by Immanuel Kant was to save science by answering skeptic David Hume (1711-1776), who declared that man’s mind was only a collection of perceptions in which there are no causal connections. Hume argued that all knowledge is from experience and that we are incapable of experiencing causality. He explained that causality, as well as entities, are only true by association and customary belief. Causality is merely man’s habit of associating things together because of experiencing them together in the past. Necessary connections between objects or events are not implied by experiences of priority, contiguity, and constant conjunction.
In that sense, Kant’s moral philosophy can be seen as an attempt to rescue Good and Evil from this nagging distinction. And Rand’s?
In other words, just because, as chidren, we always saw someone being punished for choosing a particular behavior does not mean this punishment is necessarily warranted. Or that the behavior is necessarily bad.
And if it was punished only because it was embedded in the particular Kingdom of Ends we were raised to accept as necessarily virtuous, how then can we ever justify punishing one set of behaviors rather than another until we can establish beyond all doubt the optimal Kingdom of Ends?
Further, if we can’t experience causality even with respect to the laws of nature [the interactions of mindless matter] how in the world can we possibly propose to do so with respect to the behaviors of mindful matter?
Mindful matter, after all, is quite capable of embracing moral relationships clearly shown to be contradictory. For example, one mind might champion the right of government to conscript citizens into armies in order to sustain its national security while another mind might champion a world in which such choices are viewed as tyrannical.
A single mind can have contradictory moral attitudes, thinking one way at one time - by feeling some misgivings, perhaps, if one is willing to notice mixed responses - and thinking another way at another time, and feeling torn on another occasion. Often when the shoe is on our foot, we notice the contradiction, but it can happen in other ways also.
99.9% of human animals are amoral or immoral. Only a select, elite group of a very, very small minority have any morals, values, or virtues. All the rest of the planet is worthless outside this very select group of individuals.
How rare are you thinking, Mo, one in one hundred, one in one billion??
Many people act like they are unified, but this just demonstrates the ruthless suppression they have of their own complexity. Given the amount of damage we have all gone through and the constant bombardment of contradictory messages, even single messages that are mixed, and the various contradictory punishments and rewards out there for the same acts and attitudes, it would be odd if someone managed to have no mixed feelings, ambiguousness, inconsistency or misgivings.
I don’t think there are any such humans, though many put on a good mask.
Firstly, we may come to the conclusion that a Kingdom of Ends is a stupid idea. Or rather an irrelevant one. That sort of solves the problem.
The second thing we might do is to recognise that all “optimal” is ever going to mean is “the best we can come up with so far”.
Look - if Kant had ever grown up, morally speaking, he might have realised that we may certainly use each other as means to our own ends and still obtain a workable moral system. Or even that people have been doing this for a long time already.
Can’t respond to that. “Mindful matter”? Cute phrase. have no idea what it means.
But what is not rare are minds that think their own thoughts tie everything together such that Good and Evil are always clearly distinguishable. Objectively, as it were.
Not always, just sometimes (Think: cutting a random person’s eyes out to solve abortion—founded on a belief set that you think is irrefutable, but I don’t).
He said, if I may Faust, only the moral elitists will feel compelled within their justifications to remove logical contradictions from their belief schemata.
Because they have a demand and interest for it. Only philosophers are capable of reducing morality down to a logical, belief system. What point, function, or utility are beliefs if they’re essentially irrational???
If Faust ever realized this fact, then he may begin to understand what Kant was truly about. Justification and logic are twins. Morality is a rarity, not a commonality. Religion maybe the opiate of the masses. But somebody has to produce, distribute, and sell the opiates. Who do you think does that, and how, and why??? If you want a new drug, then you need to learn the chemistry. If you want a new morality, a new Nietzschean value ontology, then you need to learn the reasoning behind morality.
Why the need for moral consistency? Who is to judge?
It remains a problem “out in the world” as long as there are folks able to meld and to weld their own particular Kingdom of Ends with and to wealth and power. My aim is to keep philosophy from aiding and abetting this deadly duo.
However futile, it is something to do.
Oh, and also to remind folks an even more dangerous foe always lurks around the corner: wealth and power wedded to…cynicism? realpolitik? Both embedded in political economy. There Good and Evil are measured in, among other things, Swiss bank accounts and offshore transactions in the Cayman Islands.
Unless, of course, it means considerably more. And “the best so far” can only be but another point of view.
That’s the point. Mind is matter like no other. How do we understand matter that evolved out of matter able to understand nothing at all?
I still don’t get your point here. That’s why [on another thread] I asked others to reconfigure it. If someone actually believes this is a solution to the abortion problem there is no way you can demonstrate beyond any doubt whatsoever it is refutable. Again, you may as well claim to refute the existence of God. Or claim to explain the existence of existence itself.
My point is only that someone who posits this [in all sincerity?!] will almost certainly be doing so from a mental institution.
Yes, many minds have that as their official position. IOW they gloss over their own complexity and act and speak and write as if they have no doubts, feelings of confusion, mixed reactions, etc. I see this as endemic, the false presentation of a unified self. It is kind of the inner counterpart to fascism. Of course I do think there are times when one should put up this front. I don’t think someone responding to, say, a sexist, must acknowledge feeling he or she has that sometimes align with some of the bile coming from the sexists mouth or keyboard. But overall this presentation of the ‘unified self’ is I think a problem.
I wasn’t opposing your position in the OP. I was extending it, I would say. I think there is a strong urge to avoid noticing ambiguity and ambivalence. People want to be streamlined, coherent, consistent. This seems positive, since they know how to react along ‘party lines’ even if it is just a party of their own making. Rand is a perfect example of this tendency. She never really got the contradictions between her life and her ideas, and even how much she suffered her own ideas. As if that was irrelevant.
That example is not very different from many war scenarios. The necessary evil. It’s very specific. I am not sure how one could show that the eyes are the best organ to maim. But it could be seen as one of many right answers (maimings) that while horrible save the deaths of untold baby souls in the long run. It allows the opponents to live AND leaves a visible reminder. Very effective one could argue. And how does one go about proving such a position wrong? Certainly not scientifically, since this would involve the same necessary evil approach. With deductive reasoning? Hardly.
