Episode 10: Kantian Ethics: What Should We Do?

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. My name is Mark Linsenmayer, sending you my vocal stylings from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:19 Seth: And this is Seth Paskin, deep in the heart of Texas.

0:23 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts. I can't think of anything goofy to say.

0:30 Mark: Just the sound of your voice is goofy enough.

0:32 Seth: Yes.

0:33 Mark: Our question for episode 10 is yet again, what are we supposed to do? Focusing on Emmanuel Kant's ethics as depicted in the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, also called the Groundwork of the Metaphysical Morals. You can find that text and links to other fun things@partiallyexaminedlife.com let us give the ground rules for our discussion. I should not say ground rules. I should say guidelines that we try to adhere to, unless we don't feel like it. Number one, we do not assume that our audience knows anything about any of this.

Right? So while it would be nice if you read the Kant, you might get more out of this. If you read the Kant, you're not going to read the. Right. The Kant's going to read the freaking. He's going to read the freaking Kant. Maybe some of you had to read some of this already in some class at some point, and so that's good. We'll remind you what that was like and you can be thankful you don't have to read it again. I guess I'm jumping ahead of myself because I know Wes is in love with Kant.

1:31 Seth: He is in love with Kant.

1:33 Mark: Number two, no gratuitous name dropping. We're interested in ideas, not with fetishizing a bunch of dead philosophers. If we have a point to make, we should maybe just make it and not say, you know, you understand what I mean? If you go read the Ayn Rand essay entitled, no, I don't actually have a problem with universal healthcare, so fuck y'.

1:49 Seth: All.

1:51 Mark: I think that's how she actually sounded.

1:53 Seth: That was very prescient of her.

1:55 Wes: He actually had a severe mental problem.

1:58 Seth: That should come as no surprise to anybody.

2:00 Mark: Maybe that's why she was talking about future events, but I don't know. Number three, we shall be rigorous and exact in all that we say, except in the case where not doing so seems like it would be fun. This is a very Special episode number 10. Did you think when we started this so many months ago that we would get to episode 10?

2:19 Wes: It was episode 11.

2:22 Seth: It's the 11th recording, but it's episode 10.

2:24 Mark: Yes.

2:25 Seth: Actually, I think it's the 12th recording.

2:27 Mark: I should say that with both of the last attempts to record utilitarianism, Seth sent me files that were labeled episode 8, and Wes sent me files that were labeled episode 10, when in fact it was episode 9. So we're gonna start off before we get into Mr. Kant with a letter from Phil.

2:47 Seth: We're going to answer listener mail, and we won't call it fan mail because it's unclear whether or not this person is a fan, but he at least sent us something. So.

2:54 Mark: Okay, here's dear Partially Examined Life guys, whom I love so much. Actually, that part is not in there, actually. But I have a question about graduate study in academic philosophy. I'm currently looking for a suitable graduate programs to apply to, and I keep fighting this urge to gravitate toward programs in slash related to continental philosophy. The closest options on either side seem to be Communications rhetoric or Poli Sci Theory. I know philosophy is a risky choice for graduate study, but it seems like that's where all the interesting stuff is happening.

One thing I like about your podcast is the cynicism each of you brings to the discussion from your stints pursuing academic philosophy. What is it about academic philosophy that you three found unacceptable? Can you direct me toward a convincingly scathing indictment of academic philosophy so I no longer have the urge to apply to graduate programs in philosophy?

3:43 Seth: So the first thing is that graduate school, as an undertaking, regardless of what discipline you pick, is no more or less a worthy activity than many other things you could do with your life after you graduated from college. Philosophy is not inherently less valuable than, say, English or an MBA for that matter, or accounting or computer sciences or something like that. And I would argue it's inherently more valuable. But I think your question about whether or not an academic life is worth pursuing as opposed to some alternative. Which would be what? I don't know. Getting a job, earning money, you know, being an artist, traveling the world, doing good works. What's the alternative? Phil?

4:23 Mark: Podcasting?

4:24 Seth: He can't answer.

4:25 Mark: Unfortunately, I came this close to doing a offensive accent with a little voice to pretend I was Phil. But you just were saved from that.

4:33 Seth: Well, I think that would be fair. I think Phil's asking a very valid question. It would be unfair.

4:38 Wes: Are those student evaluations at ut? The. The tables, Mark?

4:43 Mark: The one that. Where some students said I was an asshole?

4:46 Wes: Something like that said, Mark Linsenmayer sucks huge balls.

4:53 Seth: Nice.

4:54 Mark: See, I knew who was the person who did that and the reason he used the sucks part is because I had written on his paper that I was grading, like the only reason I'm giving you an A on this is because all the other papers suck. And for some reason he didn't. He, he took offense to that. That was supposed to be like a, you know, bonding with him. This was actually my first semester grading anything, so I had some things to learn about how to relate to students.

5:17 Wes: Yeah, I just used to like speaking of cynicism, I got so cynical. I would just cross out entire paragraphs. I stopped putting notes on students papers and just cross out entire paragraphs and put no in the margin. And then I stopped leaving comments altogether. And I would just write what I considered the prototypical essay, the correct essay. For that I'd stick it in every blue book.

5:43 Seth: So Phil, there's a difference between cynicism about academia as a career, cynicism about graduate school as a pursuit, cynicism about the philosophy program at the University of Texas at Austin in the mid-90s, and then cynicism, I suppose about further academic

6:01 Mark: pursuits altogether, or cynicism about the practice of philosophy at all.

6:05 Seth: Yes. So it doesn't sound like you have question about the practice of philosophy. Sounds like your issue is about whether or not to go to graduate school.

6:15 Wes: I have to say my cynicism has

6:17 Mark: faded after having a real job. How much better it was in graduate school.

6:22 Wes: Yeah, that's my recommendation to Phil. Go out and get a real job and then come back later in life. And you can appreciate I'm only interested in things that are useless. And I'm no longer interested in making money. Not that I ever really was. But I think you want to look at all the horror stories and scare yourself about getting a job or how much that sucks. The Chronicle of Higher Education is constantly publishing that stuff. Go on the Metafilter. That's got a lot of great stuff. Search for should I go into a philosophy program? And I used to do that periodically, whenever I started feeling like, wow, I really wish I were back in academia.

I would just go read all those horror stories. But at this point I feel like I could tolerate the bad things. And I don't have the same doubts about, oh, this is useless. And this isn't really relevant to anything. I just, I enjoy it for its own sake. But I would definitely not go in with the idea that I would have to have a tenure track position somewhere afterwards because the job market is so competitive. I would go into it purely out of just wanting to spend my time that way. And if it, you know, I got a tenure track position. Great. But the amount of anxiety that I had at UT because everyone was talking about how impossible it was to get a job, it was tremendous.

7:30 Mark: So are you intending to just never have kids? Because what you're describing, like the reason I was able to go to graduate school and live on a four digit income for that while, because it didn't matter because it was just me or even when I was like, you know, with a girlfriend. Just wasn't the same thing in terms of having to get a financial foundation for a life.

7:52 Wes: So you got to find the right woman, Mark.

7:56 Mark: We'll just support you.

7:57 Wes: Who's rich, the one who's going to the wealthy woman who will support you? I don't know, I. I haven't had kids yet, so that may change things.

8:08 Mark: I have come to the realization maybe I knew this all along, but that the job system is a cruel joke. So this whole idea that eventually you have to be doing something that takes up all of your time and making money off it, you have to sell away your life as an evil, evil thing. And I think that everybody has to face up to that at some point. There's only so long for most people that you could go on living like a college student, even though Wes can extend that for a long time. So I would think, you know, with my kids, I'm gonna try to prepare them from right away to figure out how to beat the system.

And that's a different thing from saying how to get a good job. I mean that's what we were raised like. Oh, you want to get trained and you know, have a good education for a good job. So yeah, of course I'm going to stay in school. Of course I'm going to try hard to get good enough grades to get where you want to go. But it's not even that because a lot of people, when they get a good job, that is the death of them, right? The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. So you don't want to end up in a terrible job that's going to SAP you of everything you have.

On the other hand, to get something that you actually enjoy, that actually gives you meaning is, you know, you either have to just stumble onto something and be lucky or find something you really love, I think pretty early on and train specifically to do that. And of course you might even find when you get there that it wasn't for you anyway. But so philosophy is one of those kinds of things that maybe you find that this is something that I really love. And I'm willing to put up with all the crap that goes into trying to do philosophy professionally, which is, yeah, it's really hard to get a job, it's very competitive.

And so you just really frickin better be putting all your energy into it to being cooler than anybody else in your program and getting in a really goddamn good program in the first place. Which means having really good grades and working really hard on a honors thesis or whatever it is that you need to get into a really good school. I don't think I was prepared in that way. I did well enough, but not like well enough to get into the most awesome schools. And then once I got there, it's not like I was publishing and things from the very first moment that I got there or at all, frankly.

So yeah, if it's your goal, you just really better make it your goal. I saw that as a future of. Well, if I try my hardest down this academic professional route, then I will be living in Montana, doing a postdoc and then I'm gonna have to move to some other shitty university city. Like the odds of actually getting to live in a place that is nice are gonna be very low. Plus just the difficulty of getting one in the first place. That all made me frustrated about. So even from the moment I got in grad school, I was like, I'm doing something I really enjoy now and it's making my life better.

I was also doing a lot more stuff with my band and stuff. But around the time I hit 28 years old or something, I'm gonna hit a brick wall and I'm gonna have to say my life is basically over because I have to get a real job. And it didn't turn out quite that badly. But I did have to spend a number of years working in a filthy, nasty office doing stuff that I hated.

10:57 Wes: So, Phil, you definitely don't need to look up discouraging stories on the Internet after.

11:04 Seth: Well, let me definitely take that back. Yeah. Let me say something kind of in counterpoint. I don't know if I want to agree or disagree with Mark. I definitely think that we treat work as this. It's like there's this giant machine and that your role when you're younger is to try to figure out which cog. Which part you're going to be. And you know, hopefully you're. Hopefully you're not a tiny one that gets replaced often, which is some really critical piece in the center that gets a lot of love and attention in the form of cash. But the other thing is, the reason I know Mark and Wes and we're doing this is because we went to grad school.

I would not be doing a philosophy podcast, and I would not be probably even as knowledgeable or interested as I am if I hadn't had that experience. And one of the reasons I went back to graduate school, and I kind of went back partially because I didn't know what else to do with my life and partially because I thought, oh, I'm going to be a professional academic. But the problem was I went to a really, really good undergraduate school. And even in high school, I had really, really smart, good friends. And we would discuss things like literature and philosophy and politics and music and things like that.

And what I found was, when I was out on my own after school while all my other friends were in grad school or off in new cities doing jobs, was that it's very hard to find people to surround yourself with that share your interests and your passions where you can enjoy exchanging ideas or doing things like that. And if you find that group of people and you're able to kind of think about and pursue the things you want to think about and pursue without having to go to school to do it, more power to you. But I had to go to graduate school to find people that were like me or that shared my interests so that I could be fulfilled.

And a big part of the reason of doing this with Mark and Wes now, and I thank Mark for reaching out to us, is that it does fill kind of a void or gap in my life. And I am. I, for a long time was the definition of one of those little tiny parts. I was a tool. That's what I did when I left grad school. I became a tool. And, you know, only now am I kind of finding my own footing as a non tool, like self sustaining individual, per Mark's description. So anyway, enough attention for Phil.

13:08 Mark: We should address everything in the remainder of this podcast to Phil by name. Just like all the people in their speeches just started talking to Joe the Plumber directly.

13:18 Seth: If I'm not mistaken, Phil's email address suggested that he was actually at wwu. Edu, Right, Western Washington. So you can just say Phil at wwu and that would be the equivalent of Joe.

13:31 Mark: I don't know if I could say that. How about wwf?

13:34 Seth: Phil at wwf. That'll work.

13:36 Mark: The World Wrestling Theater.

13:37 Seth: Let me tell you something, Linsenmayer. There's gonna be a throwdown at the stadium this weekend.

13:43 Mark: That is a better fill voice than I was gonna do.

13:45 Seth: The last professional wrestling event I went to was many, many, many years ago. Long before there was no WWE or wwf. It was something else. But, like, back when they had Andre the Giant and Pretty Boy Ric Flair. Is he still around? I don't even know. The Iron Sheik.

14:02 Wes: Yeah, I used to watch all those guys.

14:04 Seth: I actually took a flight once from LA to Dallas and those guys were on it. They were traveling from one site to the next. It was one of those big jets that has, like, two seats on either side and, like five in the middle. And they had like two or three rows for, like, five of them of those five seat rows in the middle, and they were just knocking back Budweisers and playing cards or sleeping. The Iron Sheik were but, like bifocals.

14:25 Wes: Andre the Giant had a tragic life.

14:28 Seth: He did.

14:28 Wes: Have you seen that documentary?

14:30 Seth: No. There's a documentary?

14:32 Wes: Yeah. My friend Andre, he eventually died on that. Caused his largeness.

14:37 Mark: Yeah, but he had a big heart.

14:40 Wes: He had a huge heart. That's what killed him.

14:43 Mark: All right, so putting down Andre the Giant as a keyword for searching on this episode. How about some Kant?

14:49 Seth: How about some Kant?

14:51 Wes: Sweet, sweet, sweet.

14:55 Mark: Now, my experience with Kant, looking back, I didn't really like him because I thought he was such a fuddy duddy, such a moral absolutist, and I thought he. His writing was purposefully obnoxious in style, like many of these folks. But actually, when I got down to it, like, I took a whole class of Kant reading the first Critique, for the most part. So the Critique of Pure Reason, which is mostly about epistemology, what we're not talking about. And I found that I could at least decipher what he was saying pretty easily. It wasn't like Hegel, who was just freaking opaque and you had to just guess at what he was talking about.

Kant, yeah. Okay, he uses some obnoxious language, but he uses it consistently, and he's very redundant about it. You know, there's a lot to get through, but at least you really know what the words he's using mean. He conveys his point very thoroughly, whatever you may think about its validity. No, yeah.

15:46 Wes: Kant is what got me into philosophy. The Critique of Pure Reason.

15:51 Mark: That was what got you into philosophy. So it's the first thing.

15:55 Wes: No, it was the first thing that I really was obsessive about. The Critique of Pure Reason and reading it over spring break, believe it or not, just poring over every paragraph.

16:05 Mark: Spring break of third grade, spring break of college.

16:08 Seth: Wes was at. Wes was at Daytona Beach, he had the tigurator going and the little critique of the.

16:15 Wes: They were filming a Girls Gone Wild thing around me and I was just sitting there reading the Critique of Pure Reason.

16:20 Seth: It's one of the early episodes. If you go on the website, I'm sure you can find it.

16:22 Wes: You'll see me in the background.

16:24 Seth: That's right.

16:24 Wes: Gross and pale. But yeah, seriously, I loved. I thought with Kant, the difficulty of the writing was justified by the difficulty of the subject. It's not like Lacan, where he's obviously being an arrogant person, prick and insulting everyone.

16:39 Mark: Now, does it count as name dropping if we just drop someone's name to dismiss them? Not to say. You'll understand what I mean if you read this person. But just to say not shitty like Lacan, that's okay, right?

16:49 Seth: I would call that a name drop. Now, if Wes says, well, Lacan was arrogant French guy and that's why I'm using him as an example, blah, blah, blah, but neither here nor there.

16:58 Wes: He was a French psychoanalyst who writes in a very, very opaque style, like Hegel and Kant, much like Dr. Phil.

17:04 Seth: Okay, I'm going to disagree with you guys about Hegel anyway. Sorry. Hegel was another German philosopher, by the way, who is a antecedent to Kant.

17:12 Mark: Some stuff he wrote was very clear. And the phenomenology of spirit that we will, I hope, talk about fairly soon was difficult.

17:20 Seth: Yes, it's very difficult.

17:21 Mark: That's actually the book that I became obsessed with. Like, if I can read this, I can freaking read anything.

17:26 Seth: That's probably not a bad judgment call on your part. So my experience with Kant is that, you know, I didn't have the same kind of entry point the way Wes did. But Kant is one of the maybe three or four figures in philosophy that you can't avoid. Like, no matter what you think or who you read or what you say at certain points of time, anything that you read after Kant is going to somehow lead you back to him, or somebody's going to make reference to him, or he's going to have somehow influence. But I don't think I read anything.

17:53 Mark: If they just say he's a good writer, not like Kant, that shitty opaque writer.

17:56 Seth: Yes, there's always some reference, but I don't think I seriously read Kant. I didn't read the Critique of Pure Reason until I was in grad school. When I was in undergrad, I think I read some. I might have read the Grounding and maybe something else, but, I mean, I

18:09 Mark: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics is like the.

18:13 Seth: Yeah, that might have been cheat sheet. That might have been it too.

18:15 Mark: Yep.

18:16 Seth: And then I actually thought the Critique of Pure Reason was a. I think I only made it through the first half of it, now that I think about it. But it's a terrific book. I didn't find it very easy to understand, but I think he does some amazingly good work in it.

18:29 Wes: I think it's critical to so much of 20th century philosophy, whether that's analytic or continental. So I think it is very difficult to understand a lot of things. Even people who don't explicitly mention Kant, like Hegel, and sometimes they'll be responding point by point to Kantianism. And if you haven't had the background, then it's very difficult.

18:48 Mark: Well, and even people like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, who we don't really know if they read Kant or not, they probably didn't read that much of him, are still responding to him.

18:57 Wes: Right, right.

18:59 Mark: That's how big it was in the intellectual climate.

19:01 Wes: And then of course, many people are bastardizing him or misrepresenting him, like Bertrand Russell, the analytic philosopher, who is Wittgenstein's mentor, who wrote a history of philosophy, which I don't have a very high opinion of, especially his account of Kant.

19:14 Mark: What about morality in particular? So Kant is most famous for his epistemology, which is that viewpoint that separates the world of experience from the world as it is behind experience. Right. So all the people who want everything reducible to scientific method, well, those people are just talking about the world of experience. Right. So guys like Hume, who was right before him, who was skeptical about many of the claims of metaphysics and said, no, no, we have to be able to reduce everything to some possible perception. Just the empiricists in general did this to say, you have to have perceptions of something or else you don't know what you're talking about.

And Kant wanted to acknowledge what was right about that and say the scientific method is exactly doing what it's supposed to do if it's kept to its appropriate sphere. But he wanted to say, well, that's just the world of appearances, the phenomena. There is the world of reality behind it. We don't really know anything much about it. He called it the world of noumena. So the stuff in the noumenal world is not really a proper object of science, and we shouldn't be doing a dogmatic metaphysics about it. We shouldn't say we know for sure there is a God and, you know, the kind of stuff that they were doing in the Middle Ages and that even Leibniz and even Descartes was doing.

He thought that there were some strict limits. You had to do have some other approach if you wanted to say anything intelligent at all about the noumena or

20:32 Wes: that there's a soul, such a thing as.

20:35 Mark: We're just introducing Kant.

20:38 Seth: Okay. All right.

20:40 Wes: There's a parallel between what he does with moral law and natural law.

20:44 Mark: Right.

20:45 Wes: To know that freedom, things like autonomy. Kant isn't saying that we know we're autonomous, we know that there's a God. All those things are, we may think, but we can never know them.

20:55 Mark: So that's what he's most famous for. The ethics, though, also is pretty famous. But not many people, when you just talk about the ethics, like in an ethics class, necessarily link them up. But if you actually read the groundwork here, like over half of it is just spent linking his ethical views to this epistemological, metaphysical approach that he'd worked out.

21:12 Seth: Yeah.

21:13 Mark: And all the weirdness of the language is all reducible to his high level of concern with making his overall system consistent, which, if you're really just reading it for the ethics, maybe you don't have to care about.

21:24 Wes: Well, one more, and I think this will be relevant, one more aspect of the epistemology is that he was worried about Hume's skeptical critique. So, for instance, causality you can debunk by saying, what is our concept of causality? That things happen in sequence or near each other. And there's no way to say that one thing really has caused the other. It's just association. It's just something for which there's really no evidence.

21:48 Mark: You never perceive the actual causing.

21:50 Wes: Yeah. And so that attack on science actually worried Kant. Kant was also a scientist. So what Kant wanted to say is, well, look, if we start with this idea that there is such a thing as organized experience, and what does that imply? And he thought that implied. Well, the epistemology gets very complicated, but it has a lot to do with the role of the mind in sort of giving laws to the world, giving natural laws, including causality, as a way of organizing the world. But that becomes a ground for what Kant calls objectivity. So that the world for us is already, in a way, constructed by the mind.

And when we do science, we're breaking it apart again. And there's a natural fitting between the synthesizing and the breaking apart. That's important because when we start talking about the groundwork here, the analogy to natural law is this moral law, which we also are the wellspring of, except that the moral law is something that we can go against. And natural law, of course we can't. You know, we can't defy the laws of physics, but if it's a law that we shouldn't lie, we can, of course, decide to lie.

22:54 Seth: So, key message is that his epistemology and his metaphysics and all that are intimately tied to his conception of morality. So if you just read the grounding or even the fundamental principles of the metaphysics of morality, you're going to get a healthy dose of the Kantian metaphysics.

23:14 Mark: Right. Knowing the things that we've just described will help people trying to approach this quite a bit.

23:18 Seth: Yes, because there's definitely language that he uses that's very funky if you don't really realize that he's using technical terms, like when he talks about pure reason versus practical reason and pure practical reason. These things sound very, very strange if you don't understand how and why he's using them the way that he does.

23:39 Wes: Yeah.

23:39 Mark: Is that a good place to start with those terms, or should we just jump to the categorical imperative?

23:43 Wes: Let's sketch out the argument from the concept of morality to the categorical imperative

23:49 Mark: from the concept of morality itself. That is the categorical imperative.

23:53 Wes: I think the idea is that you start with the concept of morality and what is right. And that implies, for Kant, autonomy. It implies freedom of will. So in that sense, he's beginning with a sort of conceptual analysis. He's saying, what do we have to presuppose in order for there to be any such thing as morality or. Or odd. And without freedom of will, you have no such thing as morality. That's the first step of the argument.

24:16 Seth: Yeah. Do you mind if I take a stab at it?

24:18 Wes: Yeah, go ahead.

24:19 Seth: Okay. So the first thing, and it's not necessarily an assumption, is. But Kant says everyone has to admit that if a law is going to have moral force, that is, if it's going to be the basis of an obligation, like, you must do this, it has to carry with it absolute necessity. So that if you say something, for example, thou shalt not lie, that has to be valid for any rational being, and it can't be conditionally necessary or conditionally true. It has to be absolutely true.

24:51 Mark: Well, why is that the case? It sounds like you're saying it has to apply in all circumstances. And yes, he does see that as an absolute rule, but why intuitively, should we just accept that as A starting point.

25:01 Seth: I think that's a topic for discussion. I'm saying that I think we go. That's where he starts the argument.

25:06 Wes: I think the idea is that there to be any such thing as obligation, there has to be autonomy of the will, which means that the will is not determined by these external influences, which he calls heteronomy. It's not determined merely by the fact that you want to eat something right now or merely because of a certain emotion. There has to be freedom from those influences. Which is not to say that we're completely free from influence. It's just that the influence. Influence has to come from inside, from laws that we ourselves supply, because those are laws. Then everything has to be universalized. Without law, there's no sense of freedom that you can explicate in a meaningful way.

25:44 Mark: Right? So it's the form of law itself. And let me just add one little piece here. So actually, what he starts the preface with is by distinguishing, kind of like we were just saying, the truths of experience versus the truths of reason. So like Seth was saying that these laws have to be necessary. Necessity can never come from experience.

26:02 Seth: Yes, exactly. Which is.

26:03 Mark: And that was the whole deal with science, that we think, oh, you know, I drop this and it falls. I drop this and it falls. Therefore there's gravity or something. Well, that you can make an inductive generalization and say, well, so far everything seems to be exhibiting behavior in the form of the law of gravity. But if the law of gravity is real, he thinks that the way we actually conceive of a scientific law like that is something that actually necessarily holds. Not that things will always fall, but however you phrase it, you know, that objects will be attracted to each other in proportion to their masses.

And so if that's necessary, it's necessary in the same way that a mathematical truth is. And I. I think already there. There's a pretty big jump. But, I mean, you can see where he gets the notion of necessity, really. I use math itself, right? I can take two fingers and another two fingers and count them. That makes four. How do I know from that that two plus two equals four? Well, maybe next time I count two fingers and another two fingers, that'll be five or something. Well, no, this idea that two plus two equals four is. Is necessary mathematics, for Kant proves that there is something outside the realm of experience.

And so he extends that in the same way to science. And now here with ethics, he's saying that's actually the way we think of ethical obligation. I don't say Some action is right because I see virtuous people doing it, or I don't say some action is right because I look at some end that it produces and say, oh, that was the right action. No, I just. I have this intuition that even if nobody does that, that's what right is,

27:24 Wes: and it's not right sometimes and wrong other times correct. So that's why there's the universality and necessity.

27:31 Mark: Yes. So the weird leap here, though, maybe we should actually give what the categorical imperative is and try to connect this back to here, because I. It's a freaking bizarre jump to me. So I guess what he's saying is the form of willing itself, the form of free willing, is necessarily universal in the same way that a scientific law is right. So if I just say I'm going to eat something because I have hunger, oh, well, now I'm distracted by that thing over there and I have an appetite to go and check that out or whatever, then those are purely subjective.

You know, those are appetites, desires arising in me. But somehow, no matter how many appetites there are like that, we always are free to turn away from all of them and do something else. So he's like, how could that be possible? Well, there must be something outside of inclination that we could draw upon for our motivation. So he thinks that's just in the same way that the mind can turn from numbers of fingers in front of me to this universal mathematical truth. I could turn from the quality of people's actions in front of me and the choices I have to this eternal, necessary, universal moral truth.

Just by reason. In the same way?

28:35 Seth: Yes.

28:35 Mark: Is that accurate?

28:36 Seth: I think so. If Wes says no, then I guess I can't agree with you, but it sounded pretty good, you sheep.

28:43 Wes: I mean, one thing to remember is Kant is an empirical determinist when it comes to the empirical realm. He's a Newtonian. He's a materialist. And there's the brain and there's sensory perceptions, and everything that happens is deterministic. This is really hard to reconcile with the other part of this, but. So the idea is that if you are acting simply within that realm, then you're not acting autonomously. You're just subject to the determinations of external causes. The idea is that the subjective plane is its own difference, cut off from the empirical in some way, and there's a possibility for autonomy on one side of it, even though everything on the other side is determined. So I know that we're not going to be able to make sense of that.

29:23 Mark: Well, no, we've already said something about the epistemology and what he means. See, I'm surprised that you're giving this first because chronologically in the book, he actually gives this last. This bit about freedom of the will. The system fits together so tightly that you could really start anywhere and just start eating your way in. So this is fine.

29:41 Seth: I think I must have read a different book anyway. But that's.

29:44 Mark: Well, you're saying that in one respect we are determined, right? Insofar as we are objects of experience in the external world, so brains and bodies, but yet we experience ourselves as free. It's a practical necessity. We have to think of ourselves as free.

29:59 Wes: Right.

30:00 Mark: So how do we reconcile that? Well, he uses his epistemology in saying, well, we must be free in the noumenal realm, in the land beyond experience. And so we could sort of think of ourselves.

30:11 Wes: Must be. Not that we know that, but that's the way we have to act as

30:14 Mark: if that is the case.

30:15 Wes: We have to act as if. As if is the very important. Important. Yeah.

30:18 Mark: All right. And so what does that imply that we have this freedom that goes into the noumenal realm? Well, according to his psychology, his view of the mind, right, We've got three parts of the mind. And this is more detail than he gives here, but I might as well give it. We have sensibility, right? So things that are. We immediately understand that are in front of us, that includes our desires, our inclinations, our fears. We have the understanding which is the thing that we use to put those together. So we say, oh, I got hurt when I touched that electric socket last time, and I got hurt the time before, so I'll probably get hurt next time.

So that's how we do inductive generalizations. We use the understanding. Well, if we're going to reach beyond the kind of stuff that could be experienced, then we must be using reason. So reason means something more special than just like the use of the mind to think about stuff. Some of that is the understanding. But reason is the only faculty that reaches into the noumenal realm, to the realm of things as they are in themselves. And that's how we get mathematical truths. That's how we get these truth of necessity about science, right? It's not just inductive generalization and putting individual cases together.

When we come up with the universal law, it's reason is getting involved. And so the same thing is happening with here with. With the mind and the soul.

31:32 Wes: Let's give a very concrete example of that on the on the epistemological side, suppose I do the calculation two plus two equals four, and someone says, well, why do you believe two plus two equals four? And you give the explanation, well, because I did the calculation according to the right rules, and this is a necessary kind of truth. And the other person comes back at you and says, well, no, what's going on is completely explicable in terms of biology and brain processes. And, you know, click, click, the machine does this and that, and here's the output.

So the representational side of it, this sort of subjective experience of two plus two equals four is one explanation. Then there's a physical explanation on the other side. Point is that both of those are true, but they coexist. And you can say the same thing with. Take an instance where you have resisted inclination and you didn't lie to someone, even though there was the inclination to lie, and you did it completely out of duty and for obligation. And we'll discuss this later. Well, in the empirical realm, everything is determined. You're just a billiard ball.

You're being shoved around by the events of nature, and there is no freedom. But in this, what Kant calls transcendental realm, in this area of reason that you were describing, Mark, it can also be the case that we think of ourselves as acting autonomously. And in a way, that's all that's necessary. That representational realm of thinking you're autonomous is a different plane of representation that can coexist with the realm in which we're just determined creatures. The question of error. Whether we're right to say that in a way doesn't even matter, because it's that feeling.

It's that thought of our autonomy which is important, the idea of it. That's right.

33:08 Mark: It's this technical term, idea with a capital I that can only apply to things in the numeral realm, not to concrete understandings of things that we can touch. So that still leaves the question of what do we actually find when we look, using the special faculty of reason, in the noumenal realm regarding obligation? And the way he puts it is it's just the form of willing itself. Is that what he says?

33:30 Wes: Is that one of his formulations, the form of.

33:32 Mark: No, I'm just talking about when he explains it, not when he gives a categorical imperative.

33:36 Wes: That sounds right.

33:37 Mark: Is this just exactly the way you would not have started explaining this, Seth?

33:42 Seth: Well, I'll tell you, I'm realizing now that text I was reading was the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals. Yeah, that's yeah, same one.

33:51 Mark: Yeah, that's the same one.

33:53 Seth: Okay. I must be reading a different translation.

33:55 Mark: But this is the last chapter is mostly where he talks about this.

33:58 Seth: Yeah, chapters. Right, right. I just feel using the term noumenal is kind of making this more complicated than maybe it needs to be.

34:05 Mark: The world in itself. Okay.

34:06 Seth: It's really the world. Yeah. I want to say you're right.

34:10 Mark: There is apart from experience, as it

34:11 Seth: is apart from experience. Yes.

34:13 Wes: They are things in themselves, and they the world that famously include God and soul and free will and traditional metaphysical concepts of substance underlying things that Kant says we can't really know. Yeah, the real things of the world we can't know. We only know these empirical, I'd say, effects of them, whatever comes in through the senses. So there's always the addition of our own mental operation to experience.

34:39 Seth: Yeah.

34:40 Wes: So experience never really is of what is absolutely out there external to us. It's always adulterated with our own activity. Sorry, Seth.

34:48 Seth: No, no. There just seems to me that in terms of posing the question and kind of posing the. To try to explain why there's this need to do what he thinks there is. I thought there was a pretty straightforward piece in the preface where he kind of outlines it, but I realize now that that's like coloring my interpretation of what you guys are saying, and I'm making myself lost. This, by the way, is not unusual when you're talking about Kant. For anybody out there who's actually listening to this, it is easy to get lost in the nuances.

35:12 Mark: I found one statement of the point I was trying to make.

35:14 Seth: Okay.

35:15 Mark: Which is the very end of chapter two, which in mine it subheading, that is in brackets, which means the translator added it, the position of the argument. But it's the last section. An absolute goodwill whose principle must be a categorical imperative will therefore be undetermined in respect to all objects contain only the form of willing, and that as autonomy. So we haven't explained what the categorical imperative is. And things. But so what? When we strip away the objects that we could be considering, like when we're trying to figure out what we're going to do, we have some end in mind.

And a lot of those ends come to us out of experience. So anything that's a result of our desires or our dad telling us to do something is something that comes out of our experience. If you strip all that away and just consider the form of willing in itself, what you get from reason, then Kant says what's left is only actions that could be universal laws. They're universal actions, the form of willing. And this is a bizarre leap. And I'll jump ahead and say, I don't think it works a bit. But the way he presents it is pretty elegant, I think. So that's where the first formulation of the categorical imperative comes from.

We want to read that.

36:27 Wes: Sure.

36:28 Mark: Because I've not made the jump easy enough.

36:29 Seth: Go ahead.

36:30 Wes: Categorical imperative would be that which represented an action as necessary of itself without reference to another end, as objectively necessary. But he contrasts it to this hypothetical imperatives. So I suppose a hypothetical imperative would

36:46 Mark: be, if you want to be healthy, you should exercise.

36:49 Wes: Yeah, there you go.

36:50 Mark: Or if you want to make people happy, you should do things like utilitarian to make them happy.

36:56 Wes: Right. I was actually thinking, if you want ice cream, you have to get up and go get it. And I was thinking, well, that's too much effort. But anyway, there's a hypothetical.

37:04 Mark: Right. Which is the same as saying, again, like, if you get rid of all the objective experience, like your desire for ice cream, and just consider what is going to command you, even if you don't want anything, even if you have no goals that you've come up with yourself, you know, out of experience, this is what's left. And so they just call it the categorical imperative. What that means is it applies categorically across the board. It applies to you regardless of your particular goals or situation. Yes, but what it actually, the formulation of it is, it's in chapter one, a bit in.

But what kind of law can this be, the thought of which, even without regard to the results expected from it, has to determine the will. And if it is to be called good. Absolutely and without qualification. Right. Since I've robbed the will of every inducement that might arise from it as a consequence of obeying particular law. Right. We've got rid of all these goals that we might have come up through experience. Nothing is left but the conformity of actions to universal law as such. And this alone must serve the will as its principle. So universal law of action as such, that is to say, I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law.

Right. The maxim being sort of the principle behind why you're doing what you're doing. And it's just called a maximum because it's supposed to be like a general rule. It's not like, you know, I want ice cream, so I'm going to get it right now. No, I have in Mind a maxim that says, whenever I want ice cream, I should go and get it. So that's, that's really all maxim means. So according to Kant, again, when you get rid of all this empirical stuff, all that remains is universality. So anything that I decide to do, I have to consider whether it is something that could be a universal law, could apply to everybody.

38:40 Seth: Another way to say it is if you strip out all of the things that you would typically think of as either circumstance or motivation. Desire, fear, it's hot. The people around you, the consequences. If you strip out anything that might make your decision to do that act,

39:01 Mark: conditional or hypothetical, conditional upon the existence of some desire.

39:05 Seth: If I was not. Am I not acting out of fear? Okay. Am I not acting out of this? Okay. Am I not acting. Am I not doing this because of this? And you get down to. You're supposed to theoretically get down to something like, I'm doing it because it's right. And what right means is that anybody else who is in my situation should do the, you know, or I would will that this was a universal law. Like, I take out all these things. And I'm not saying I would will that anybody would do this unless they were heavily sedated. Right. Or whatever that. Whatever the appropriate thing is.

And the question just becomes about whether or not, and I pose this to the people out there listening. Can you even conceive of a circumstance where that even makes sense to say that? Can you conceive of stripping out all of those different elements and saying anything that has any content or meaning? It's a weird, weird, weird thing.

39:55 Mark: Yeah.

39:55 Wes: One thing to note is that it's not that you're not going to have all those interests and desires, and it's just that they're not going to be decisive in your.

40:02 Seth: Yes, exactly. I'm saying strip them out in terms of your. In terms of your decision about why to do something, not that you don't experience them. That's actually one of the good things about Kant is that even though it doesn't sound like it when he's talking or writing, he's very focused on experience. You know, he's really just trying to explain experience and ground it, not do away with it.

40:22 Mark: Yeah, yeah. Let's give the easy examples because otherwise this universality thing doesn't make any sense. Do you have to be able to coherently will that the maxim behind your action could be a universal law? So here's the obvious one. I'm thinking about killing my brother. Well, what if that's the obvious. Everybody. What if. Actually I should just say I'm thinking about killing somebody. Right. So I'm abstracting from the particular circumstance. If that was a universal law that everybody killed somebody, then everybody would be dead. And I couldn't be sitting here thinking this right now. I couldn't be contemplating this murder because my parents. Parents. Parents would have been murdered long ago.

41:02 Wes: So figure out if it's consistent. Make sure there's no contradiction between the maxim and this alternate world in which the maxim has been universalized. Right.

41:10 Mark: In which it's not just a normative law of what we should do, but it's a descriptive law about what people actually do. Yeah, that's the, that's the big description here. In the whole. The whole thing is the normative stuff can't come from experience.

41:20 Wes: So take the example of deception. And you know, I'm thinking, well, I shouldn't lie, but there's this particular case where the consequences are going to be bad, so I'm going to lie in this case. So you start out, you universalize that it would be the case that I imagine a world in which everyone's maxim is that they can lie. And I think you can contextualize it to situations that they can lie in these hard situations, let's say, let's make that the maxim. So in that world, I think the argument is that if everyone thinks that, then there's no such thing as giving one's word. People aren't going to take anyone's promises seriously. Like that lying would be so frequent that your deception couldn't work anyway. So there's a contradiction between this idea of thinking that you should lie and then the sort of inefficacy of it in this world in which everyone does lie. Is that right?

42:11 Mark: Yeah. And the fact that you had to add the context in it, like your entire circumstance right there is where it seems to fall apart. Not to jump ahead and start criticizing right away, but because how specific can you be? Like, I guess I hold it as an okay rule myself that it's okay to lie, like in really extreme circumstance if it's a matter of life or death. And then you try to universalize that. What if everybody, when they were in an extreme matter of life or death circumstance, were to lie? Could you universalize that? Sure, because that just doesn't happen that often.

So in this imagined world in which that is a universal law, still people mostly tell the truth because they're not in extreme circumstances. And yet we know every time somebody's in Extreme circumstances that going to lie. So when somebody tells me something, then I would be like, well, either that person is telling the truth or they're in extreme circumstances, in which case I might say they probably have a good reason for telling the lie and maybe I shouldn't care.

43:04 Seth: I get what Mark is saying, right? Because you could say like, well, anybody who's 41 years old with more or less dark hair, with a little bit of gray, who happens to be 5 foot 7. La di ya da da. Right?

43:18 Mark: See, that's in your maxim. Yeah.

43:19 Seth: Should do X in such and such a circumstance. Then you could create a plethora of universal laws where you basically describe a set of conditions that was so specific and could only obtain, you know, that you'd feel comfortable doing that. But I think what we like Bush

43:33 Wes: v. Go, it's like Bush v. Gore.

43:37 Seth: Yeah. I mean, that's, that's what all those. That's what all those riders, all those tax exemptions and stuff in the laws are. But here's the thing. We have to keep in mind that Kant has this idea that he starts off the whole discussion with, hey, there's a world of experience. Some of it's about nature. We call that physics. When you do the study of that, you're doing physics. When you're talking about experience in terms of the human will and human behavior, we call that moral philosophy. So when he's thinking about a universal law, if you think about these two things, you have all of the experiences, all natural phenomenon, and you study that and you call it physics.

And then you use pure reason to get laws of physics that are not part of experience. Right. You use your pure. You use reason to get those laws out. And what are those laws? Gravity. Right. F equals ma. Those sorts of things. I think he's thinking the same thing here, where I have this world of experience, only I'm talking about not natural phenomena, but human behavior and human phenomena, so to speak. Now I'm going to use my pure reason to find out what those laws are that govern human behavior so that I can say what we ought to do. I don't think they're going to be specific because laws of physics that govern nature are not specific.

They're very, very general. In fact, that's kind of part of what defines them because the law of gravity obtains always everywhere, so to speak, in all macro phenomena, not just here, not just there. So we'd have to think about moral laws as being those kinds of laws. Even though I don't know that that Makes sense. I think that's what you have to believe if you want to believe his approach.

45:12 Mark: No, I think you're right that what I was giving is a pretty standard response to Kant. And I still think we should talk about it some more. But I did read elsewhere that Kant did not believe that his categorical imperative could. You could then deductively figure out from that a bunch of specific rules for action that it was giving. Yeah, it's a test on particular actions whether you should do it or not. But it doesn't follow from that that then you can come up with, you know, these are the ideal laws to have. These are the ideal moral precepts to follow. I'm not completely sure what to make of that. This is in some secondary sources. And he's a little more clear about this in another one of his works, the Metaphysics of Morals, that he wrote after this, which.

45:51 Wes: Yeah, responds to some of these things and elaborates and changes some of his position. Do you have any response to that? Objection. Is there a way to get around that?

46:00 Mark: Mark my own objection.

46:02 Wes: Yeah.

46:03 Mark: No, instead I want to just talk about it some more and make fun of Kant because it's. It's such an obvious thing. I mean, I guess when I was reflecting back on this, and I really did, when I approached Kant this time, I wanted to do it in a very sympathetic way because I don't think I'd really done that before that. I'm always looking, oh, what's the formulation? Oh, I can shoot that down. But they sort of give it the same charity that I gave to utilitarianism last time that it seemed. There are lots of stupid ways we could use the utilitarian calculation to come up with very counterintuitive answers.

Right. Oh, it's okay to kill somebody if 10 other people will be made happy by the killing or something. If you rig your calculation to make it skew counterintuitive, you can do that. Well, it's kind of the same thing here. So I actually just taught a few years ago, we read a section of the groundwork here, including this formulation of the categorical imperative, and I went through some examples. Any particular action you take, it seems there are many, many, many maxims you could use to describe that action. Like, what action is it exactly that you're taking?

So let's just say I'm getting into my car. Well, what if everybody got into my car and they wouldn't fit? Like. So that's an example of a dumb interpretation of the categorical imperative.

47:12 Wes: Yeah. That's not a decision.

47:13 Mark: Right. So you have to be.

47:14 Wes: That involves obligation.

47:15 Mark: Yeah, it's really supposed to be a reduction of obligation to something that doesn't have any obvious moral terms in it. Right. Is it possible to conceive of a world in which everybody does this?

47:28 Wes: Right.

47:28 Mark: That's the big advantage to this form of the utilitarian calculation. It's supposed to reduce ought to. Well, not is, but is in this imaginary world that you come up with in which your maxim is universalized. And so that's supposed to make it, you know, all the more intuitive. And you can see where he's going.

47:44 Wes: Right.

47:44 Mark: He wants us to do actions that are going to be in harmony with other people's, you know. Right, Actions. So actually the third version of the categorical imperative which he gives explicitly puts it that way. But leaving that aside, looking at just this version that he has right now. Well, so it's not getting in my car. I shouldn't use that maximum. I shouldn't say it's getting in my car. It's getting in a mode of transportation that belongs to me. Well, if everybody did that, that should be okay, right? Well, unless you're saying if everybody had cars, then, you know, that would really SAP the fuel resources on the planet.

So in fact, our use of a car in itself is immoral in some way in that it's not really sustainable. You know, it's not overtly obnoxious in the way that stealing the car would be, but it's something that is ultimately unsustainable. So in other words, there are Kantian arguments for either way. So I could say, oh, it's fine for me to get in my car, it's my property. In other words, look at as a matter of property as opposed to, you know, stealing somebody else's car. Or you could look at it from this, you know, resource management.

48:40 Wes: Well, I don't come up with a

48:42 Mark: conscientious argument against it. I'm glad you brought that up. I'm considering owning the car as being part of the action here. That is a self contradictory thing because not everyone could own a car. Cars by nature are something that takes so much of the environment away and because a car does a little bit of damage. Well, if everybody was doing this damage, then, not that this will eventually lead to something bad, this would have already led to something bad.

49:04 Wes: You're talking about whether it's allowable. Getting in the car isn't an obligation.

49:08 Mark: Well, that's. No, but that's how you get at obligations. Is you figure out which actions are allowable, and if they're not, then that means there's some obligation that prevents you from doing it. That's just the nature of this thought experiment. On this version of the categorical imperative that you're trying to figure out, is this action I'm contemplating permissible or not? That's all. And you can consider any action. It doesn't have to be an obviously, you know, something that seems that involves morality or not.

49:30 Wes: Okay, if it's a matter of establishing permissibility, then aren't you saying in this hypothetical world that it's just permissible?

49:38 Mark: No, no. Because if you. If something permissible for me to do.

49:41 Wes: Not saying that everyone necessarily is lying all the time. You're saying it's permissible.

49:46 Mark: No, no. That it is lying all the time. That's the way the thought experiment works. You imagine that it is a universal law of nature. Not just that it's. Okay, that doesn't make it. That's not a law of nature. A law of nature means this is actually a description, right? A universal descriptor of the way people act. So it's saying everybody is robots obeying this law.

50:06 Seth: What?

50:07 Mark: That's what you're imagining. Maybe we need another example here.

50:09 Wes: Now, Mark, that probably sounds right to me, but let's see. I ought never to act except in such a way I could also will that my maxim should become universal law. And the maxim would be.

50:20 Mark: Right. A universal descriptive law.

50:22 Seth: No, not descriptive.

50:23 Mark: Yes, that's the point of this.

50:25 Seth: But he's talking about ought. I mean, he's not talking about describing what actually happens. He's talking about setting up rules. Obligation is about what you ought to do, not what you do.

50:36 Mark: Right, but that's the way he's defining. Ought is something that you ought to do is something that people in this imaginary world in which the maxim is universalized, which is to say everybody does it.

50:49 Seth: Yes.

50:50 Wes: Right.

50:50 Mark: So that becomes descriptive. So let's go back to the lying example.

50:53 Wes: It isn't. Okay, here's.

50:54 Mark: It's not that just everybody can lie. It's that everybody does, in fact, lie. And because everybody lies all the time, then nobody believes anybody else. In fact, language itself breaks down. It makes it inconceivable that we could even have communication if everybody lied all the time. Where his example actually is about promise keeping, which, of course is much more.

51:12 Wes: More specifically right, though. But I think you would phrase the maxim as something like conceive of a world in which everyone must lie anytime that they think that will get them what they want. Yeah, I think that putting your purpose in there is important. The maxim. So, in that. So, okay, let's go back to the car exam. In the hypothetical world, it would be everyone must when they want to go

51:35 Mark: somewhere, you know, more than two miles.

51:37 Wes: Let's say this sounds absurd, though.

51:39 Mark: Well, that's the point. That's where the categorical imperative. That's why it just seems so blatantly absurd to me. It seems less absurd in its other formulations.

51:47 Wes: But of course, this is just a thought experiment to determine its permissibility. It's not saying that that world should come to exist. Let's not say that, you know, this is the ideal world. It's just saying, okay, then it sounds like we're.

52:02 Seth: Yeah, I think the step is the moving from the normative to the descriptive. If that's the way you're going to try to figure out whether or not this is a good idea, then no, it doesn't work.

52:12 Mark: Well, it's just the fact that you can't do it in a consistent way. So you can see where lying would be inconsistent. Right. Let's just even give the example he uses. So it's promise keeping. I want to borrow some money. I just don't think I'll be able to pay it back. Should I promise to pay it back even though I know I won't be able to? Well, if everybody did that, every time somebody needs some money and won't be able to pay it back, they promise they'll pay it back, then nobody would believe them. So, in fact, it is impossible that I would be considering doing this right now because already just the notion of promise keeping about this kind of thing at least wouldn't exist because everybody would know you were lying.

And, and again, taking that to an extreme, if we just talk about not lying in this particular situation, but lying at all, and I think, what if everybody lied all the time? Well, then language itself would break down. So that's sort of the limit case of here. So I, and I think just the fact that I can talk about those two things means that we have to talk about circumstances to some degree. Right. Are we lying in all cases or are we just lying? Breaking a promise is a specification of certain kind of lying. You're already giving some circumstances there, even if you use a neutral word.

So it's the same thing with like killing and murder. Like the way I put it, oh, if everybody killed all the time, then we would all be dead. And I couldn't be thinking about this. That seems a very obvious one. But he actually doesn't have a problem with like capital punishment or killing in a war, at least a just war or stuff like that. So what he would have to say

53:32 Wes: is it's not killing people guilty of murder. Yeah. Then there's no inconsistency.

53:36 Mark: That's great. Then they just. All the murderers would be dead again. Right. So you have to say it's not.

53:41 Wes: Because that's a good consequence.

53:43 Mark: Sure.

53:43 Seth: Are we getting hung up on like one of the formulations of the categorical imperative and going down a rabbit hole?

53:49 Mark: All right, well, let's do this just a little more and we'll move on to the second one. I think you're right because it does. It's supposed to make. These three formulations are all supposed to be equivalent. But he does say this is the one that's basic. So if you have any question about the other ones, like those are all reducible to this one. So this is really the one that has to stand up. So we use the lying example. Then if you consider something that seems like it's morally neutral, so it seems like getting in my car is morally neutral, or I want to go somewhere so I'm going to take a car.

So you can give a Kantian argument that, well, if everybody who had a car and wanted to go somewhere used that car, I mean, that seems like that's kind of almost how it is now. Like it, it's still possible that I would be making this, standing here, making this decision. On the other hand, you could give a Kantian argument against the use of cars at all, because it's something that is ultimately unsustainable. If everybody used this kind of technology that had this kind of fuel use, then that would have been used up long ago and I could not be standing here making this decision.

So actually I brought that up. It's a double edged compliment. So in the same way that utilitarianism seemed to like, you could give a utilitarian argument for and against the very same action, you could do the same thing with the categorical imperative. And it's just a matter of like. Well then you have to think clearly about like, which is really the more sensible maxim to describe the particular circumstance that you're undergoing. So at least gives you a rich language to talk about whether something is permissible or not.

55:15 Seth: Okay, can I take a stab at this?

55:17 Mark: Go ahead.

55:18 Seth: Some different, a different direction. And this might bring us back to something that Wes brought up a while ago. But I Come up with a maxim that says, in order to get something, I want to make a false promise. So you imagine a world where, not descriptively, in which everyone by nature must make a false promise when they want to get something that they want. But you conceive a world where whenever anybody wants something, it's okay for them to lie or give a false promise. The problem with that seems to be that you want to hold on to the idea of a promise having validity, that they're being true promises, and that it's almost like you have a universal law that's competing with it that says you should always make true promises and keep the promises that you make.

And the problem with the false promises piece is that it goes against your understanding or your nature of that other universal law that somehow is the one you actually think should hold up. I'm trying to come up with a way to get out of the descriptive transition where you're saying, okay, so I'm imagining a world where I say it's okay to make a false promise for whatever reason, that the real problem is that you want to hold on to the idea of making a true promise, that that's important to our experience. And so when you universalize, the problem is what you universalize contradicts something else that you want to preserve or the.

That's more important. And that is a clue, actually, to what your universal law should actually be.

56:43 Mark: Yeah. Can we just look at a couple of the examples here? I'm looking at after the formula of universal law. Formula of law of nature. Illustrations.

56:50 Wes: Yeah.

56:50 Mark: And he uses these different illustrations to prove different things. And what you're talking about seems to sound more like what he uses to prove the existence of imperfect duties. Right. Beneficence as opposed to obligation. So he uses this descriptive thing as a test to really just see if something is just off limits. So here's the first one. A man feels sick of life as a result of a series of misfortunes that have mounted to the point of despair. But he's still so far in possession of reason to ask himself whether taking his own life might not be contrary to his duty to himself. He now applies the test, can the maximum of my action really become a universal law of nature? Which means descriptive.

57:27 Unknown speaker: Ooh.

57:28 Seth: Yeah.

57:28 Mark: His maxim is from self love, I make it my principle to shorten my life if it's continuous, threatens more evil than it promises pleasure. Which it does sound like the utilitarian should say that. Right. You know, if nobody's going to miss you at least. And you're just going to have more misery than off yourself. The only further question to ask is whether this principle of self love can become a universal law of nature. It is then seen at once that a system of nature by those whose law, the very same feeling whose function is to stimulate the furtherance of life should actually destroy life, would contradict itself and consequently could not subsist as a system of nature. In other words, everybody. Yeah, well, I guess the dumb way I interpret that is just if everybody killed themselves, we'd all be dead.

58:07 Wes: But isn't it killed themselves when they're in despair or when they wanted one to. See, this is where I get back to the point.

58:13 Mark: Yeah. Actually this is not even an easy example. The borrowing money one was the only easy example because he has. It's the fact that.

58:21 Wes: It's the very fact that the suicide if he destroys himself in order to escape from pain circumstances. So I think that to escape from painful circumstances is a critical part of the maxim. I do think it's. You are willing it to be a natural law, but it's this natural law of not where everyone destroys themselves because that would be a pretty easy disprove of it, but where everyone destroys themselves to escape painful circumstances. Now I don't see the contradiction yet.

58:49 Mark: Right, he's the contradiction here is it is then seen at once that a system of nature by whose law the very same feeling whose function is to stimulate the furtherance of life should actually destroy life, would contradict itself. So in other words, it's this desire for happiness or something like that. This motive is what's pushing you to then end it all. So the urge toward life is trying to get you to end life. And if that's the case, if that's just the way the urge to life worked throughout nature, then just everything would. Everything would be topsy turvy and things would. I guess I'm just still coming back to. Too many of them would be dead for me to be making this choice right now.

59:25 Seth: Wait a second. I'm sorry, can we. Can we just pause for just a second, please?

59:29 Mark: So that was supposed to be a good illustration. End up just confusing things.

59:33 Seth: I'm just realizing something here. Now I'm kind of confused. So is the exercise here that you want to say. Can you imagine creating ethical maxims that if they were not normative but rather descriptive would describe the kind of world that we would want to live in or the world that would make sense without contradiction?

59:54 Mark: Yeah, the latter. Not that we would want to live in okay.

59:56 Seth: All right.

59:57 Mark: At least that's how he's talking about determine obligation. You have to talk about just coherence.

1:00:00 Wes: It can't be anything consequential. So this suicide thing is a bad, bad example.

1:00:06 Seth: I don't know. I think it's kind of.

1:00:07 Wes: It really skirts around it at the end.

1:00:09 Seth: Well, I think it's kind of interesting because if you say if the circumstances of your life are such that, you know, you have immense suffering with no possibility of parole, no possibility of relief, then you should kill yourself. There are societies, I would imagine, where that actually happens is encouraged. Is encouraged. Right. And then there are others where it's not. So the mere fact that you have competing views on this subject in the actual world and experience should tell you that this is not going to be one of those maxims. Because what you'd say is, if I will, that this is a universal law.

Well, let's just say for the sake of argument that the United States is one of those places where under no circumstances do you commit suicide, even if you're in misery, and that there's another culture. Let's just say it's Japan. For the sake of argument where that that's the right thing, you might get

1:01:01 Wes: back to the lying argument. Because maybe we could say, you know, it is the case that everyone lies when they need to and it works. Where's the contradiction? I'm going with your example, Seth.

1:01:12 Seth: Right.

1:01:12 Mark: This is all just getting at that stupid. Like, how much circumstance do you include in the maxim? And I think that's where the whole freaking formulation breaks down. Because it's the same thing.

1:01:21 Wes: Right.

1:01:21 Mark: If everybody killed themselves all the time, that would be impossible. If everybody was really, really, really sad, killed themselves. Well, that's certainly possible. Might not be something we want, but it's certainly possible.

1:01:32 Seth: It's certainly not contradictory.

1:01:34 Mark: Right, Right, exactly.

1:01:35 Seth: Unless. Unless you have a maxim that says you should never kill yourself for any reason. And this is what I was trying

1:01:41 Mark: to get at before, but that's a different thought experiment. I mean, you're supposed to take one maxim and universalize it and imagine the world in which that is a descriptive law. So saying there's another world in which a different maxim is universalized is irrelevant.

1:01:52 Seth: Well, what I'm saying is, can you do the thought experiment and universalize a maxim in abstraction like that and say, is that possible? Because just use this example. If you are in misery with no chance for relief, you should kill yourself. Can you conceive of a world where that's the case? Yes. That everybody, when they reach a certain point of misery and no relief, kills themselves. Right.

1:02:15 Mark: Unless you're just like a Buddhist and think that everybody is so miserable that we would all just kill ourselves but set the bar for misery higher than just the general.

1:02:23 Seth: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I need to get through this. It's killing me.

1:02:27 Wes: Yeah.

1:02:27 Seth: So there's nothing. There's nothing inherently what is contradictory about that just in itself.

1:02:33 Wes: What he says here. Let's try and make sense of what he says is the contradiction. He says that it's self love that would lead you to want to end your pain. Because he says it is asked then simply whether this principle founded on self love because it says from self love, I adopted as a principle to shorten my life. But the contradiction seems to be that between self love and the killing of oneself. Because now we can see at once that a system of nature of which it should be a law to destroy life by means of the very feeling whose special nature does to compel the improvement of life. So maybe what the world we're imagining is a world in which the feeling of wanting to preserve life leads universally to its destruction. Maybe we would generalize that far.

1:03:21 Mark: Yeah. The survival instinct doesn't work. And so.

1:03:23 Wes: Yeah, okay.

1:03:24 Mark: All right. Well, I just inconceivable there would be. Yep. Where the survival incident doesn't work.

1:03:28 Wes: Okay.

1:03:29 Mark: Are you happy with that, Seth?

1:03:30 Seth: Okay, well, so wait a second. So what you just said was. What you're doing with the thought experiment is when you are changing from a moral law to a natural law, the contradiction has to come from a natural law that we presumably already know, not from another moral law that's been universalized.

1:03:48 Wes: No, not a contradiction to a natural law, but a self contradiction contradiction.

1:03:52 Mark: Yeah. Or it just couldn't be a natural law. That's the point.

1:03:56 Seth: It just couldn't be a natural law. I don't understand how this. I don't understand. This one could not be natural law, you're saying because it's in contrast.

1:04:03 Wes: It'd be like gravity at the same time drawing you towards something and pushing you away from something. Logically a. It would be a physical law, but it would be logically self contradictory.

1:04:14 Seth: I know.

1:04:14 Wes: So in this case, it's the contradiction of the survival instinct. But Mark's right about this. It's context and stuff.

1:04:21 Seth: But you just referred to it that the survival instinct, the law of self preservation, that's either a natural law or that's a universalized moral law that's being put in contrast here.

1:04:32 Wes: No, it's not like we're looking at physical facts of nature. We're postulating the fact of nature out of the maxim. It's not like we're throwing a piece of the maxim in and then looking for contradictions to actual physical laws. The instinct of self preservation comes out of that maxim because it's self love that leads you to want to commit suicide. So self love gets generalized into this instinct of survival. But then the killing of yourself, that's generalized as well.

1:05:02 Mark: Right, that's.

1:05:03 Wes: So in other words, in a specific case, you can make sense of it specifically, okay, I love myself so much I want to kill myself because I don't want.

1:05:09 Seth: That's just hilarious.

1:05:11 Wes: But when you broaden that to everything, if everything loved itself so much, I don't know, I can't make very well.

1:05:18 Mark: You've made enough sense of it.

1:05:19 Wes: We're describing it right.

1:05:21 Mark: You've made enough sense of it to get out, I think, what Kant's intention was. But it's also very obvious when we're describing that, that it doesn't work that well, that this thought experiment is kind of silly. Anyway, let's.

1:05:32 Wes: Let's move to the hell out of me. Now.

1:05:35 Mark: Let's move to the third example. A third finds in himself. So the second example was the. The making a promise with the intent of breaking in. That's obviously not universalizable. A third finds in himself a talent whose cultivation would make him a useful man for all sorts of purposes. But he sees himself in comfortable circumstances. He prefers to give himself up to pleasure rather than to bother about increasing and improving his fortunate natural aptitudes. Yet he asks himself further, does my maximum of neglecting my natural gifts, besides agreeing in itself with my tendency to indulgence, agree also with what is called duty?

He then sees that such a system of nature could indeed always subsist under such a universal law. Although, like the South Sea Islanders, every man should let his talents rust and should be bent on devoting his life solely to idleness, indulgence, procreation, and, in a word, to enjoyment. So in other words, it is possible, and he even thinks, in his very racist way, that the South Sea Islanders are an example of such a society in which people do act like this. Okay, so this is not going to

1:06:32 Wes: be something there, that's all.

1:06:34 Mark: So this is not something that violates the categorical imperative in a way that the L Promise does. But he still has something to say about it. Only he cannot possibly will that this should become a universal law of nature. Or should be implanted in us as such a law by natural instinct. For as a rational being he necessarily wills that all his powers should be developed, since they serve him and are given him for all sorts of possible ends. So he only gives four examples in this whole book and he can't even give us four uncontroversial examples.

You know, he's really hitting at different aspects. He's like. If you can understand what I mean in all these four very different kind of cases, then you get the idea, right? Let me look at the fourth one and we'll consider the third and fourth kind of together, because they're similar. Yet a fourth finds himself flourishing. But he sees others who have to struggle with great hardships and whom he could easily help. And he thinks, what does it matter to me? Let everyone be as happy as heaven wills or as he can make himself. I won't deprive him of anything.

I won't envy him. Only I have no wish to contribute anything to his well being or to his support in his distress. Now, admittedly, if such an attitude were a universal law of nature, mankind could get on perfectly well. Better, no doubt, than if everybody prates sympathy and goodwill and even takes pains on occasion to practice them. But on the other hand, cheats when he can, traffics in human rights or violates them in other ways. But although it is possible that a universal law of nature could subsist in harmony with this maxim, yet is impossible to will that such a principle should hold everywhere as a law of nature.

For a will which decided in this way would be in conflict with itself. Since many a situation might arise in which the man needed love and sympathy from others, and in which by such a law of nature sprung from his own will, he would rob himself of all hope of the help he wants for himself. So he's going beyond this simple universalizable turn, this normative thing you're considering into a descriptive law of nature. Is it possible that it exists in both of these cases? Saying yes, it is possible exist. But you could not coherently will that it exists, right?

Because you yourself already will. You know you will your own success. And these are things that would keep you back from success if they were universal. Right, in fact, even I don't even think you have to universalize the should I cultivate my own talents? Thing. Right? It's just that you right now have.

1:08:42 Wes: It's an innate thing.

1:08:43 Mark: Yes, haven't have this innate. And he can't say it's an instinct. It has to be something Given by reason. This is where just another.

1:08:51 Wes: See, I know there's a secondary literature on this where they make better sense of this than we are going to, but it is very.

1:08:58 Mark: Well, let's just in our ignorant way rip them down and.

1:09:02 Seth: No, I don't think there's anything ignorant. I mean, I think this is actually one of the kind of interesting things that's kind of come out of this whole thing. And this is really, I think more about. Wes, you know how you said early on that you didn't like to talk about ethics was your least favorite part of. Yeah, and whereas it's my favorite part, in fact it's the only part. I think that really the other stuff is. Can be like window candy fun. But this is the real meaty stuff. But if you're going to do the work in ethics, you know, it has to have a certain amount of utility for people, for not just academics and not just other philosophers.

Like you know, I think that's one of the virtues of when we were talking about utilitarianism and all that was there was this idea that they were at least trying to speak to some common thing that people could grasp a hold of and that it would be useful and practical to them. And I think Kant thinks there's something that makes sense here that he's trying to tap into. But if it's such a struggle to get there and oh by the way, you also need this massive metaphysics to support it, that may just be too much baggage.

1:10:00 Mark: It's not even something that's supposed to be accessible to people. It's supposed to be something that is derived from the way we all in our everyday moral thinking, even the non philosophers already think about right and wrong. Like we don't put it in this form, but this. Yeah, it's supposed to be straight out

1:10:17 Seth: of our intuitions, you know, I mean one of the things is there's a dumbed down and inaccurate version of this. Maybe it's not. We haven't figured out how to make this work. So I can't say that it's accurate or accurate. But. But when we teach basic ethics, right, it's like, oh well, let's contrast these two points of view. You have consequentialism, which is AKA utilitarianism. And you have deontology, AKA Kantianism, which is actions are just right in themselves. Right. And kind of the cheap and easy way to get around this is to say you would will that anybody who is in your position, anybody who is faced with the same thing you're facing with and situation you're in would make the same decision as you would make.

That's kind of the quote unquote intuitive way of trying to understand this. And this thought experiment is not at all like that. And it's precisely the reason that Mark brought up earlier about how many circumstances do you bring into it and all that. But we're not saying any person who was in my circumstance would make the same decision that I would make given the circumstances that I'm in. It's something completely different. And I almost kind of like the former cheap and dirty way of looking at it to going through this rigmarole.

1:11:23 Mark: That's approximately like the do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. Right. So the problem with the do unto others is you'd have them do unto you is because you could be a freaking weirdo who likes all sorts of weird things done unto you.

1:11:34 Wes: So no, it wouldn't be done out of obligation.

1:11:37 Seth: That is correct.

1:11:38 Mark: That's part of it.

1:11:39 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:11:39 Wes: Treating other people's nen.

1:11:40 Seth: Well, it would never be absolutely necessary either. Let's get back to the point that Kant is saying. You know, what Kant is really looking for is this grounding that makes it absolutely necessary. In the same way that you can't escape the law of gravity, he wants to say you can't escape the law of X, whatever X is. And you know, maybe that's not the way ethics works. Maybe that's not the way the human will and human nature work.

1:12:06 Mark: Actually, the way you put it like that, it does bring in some context like you can't escape the law of gravity, but you can escape the effects of the law of gravity. It's applicability to you just go out

1:12:14 Seth: in space gravity still, the law of gravity still obtains in space.

1:12:18 Mark: Right, the law of gravity. And in fact, obviously some gravity is. You're still orbiting around the sun. You're still. Okay, well, let's get away from the sun. There's some, or, you know, there are very small objects that are attracting me in ways that I can't detect. But it obviously depends on what circumstance, how close you are to the earth, how the law of gravity will apply to you. Well, in the same thing, how these moral commandments that Kant wants to come up with do depend to somebody's degree on the circumstance you're in. I mean, of course, if there's nobody else in the world, then you can't consider murder.

1:12:45 Seth: Exactly.

1:12:46 Mark: Because there's nobody else there. But even beyond that. Well, okay, if you allow that, you could. You could allow much more specificity. And the question is, how much specificity can you allow? I just don't think he can be answered. He wants his maxims to be simple, right? So he might have a maxim like it's not okay to murder. Think about universalizing murder. But actually. But he would not be okay with a maxim that is, you know, if you're 41 years old and blah, blah, blah, you know, have something that has a lot of specificity in it, but it's somewhat arbitrary.

What we consider simple and complex, like murder itself, is actually a very complex concept. It really is. Comes down to unlawful killing, right. Immoral killing, that there are all sorts of killing which we think are, you know. Do you consider abortion to be murder or not? Well, that depends on sort of when you come down an abortion, it doesn't come out of the definition of murder. So if I want to say even something that looks like a simple maxim, because it has few words like it involves murder, really is pretty complex, then there's no a priori reason to rule out complex maxims either.

Which means there's no clear way to apply this categorical imperative test, which means it's freaking useless.

1:13:51 Wes: What about treating everyone as an end?

1:13:53 Seth: Let's.

1:13:53 Mark: That's excellent. So let's turn to the second one

1:13:56 Wes: and let's get the hell away from this.

1:14:00 Seth: Here, here I've. I've got something for all rational beings come under the law that each of them must treat itself and all others never merely as means, but in every case at the same time as ends in themselves.

1:14:11 Mark: Very nice what I got out of this. I mean, I was familiar with this before, but sort of relating this back to his talk about autonomy and things like that, and how usually our purposes come from experience, from inclinations. But he wants to use reason to reach into the world in itself and get, you know, this purpose that just reason itself somehow gives us. Well, that's the same thing he's saying, apart from any particular ends we have. And he says rational beings, whether they be human or not. I actually read something that said he believed in. There's probably life on other planets.

1:14:43 Wes: But I. Yeah, he writes about that and that they would be just as much a part of this as.

1:14:47 Mark: Yeah, yeah.

1:14:48 Wes: So if they're rational beings, they don't have to be human.

1:14:50 Mark: We're the only ones that can posit an end for ourselves that is a purpose, something that we're trying to do, which. Okay, right there I have some Problems with. But certainly we're the only kind of rational beings that can look at and evaluate this. So my dog might really want his treat. And if I hide it from him, he could still want his treat. He's not just reacting to the physical presence of the treat. He's like actually looking for the treat. His purpose is to find the treat. So he has set himself an end. But he can't then stop and ask himself, is it wrong to want the treat?

You know, he can't. He doesn't have the mental flexibility about his ends. Even though, yeah, he could take one end and then maybe he could subordinate it to another end. Well, it's less important that I get the treat than I go and greet the person that's come to the door. Assuming that you don't think he's just, just again, a sensory reaction. He's just distracted. He's actually making a choice. Even if you attribute choice, there's not this kind of mental flexibility that we have. So reason gives us this mental flexibility to posit ends for ourselves.

And he says, even if you get rid of all the particular ends which come to us through experience, right. This particular desires makes me want to find my dinner or want sex or want whatever, then there's still something left, this primal life force which he thinks that each person has this. And so that's something that we recognize in ourselves as unconditionally valuable. Right. Even if I decide, you know, I might be supporting, you know, all my actions right now are because I want to get that PhD in philosophy or something, well, then I could decide later, well, that's a stupid goal.

I don't care about that anymore. So there are lots of ends we can put aside. You can even decide, I don't care about food. I'm going to become an ascetic. I'm going to try to forego food as much as possible. It will not be an end of mine. Like anything, no matter how biologically ingrained you can set aside. But there's still something that's left, and that is the end that each of us is in itself as a rational being. That seem accurate.

1:16:41 Seth: Wow.

1:16:41 Mark: So I recognize that this is unconditionally accurate in myself. I recognize that other people have the same notion about themselves. So reason then tells us that if it's a source of unconditional value in me, then it has to be a source of unconditional value in other people as well. So that gives me this rule that I need to.

1:16:58 Wes: The mere fact of willing. Right?

1:17:01 Mark: Yep. That's the form of will itself.

1:17:03 Wes: Because it's like if you. You start out with this conception of morality and is implying autonomy and this respect for the law. Right?

1:17:11 Mark: Yep.

1:17:11 Wes: Which in turn implies this respect for all the law givers, which is what rational being is.

1:17:17 Mark: Right. If willing is the form of law itself, then that means by willing we are implicitly law makers. And this is what this whole universality thing is about. This is why we would care if our maxim could be universalizable. Because whenever I decide to do something, I'm positing by my action, by my decision, that it is the right thing for everybody to do. I am willing it to.

1:17:38 Seth: Including yourself.

1:17:39 Mark: Yes.

1:17:40 Wes: So just to be clear, what we're doing now, we're trying to derive this idea of people being an end in themselves from what's come before, right?

1:17:47 Mark: Yep.

1:17:47 Seth: Yeah. He says two things that I think get to the heart of this pretty concisely. Whether or not we can make sense of them, we break them down, I don't know. But he says, he says a rational being must always regard himself as giving laws, either as members or as a sovereign, in a kingdom of ends, which is rendered possible by the freedom of will. So basically, either in this kingdom of ends, when you use your will to create this universal law, either you're subject to it and everybody else is subject to it, or only some people are subject to it, whether that's everybody else except you or some subset or whatever.

In the case where not everyone is subject to it, you're using people as a means and not as an ends. That's one way of thinking about it. The other thing he says that I think is actually somewhat poetic, and you know how I like to go there, is in the kingdom of ends, everything has either value or dignity. Whatever has a value can be replaced by something else which is equivalent. Whatever, on the other hand, is above all value and therefore admits of no equivalent has a dignity. So insofar as you treat human beings as valuable rather than dignified, you're not doing the right thing according to this formulation of the categorical imperative.

1:18:55 Wes: Right.

1:18:56 Seth: And I don't see any way in which this is equivalent to the first iteration of it. Well, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It just doesn't seem to jive with it.

1:19:05 Mark: The connection between the two is supposed to come in the third formulation, which you just gave, which is this kingdom of ends.

1:19:09 Seth: Okay.

1:19:10 Mark: That if I imagine what it would be like to treat everybody as an end in themselves, as unconditionally valuable, oh,

1:19:17 Seth: was that not what we were talking about?

1:19:18 Mark: That if. Right?

1:19:19 Wes: If.

1:19:19 Mark: If everybody imagined, if everybody treated each other that way, we get this kingdom of ends. That's the very same world in which all the natural laws that apply to everyone's behavior. Right. We've just said how that everybody's being nice to each other and whatever are the ones that would pass the categorical imperative. In its first formulation, these are the universalizable ones. So when you connect one plus two, you collect this univers only have maxims which are universalizable. With treat everybody's an end in themselves, you get this imaginary situation that's number three.

So in. In number one, we are just imagining this particular maxim. What if I universalize this particular maxim? Well, if I universalize, really all the correct actions should be compatible with each other, right? All the correct maxims could together be universal laws in this ideal world. And when I think of everybody as a lawgiver willing those same correct maxims, what I'm willing to. What I'm imagining is this kingdom of ends.

1:20:18 Seth: I apologize. Kingdom of ends, the one we were talking about. I jumped ahead and I did not realize it.

1:20:23 Mark: Well, I think that it's good that they go together and we're presenting it because I'm just not satisfied with presenting this. Just treat everybody as an end in themselves. Like as an isolated second formulation. When I was teaching this, what I would say is, here's the first formulation about universalizability. Here's the second formulation about treating everybody as unconditionally valuable. And take my word for it, Kant thinks that they amount to the same thing because it's really freaking confusing how they actually connect together. And in order to do that, you have to talk about this kingdom of ends, which is, you know, if you thought that was weird and abstract to talk about universalizing one maxim, I think it's even more weird and abstract to talk about universalizing all the correct maxims.

I don't know. But now we've. You gave us all that good information, so now everyone has a perfect understanding of all three formulations. Everyone listening here, I'm sure. Just like Diderot or Machiavelli. See, I'm just name dropping for absolutely no purpose.

1:21:21 Wes: E T. Does any of this apply to E.T. that's my question.

1:21:31 Mark: Now you got me thinking about that. I don't. Yes, you should treat. Was E.T. okay, so E.T. like merged his consciousness with Elliot, right? So E.T. is drinking beers and it makes Elliot, who's at school drunk, embarrassing him. Now, was that an okay. Thing for ET to do, because ET is, on the one hand, he's trying to, you know, share a piece of himself. And apparently this is how the ETs communicate with each other. So he's like treating Elliot as an equal in this way. But on the other hand, he's kind of using him. He's using this line of communication to, you know, to further his own ends, which are to make his phone and phone home.

1:22:13 Wes: Et's a little bitch.

1:22:18 Seth: He's. He might be a little bitch, but he is a little bitch who is subject to the categorical imperative.

1:22:25 Wes: Yeah.

1:22:26 Seth: And by the way, also all of the categories of reason, it's not possible for ET to not experience space, time.

1:22:35 Mark: You know, now that we've made that connection between the. Up to the third formulation, it occurs to me that this is a pretty major problem with Kantian ethics is that when you think of what Kantian ethics recommends. So one of the things it recommends, as we've said ad nauseam, is never ever lie. And that would work in the kingdom of ends, because nobody else would do anything bad and so that you'd have no reason to lie. But then there's this example that is very commonly given against. I know you love Nazi examples, Seth, but if you're hiding Jews in your attic and the Nazis come to the door and say, where are the Jews? And you obey Kant, you'd say, oh, they're upstairs, go ahead. Okay, you would have to actually say, go ahead, but you'd have to tell them where they are.

1:23:19 Wes: That's the rendition of that example I've ever heard.

1:23:23 Mark: That seems an obvious case where you should lie. And that's just. It says that in a non perfect world, it is very hard to figure out what Kant would have you do. Like, should you just be an absolutist asshole or should you just reinterpret your maxim and say, well, if everybody, when the Nazis came to their door asking for the Jews, said no, well, that's possible. Sure.

1:23:47 Wes: Yeah.

1:23:48 Mark: So again,

1:23:51 Wes: what if, in fact, lying were really a, to use Kant's phrase, grounds for the possibility of adequate social interaction? What if the. The whole concept of the social depends on it? This, by the way, I'm foreshadowing someone we will be reading, you can't handle the truth.

1:24:10 Mark: Yeah, that was Nietzsche in that movie.

1:24:12 Seth: No, I think that's. I think that's a really good point, is that it's almost like the principle of utility or consequentialist ethics of the sort that we discussed last time, where you say, I'm going to do my best guess at what the outcome of my actions is going to be, and then I'm going to make my decision based on that. Even though, you know, we kind of had issues with the overall approach, it is a much more practical and useful sort of thing. Because in the example you're giving with, you know, the Anne Frank example, right, the people that are in the house are weighing a whole host of things in their decision.

You know, they're thinking about whether or not they'll be detected and if so, what are the consequences going to be for them versus this duty that they feel to protect human life or this particular human life. Or maybe they have a personal connection to the people they're hiding, you know, or maybe whatever, right. They have some political opposition to that. You can actually play that game in the utilitarian calculus to some extent and at least have a meaningful conversation about it. Whereas I don't think Kant's structure gives you any meaningful or useful way to have that conversation without pushing the boundaries of the structure itself.

1:25:30 Mark: Right.

1:25:31 Seth: And that is kind of an indictment. I mean, an ethical system that doesn't allow you to examine ethical. Even though that's a limit case. That's my complaint, by the way. Not just about that the term Nazi is overused and misused, but that when people are trying to give examples in ethics, they always use these extreme limit case examples to try to break, you know, the moral system or push people to think a certain way. When I think there are usually much less extreme examples that you could use.

1:26:01 Mark: There's limit cases like getting in the car. What a fucking limit case.

1:26:04 Seth: I hate that. Yeah, well, there has to be some. That there has to be some moral weight. There has to be some moral weight to it, too. Getting in the car is no moral weight.

1:26:12 Wes: Linsenmayer, the whole notion of the ethical quandary, you know, with, you know, those hard cases with Nazis come to the door. That's why I didn't enjoy ethics at ut. You read a lot of papers by modern ethicists which are going over those kinds of examples, and really it's saying,

1:26:32 Mark: oh, Kant really could. Does have a response to that.

1:26:35 Wes: Well, yeah, the whole. Yeah, when the whole question of the good life, it's much more nuanced.

1:26:41 Seth: Yes, exactly.

1:26:42 Wes: It's the everyday situation.

1:26:45 Seth: That's exactly it. It's like people spent years writing papers where they were just basically like, well, what would Kant tell you to do in the Anne Frank example? Like, if you finally figure that out, what are you gonna do with it? You're gonna go, oh, well, then Kant system. It's like you already know the answer to that question. You already know what the right thing to do is.

1:27:04 Mark: Well, you're looking for a way to charitably interpret these geniuses so that they make sense.

1:27:11 Wes: Also, ethicists know. I think, Seth, what you just mentioned too, is they already know in specific cases what they think the right or wrong thing is, and they want to backwards engineer it.

1:27:20 Seth: Yeah, I just. I think the more practical approach would be to say something like, we know the right answer in this case is to not tell the Nazis where the Jews are. So given that if Kant were alive today, he would say the exact same thing, that there's no way he. That Kant would be a huge enough prick. They go like, nope, absolutely not. You got to tell the truth all the time. Then I need to go back and reread his system and figure out how I can make that answer work in that case. That would be the more interesting and productive way to approach it from my perspective.

1:27:52 Wes: Right.

1:27:52 Mark: So I spent a while since we decided we were going to read this. I like the fact that we had the Peter Singer article to go with utilitarianism, because it was a modern philosopher writing a primary source. In other words, he's not saying, what does Mill think about these? He's actually just giving an ethical opinion about something, and he does it about a lot of topics. But that's completely derived from utilitarianism. And I was looking for an applied Kantian, and I know there are some out there. I don't know that any of them are as famous as Peter Singer. One name that came up was Rawls.

1:28:20 Seth: John Rawls, I think. Yeah.

1:28:22 Mark: Yes, John Rawls.

1:28:23 Seth: Lou Rawls, my lady.

1:28:26 Mark: But John Rawls was a writer in politics. His biggest theory was, you know, maybe we'll just talk about more in another episode. But it was kind of going from the second version of the categorical imperative about treating everybody as ends in themselves and going on that end. Actually, Kant has a view of freedom that comes from that which goes like this. Every action is right, which in itself, or in the maxim on which it proceeds, is such that it can coexist along with the freedom of will of each and all in action according to a universal law.

So you can see exactly where that comes out of the categorical imperative. And that's kind of getting started on politics, that in this kingdom of ends, really there should be a maximum of freedom, because everybody, Right. We all have this innate Moral sense, so everybody can know what the good is. You just have to use your reason and look for it. So he's like at core, he's not an authoritarian. Even though some of the stuff, the stuff that when he was analyzing particular cases, overall he did favor some kind of republic or something in which there's natural freedom.

1:29:22 Wes: His whole motive is the concept of free society. Yeah, he writes about all the political stuff too.

1:29:28 Mark: Yep. And so Rawls was building on that and trying to figure out like what would be the best kind of society. Well, he thinks the best arrangement of society is one that we, without knowing what part we would play in this society, the one we would design. So in other words, is the best kind of society one in which there are some very rich people and very poor people? No, because you. If you were going to design a society and you didn't know whether you're going to be one of the rich or the poor, would not design that kind of society.

1:29:55 Wes: She calls what the original position is that.

1:29:58 Mark: Yeah, it's like in the. The veil of ignorance, I believe I just bring him up because he's I think the most famous Kantian. He's like the only one not just giving. Yeah, he wrote a lot about Kant as well. But giving a new Kantian philosophy. Well, I had a lot of trouble finding, you know, obvious examples of at least famous, well established, very well respected major names in philosophy who were modern

1:30:20 Wes: Kantians really. Guyer and Wood and.

1:30:26 Mark: But all the stuff I was finding were things written about interpretations of Kant. And what would this. The kind of stuff that you were just dismissing. What could Kant say about this piece of crap here? Not like this particular example. Not. Here's a new thing. And we don't have to necessarily talk about Kant, but you can tell I'm using Kantian language.

1:30:42 Wes: Well then on the epistemological side you had Strawson. There's a lot of.

1:30:45 Mark: Oh sure, on. On the epistemological side, I'm just saying on the moral side side, on the

1:30:49 Wes: ethical side, Philippa Foot I think is a. Or maybe she's a virtue ethicist and tries to.

1:30:55 Mark: All right, maybe this is just my own ignorance, but the fact it did not jump out to me, I had a lot of trouble finding, you know, but I did find some discussions of con. So like just to connect it to what we were talking about a little last time in terms of animal rights. So it's treat everybody's in themselves. And when I mean everybody, I mean every rational being.

1:31:16 Seth: Right.

1:31:17 Mark: It's because we have the ability to adopt ends and rationally consider these ends, whether we should have these ends. That's what makes us members of the moral community. That's what gives us our unconditional worth. That's what makes us worthy of moral respect. Right? Which seems to then leave anything that is not a rational being, whether it be animals or even little kids who are not, you know, they don't have any rational facility, they don't talk, yet it seems to leave these guys all out in the cold. And in fact, Kant does say some pretty obnoxious things about animals.

I remember I did teach in my ethics class in the animal rights chapter, we read Peter Singer about animal liberation and how, oh yeah, animals should count just as much as people in your calculations, which we were saying last time was obviously absurd. Well, Kant was saying the only reason to be nice to animals is because being mean to them makes us mean people and more likely to be mean to humans. In other words, there's nothing wrong in itself with, say, torturing a dog, but just the kind of person who torture a dog would be the kind of person more likely to torture people.

1:32:21 Wes: But that still makes it wrong in itself, though, for Kant, if it so happened, that essay you sent us had a more charitable interpretation.

1:32:27 Mark: Well, but this is kind of where I'm hedging. I mean, that's actually something Kant wrote himself. And so this essay which we'll provide a link to by Allen Wood, Kant on Duties Regarding Non Rational Nature does have an argument to say when we're talking about rational nature. Yeah, well, the most complete and obvious examples of that are people or intelligent aliens or whatever, fully rational. But do we have to only respect things that have that in full? So his interpretation, he's trying to stretch Kant to be not so obviously counterintuitive by saying little kids, you know, they're gonna be rational, so we should extend our recognition for this potential rationality or something.

You know, it's kind of like we see part of the thing that has unconditional value in the little kid. So let's just grandfather them in. Or in the again, somebody who is just unconscious, maybe forever, they're in a coma. Or is mental problems such that they can't think like that. Well, they have a part of it. Well, in the same way, maybe we should respect animals to the extent that they share a part of our experience. Right. Even if they can't externalize their ends. And consider, should I look for the treat or not? Is it right for me to look for the Treat.

The fact that they can be looking for the treat means they have enough mentality that maybe we should care about their ends at least a little bit. It doesn't. Who knows how much to care about them? So that's the best I could come up with with a practical, you know, some deliberation by a. Alan Wood, one of the modern Kantians, on a intelligent way to apply this. And of course he has.

1:33:55 Wes: He's not saying, though, with Kant, again, it's. He's not saying you shouldn't care about animals. Animals. He's just talking about the raw concept of obligation.

1:34:03 Mark: He's saying the only grounds for caring about animals is because of caring about ourselves and caring about other people. And that there's something ultimately counterintuitive for

1:34:13 Wes: ethical obligation to animals. I mean, and this sort of applies to the system as a whole, this idea that it's cold and it does away with compassion. Well, it does when you're strictly talking about ethical obligation, but it doesn't negate. There's still a virtue.

1:34:27 Unknown speaker: We should be.

1:34:27 Wes: We should be clear about this, treating animals with compassion. It's just that it's not Kant's very, very strict idea of ethical obligation. It's not included under that.

1:34:38 Mark: Sure, we should be clear about this. You've alluded this to a couple times, but we didn't make it obvious that for Kant, an action is virtuous only if it is done for the sake of duty, right? Not because you're just a nice person and you like being nice to people, or being nice to people means, makes you feel good or something like that. But it has to be because you recognize that something is your duty, right? You use this reason. You look beyond any inclinations you have yourself, and you just recognize you have to do it, and so you do it.

1:35:04 Wes: Well, there's two uses of the word virtue here. Kant recognized that there were virtues like courage, for instance, and virtues like compassion. And those don't fall within the realm of ethical obligation, but they're still desirable. So there are things that aren't necessary ethical obligations that are still good things in that qualified sense, but they're not

1:35:23 Mark: worthy of moral respect.

1:35:24 Wes: Right.

1:35:25 Mark: But that in themselves, you know, I'd

1:35:27 Wes: rather be respected for my. For my body. No, the moral respect part, it doesn't bother me as long as he's not prohibiting, you know, he's not saying that compassion for animals is a bad thing, not calling it an ethical issue.

1:35:40 Mark: So the Kantians, just to sort of generalize this about practical matters, because we should we're going to talk any more about this, but it should be to give a comparable treatment to what we were able to do with utilitarianism. A, to consider whether it works for actual situations. So that the modern Kantians, you know, really use this idea of an end in yourself to focus on individual rights. And there's something intuitively advantageous about this over some of the utilitarian things that we thought, oh, well, you know, if it'll make a thousand people happy, then we should torture and kill one person or something, you know, that there's some version of the calculation which you could make that work out. But if you say, no, no, every person is unconditionally valuable, like torturing and killing this one person, no matter what benefit it's going to bring, is just off limits.

1:36:23 Seth: That's not. You don't need Kantianism to get that and not even if you're a utilitarian.

1:36:28 Wes: Some people have argued that you can reduce Kant to consequentialism or utilitarianism because, well, Mill did. All you have to do is find something that's grounding value. So, for instance, if, I mean, John Stuart Mill actually said that his system was entirely consistent with Kant's because he thought that the formulation of the categorical imperative, that when you test it, you were looking at the consequences, right?

1:36:53 Mark: It's vague. We just talked about how the universalization thing is very vague. You don't know how to conceive of your maxim. So the way you decide between what is a intelligent interpretation of the categorical imperative and a good application versus a dumb one, you know, everybody can't get in my car because then we'd all be stuck or whatever is by using some really utilitarianism thing. If your Kantian formula gives you a completely evil thing like, oh, yeah, you should, you know, tell the truth to the Nazi if it tells you something just obviously wrong or oh, well, over

1:37:25 Wes: again, though, that those evil things aren't the arbiters of what's moral, as counterintuitive as it seems. But, you know, the other way to go about it is just to deny that he's a deontologist, which is the technical word for this. Kant's grounding things in this idea of obligation. You could say, well, Kant's ultimate value is rational agency, or his ultimate value is autonomy, or his ultimate value is the dignity of humanity. Humanity is an end in itself. And so if you do that. So Kant's basic idea, right, is that we give the laws because that's Just the nature of the rational agent is to give those laws and the morality comes about in obeying them.

The alternative is to say that, no, it's just a matter of valuing rational agency or autonomy. That's the beginning point of the system. There is some end that's an ultimate value that the system aims towards. You have to say, it's good to be rational or it's good to be this or that.

1:38:18 Mark: Well, speaking of the teleology, the internal purposefulness of a system, that Allen Wood article, that's kind of its conclusion because after it talks about animals, it just talks about, like, what about nature in general? It seems like we could be obnoxious to nature. Well, one of the ways you can interpret Kant is to say that, like Aristotle, Kant really thinks the entirety of nature is a purposive system. Now it so happens that its ultimate purpose is to produce us, is to produce rational nature. But that doesn't mean then that we as rational nature can just abuse the system any way we want and use up all the natural resources and kill off all the animals or whatever.

No, because we are the teleological end of the system. We are stewards of the system. We are part of the system. We are just the apex of the system. But so in fact, this gives us a responsibility over the rest of the system.

1:39:01 Wes: Wow, I didn't get to the end of that article. That's. I've never heard anyone. It's trying to justify environmentalism.

1:39:08 Mark: Yeah, it's a pretty interesting take on him. It's a pretty interesting take on him. And it does. Again, I'll say that even though you can, you can rip on Kant to say that it's just ambiguous. You don't know how to interpret these axioms. Like, what is it? We didn't really rip on the second one, you know, what is it to treat somebody as an end in themselves? Is that just don't do anything without their consent? Because that's how it's usually interpreted. But if you sort of use people, okay, so what about prostitution? Like, if the prostitute really is, you know, says, I'm okay with being a prostitute, and you ask and ask and ask, and the person says, I'm okay with being a prostitute, does that mean that that's just fine, you're not using the person? Like that seems like the obvious case of using a person.

1:39:46 Seth: Well, if you could say in the way of Kant that their value as a prostitute could be replaced with somebody else that was equivalent, then yes, that would be inappropriate use.

1:39:57 Mark: So. But There seemed to be like, you know, a Kantian argument. Either way, it seems like a strong interpretation of consent that as long as somebody is. Because we use people all the time. Okay, I'm gonna go to a store and I'm gonna buy something from the shopkeeper. Well, I could have bought that same thing for a different shopkeeper. So it's substituted. I could use a different shopkeeper. I'm just using the person where clearly you're not. No, I'm paying for the money.

1:40:19 Wes: That's not saying you can't use people.

1:40:21 Seth: Right?

1:40:22 Mark: You can't merely use them.

1:40:23 Wes: You can't treat their humanity as a means to an end. Not that you can't treat. We use people as a means to an end all the time. It's just that. So when you go into the, to buy something in the shop, you're treating them as a means to an end. The part of respecting their dignity means not robbing them, not killing them. That's not treating their humanity as a means to the end to refrain from those things. But we use people as an empirical fact. You can't avoid using people.

1:40:47 Seth: Yeah, well, I was going to say when somebody offers, when somebody offers a service in exchange for either goods or

1:40:52 Wes: money, we treat people as a means to the end. We can't avoid it. But what we can avoid doing is treating them qua human insofar as they are human beings, treating their rational agency as a, as a means to the end.

1:41:06 Mark: Right. And he does have peculiar notions about particular notions about sex that sex inevitably involves, you know, this sharing or whatever such that if you're really just using someone for their body, then you are violating them in some way. Like, so it's any consensual sex that does not involve. I mean he really thinks monogamous commitment, he has an essay on this is using each other. So yeah, he has some old fashioned views on that.

1:41:31 Wes: Well, there's a point to it though. You know, I think there's a point to that.

1:41:34 Mark: Right, well, and I guess that's the thing I'm saying. So you can rip on him as being ambiguous that it's hard to apply his rules, or you can say, no, this again provides a rich vocabulary for, you know, giving, giving the pros and cons to any given situation. And so just like utilitarianism, you can just try to give a Kantian argument using either or both of the formulations for and against what you're considering and then just see which one makes more sense. So like we just did that with Prostitution or, you know, just did that with what ethical obligations we have toward animals.

1:42:02 Wes: This is why I would rather stick to epistemology and. But. And also political philosophy because I dislike specificity and attention to detail.

1:42:12 Mark: Well, that's why you become a philosopher as opposed to a scientist. Right. Because you don't want to pay attention to details.

1:42:17 Wes: Well, there's too many endless exceptions.

1:42:20 Seth: Yeah. And yet this is the only thing that matters ultimately. How you comport yourself in the world and how you comport yourself vis a vis other people, whether it's in a personal one, on one sphere, a larger social sphere, political sphere is the only thing that matters. If you're a sucky. If you're a sucky human being, to me, it doesn't matter what you accomplish.

1:42:38 Wes: Yeah. It's funny. I tend towards the Aristotelian view, though, although, you know, really both appeal to me in different ways. I think of the three things we've discussed so far, the Aristotelian, the utilitarian, and the Kantian. I think that Aristotle is what the. The concept of grounding the ethical in character as opposed to consequence or obligation or the will or whatever that is. You know, I don't know. What do you guys think? What's the most appealing of the three that we've looked at?

1:43:10 Mark: They're all bullshit. How about that?

1:43:14 Seth: God.

1:43:15 Wes: Well, you think Aristotle's bullshit insofar as

1:43:17 Mark: he differs from Nietzsche, which is to say that Aristotle does think that there's some kind of objective, you know, virtuous type of person, whereas somebody like Nietzsche seems to think that there are multiple options. And we could argue. I know we were a little more subtle about when we talked about Aristotle, but at least the basic dumb interpretation of Aristotle is that all these are kind of rigid and say that there is a right way, objectively, that you're supposed to be. Or what you're supposed to do or what you're supposed to bring about. And I don't know that you have to have that absolutist concept in order to get you to action that you will be comfortable with. Right.

1:43:55 Wes: And if you sort of do something in between and say there is a human nature and there are certain generalizable traits.

1:44:02 Mark: Yeah.

1:44:02 Wes: Like courage, let's say. Then also say there are different options.

1:44:06 Mark: Well, actually, courage, I don't think is a good. Is a good example of that. But maybe we should save this discussion for. For the most part for next time, because this is exactly what we're going to be talking about. I mean, what you said, Seth, Is that what really matters is getting to. To action. And I don't know that you need a universally applicable law to get to action. You just need a reason that then seems in some way justifiable, that you can stand up for yourself and in front of other people and say, this is why I did this. That does not make you want to kill yourself.

1:44:39 Seth: That's kind of it. If you asked me if I was answering Wes's question, I would say I wouldn't want to defend any one of the three of them in a academic setting. Like, if you asked me to justify and explain and defend, I wouldn't want to. But if you're asking me which one I was going to use to kind of guide my own life or maybe set up, you know, educate the youth or make laws or whatever, I would say Aristotle.

1:45:03 Wes: I don't know that reading any of these things would modifies the way I live. I mean, do we have any doubts about the way we want to live? Do we see that as an unknown? I'm not sure that I do. I don't live up to my expectations a lot of the time, but I still have pretty concrete expectations at this point.

1:45:18 Seth: How often are you presented with moral quandaries or ethical quandaries that you don't immediately have answers to?

1:45:25 Wes: I don't know. I never leave my room, so almost never.

1:45:29 Seth: That would be one way of changing your circumstance to make it irrelevant.

1:45:32 Wes: I'm presented with difficult situations. You know, how do you deal with someone who you fought with? You know, you have a relationship with someone, and it could just be even a colleague at work, some difficult situation where there's an asshole in your life. Let's say, you know, this is Dr. Phil territory. How do you deal with this person? In a way, these are more hypothetical, imperative, practical questions.

1:45:53 Seth: I'd say negotiating. Negotiating personalities and sort of interpersonal politics. And one thing, it's like, how often do you find a wallet with $10,000 in it that you think, man, should I keep the money or should I return it? Because that would be the right thing to do? I mean, how often does that happen?

1:46:12 Wes: That would be actually difficult for me.

1:46:14 Seth: I think it would be difficult for most people. I don't think there's anything unusual about that. But I'm just saying those kinds of things don't typically come up.

1:46:21 Wes: I mean, all the real quandaries aren't the $10,000 wallet thing. They're about wanting to do something that, you know, is not good for you. Wanting to eat the big pizza Wanting to not do your piano lessons, which, you know, Kant does talk about that too, because he talks about developing one's talents.

1:46:39 Mark: And it cashes out that your main duties are to improve yourself and to improve the happiness of others.

1:46:45 Wes: Right.

1:46:46 Mark: You have an indirect duty to improve your own happiness. Because if you're really unhappy, it's going to be very easy for you to violate the categorical imperative and do nasty things to other people. You're going to be grumpy. But, you know, we already have a built in desire to help ourselves. So that's not the moral obligation, it's to improve yourself and to improve the lives of others.

1:47:04 Wes: Yeah, they all start to look the same when you get down to brass tacks.

1:47:08 Mark: Well, I was thinking that I actually found Kantianism kind of helpful in terms of my intuitions. In terms of like, what are your duties towards someone who is dying or someone who is already dead? You know, should you make promises or. Really if somebody is in terrible pain and is about to die From a utilitarian calculation, it doesn't really matter if you're polite to them or not. They're really in a pissy way, no matter what you do. And no matter how rude or nice you are, like, it's a drop in the bucket one way or the other. So whether I go and visit somebody who is dying in the hospital, who I, you know, was fighting with or whatever, like that matters to me because will I feel bad if this person dies without my going and saying goodbye, or if I'm just rude or whatever.

But it really doesn't matter much to them because they're gonna be dead from a utilitarian point of view. But it seems obvious to me that it does matter. That even if the world were about to end in five minutes, that would not give me license to go around raping. Right? Where from a consequentialist point of view, big fucking different, no difference. We're all gonna die in five minutes. Or, you know, make it an hour, make it a day. What was that? Children of Men was a recent movie that the foundation of it was babies have stopped being born, right?

So we have no future. You have the rest of your life, of course, but then after this generation, this is the last. And it really led to the sense of nihilism and thinking of it from a consequentialist point of view. Yeah, but if you think of it from a Kantian point of view, you can see. No, you should still. Even if that were the case, you should still do your duty by other people. And that seems there's a difference there. And it. Kant seems right to me as far as that goes.

1:48:43 Seth: Yeah.

1:48:43 Wes: Unless you as a utilitarian assign human dignity, this overriding value, in which case maybe you're not a utilitarian, I don't know. But in the calculation, that complex calculation where you get to wait things differently.

1:48:56 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:48:57 Mark: Well, that goes to remember that somebody's happiness. And we were. And when we were talking about Aristotle, we were considering briefly like, well, does how people think of you after you're dead affect your happiness? Like, so you can bring all those weird considerations into your utilitarian calculation. There's probably room.

1:49:12 Wes: Right.

1:49:12 Mark: But it's more of a stretch for them. Whereas for Kant it's just. It's the same thing with all these, you know, if you torture and kill one, you make a bunch happy. Like, it's just Kant seems, obviously you really have to stretch utilitarianism to make it accord with your ethical intuitions, whereas Kant just doesn't have the problem. Now, that doesn't, again, give a defense of Kantianism beyond really the second formulation of the categorical imperative about treating people as ends. The rest of it seems elegant but kind of insane to me. And I guess the primary thing I just want to loop back to what we started with is that Kant has a view, for instance, of math, where he believes in what he calls synthetic a priori intuitions. That is these things that are not a matter of definition but yet are true purely because of reason. And he uses, and this goes all

1:50:02 Wes: the way back to not just reason, but intuition. Space and time are intuitions. They're not reason. They don't have anything to do with reason.

1:50:08 Mark: Well, let me just consider math.

1:50:09 Wes: Trust me, math is a matter of the intuition of space and time.

1:50:13 Mark: Okay, well, we're just pointing to a fundamental division. This is the big distinction between the empiricists and the rationalists throughout history. And as far as I'm concerned, you know, Kant is on the rationalist side in a way that I don't like. And it's especially objectionable in the way he does this with ethics. So for math, you know, the empiricist is going to say, you count instances of two and then another two, and you see that when you put them together, they make four. This gives you the idea then of a number system. And then all the truths of the number system are going to be true by the definition of that system.

This is Wittgenstein's version of this. Wittgenstein Seemed in some ways to be a strong empiricist, that even though when I add really, really high numbers, I don't have to confirm that by laying about a bunch of objects on the ground. It's not because it's a synthetic a priori intuition that I just intuit when I. In fact, if the numbers are big enough, my intuition is not going to tell me anything about them at all, but it's the fact that I obey the rules to do the calculation, that's

1:51:10 Wes: not the way it works. Sorry.

1:51:13 Mark: All right.

1:51:13 Wes: There is a lot of Kantianism, and the dominant theory in linguistics is Chomsky. It's totally Kantian. The idea of a transformational grammar that's innate, very well structured cognitive system that is already there. I mean, obviously both are playing a role. Right.

1:51:27 Mark: You know, maybe we better in some ways table this conversation because we are going to have another Kant episode about epistemology. And I think we'll go into this a lot more and I'm sure we'll do this rationalism versus empiricism. But laying this out, okay, so that's the version that he has of math. Well, he thinks, again, the same thing about ethics. And it's true that it's not the case that, oh, I see somebody doing something and I say, oh, that's the right action. I see somebody else doing something and that's the right action. And then I add those together and I come up with an inductive generalization about right actions or something. It seems like it's something over and beyond that. What do you guys think of just that intuition that Kant has there?

1:52:01 Wes: What I like about what Kant's doing is that I think it's very hard to make any sense of the ethical and the moral. If you're a complete skeptic, you might say, look, there's nothing. This is just a world full of material objects. We have these altruistic emotions. But is there really any ground to the ethical. That's a very strong skeptical claim, just like Hume's claim about causality. I think they're both very hard to confront. And I think that's what Kant's trying to do. And in the case of the epistemology, he's trying to just find anyway, you know, it's like the Hail Mary pass trying to get around a very difficult skeptical challenge.

And that's what I like about what he's doing here because he's as maybe as the problems that we've identified with maxims and stuff. I think it's really brilliant. First of all, the whole concept of freedom is difficult. In what sense can you be free? Especially if we're lovers of science like Kant, and we think everything is deterministic and we're likely to think there is no such thing as free will. And Kant has his way around that. But it's brilliant to say, okay, well, the law comes from within and therefore it's reflective of autonomy, and therefore it can be ethical when it's sort of like the Last Stand, the subject becomes the Alamo of the ethical when you can't get it from anywhere outside.

1:53:17 Mark: I agree with Kant when he says you can't really get ethical universals in the way that people who have a realistic ontology about ethics, right, that think that objective ethical norms really do exist, that if you can't get those from sense experience. And so if there is any ground for this at all, it has to come from somewhere else. But my response to that is I don't like where he says they come from. It doesn't make any sense to me. So ultimately, I think there isn't objective ethics in this way. So what he's really doing, he's expressing, like you're saying, a skepticism.

And he thinks he has the answer to the skepticism. I don't think he does. And that's kind of the way, again, in epistemology, this plays out as well, that a lot of people thought Kant was. Yeah, you're right. There are some things that metaphysical speculation should not be talking about in the way that Leibniz or somebody like that did it. But then they like maybe Wittgenstein or like the logical positivists that we talked about, Carnap and those guys in our Wittgenstein episode, or there are plenty of other more sensible, more thoughtful people like Hegel or Nietzsche who seem to think this as well, fine.

We can't know anything about the world in itself. Let's only talk about the world of experience, of appearance. That's all we have the ability to talk about.

1:54:28 Wes: For Kant, especially, not knowing is not a reason not to talk about it because there's the domain of the rational, which is larger than the domain of empirical.

1:54:36 Mark: Well, but again, if you don't believe in that, if you think even math comes from really the definitions of these terms that you've come up with. So in other words, it is ultimately reducible to something empirical. It's just not in an obvious way that it's true by definition. It's not a synthetic a priori thing because it's actually analytic. It's true by definition, then you've gotten rid of any ground.

1:54:57 Seth: Right.

1:54:57 Mark: It's the same thing that you can. Okay, so scientific laws. Maybe the best we can come up with is inductive generalization. And you just can't say that there are necessary laws. That just doesn't make any sense. I don't think there's anything that. That contradicts like what he might say about space and time that like, oh, we just perceive things as spatial and so they're necessarily spatial. For beings like that, that perceive stuff like that, that seems like a different issue. I don't think space and time helps the rest of this stuff. I know.

1:55:23 Wes: I think there's a lot.

1:55:24 Mark: I'm raising a lot of things that we need to defend.

1:55:26 Wes: I. I think his epistemology can be defended. And we'll do that next time. And I'll.

1:55:31 Mark: I'll be the defender next time we talk about Kant. That's not next episode.

1:55:36 Wes: I know. That'll be far away. Don't worry. Far, far away.

1:55:41 Mark: Well, and let me tell you one more thing about this freedom. So I gave his solution to the problem of free will, that the freedom must reside in the way things are in themselves instead of our experience. But I feel like it's exactly the opposite, that we experience ourselves as free all the time. Now it's not like I touch myself and I feel freedom. It's not five senses experience, but I experience myself as obviously free. And it's actually only some sort of external. It's like this theory that everything has a cause that tells me, oh, that doesn't make any sense because I'm, you know, I am material and I must have a cause and stuff.

Kant reverses that. He says that the world of our experience is such that everything is determined, but that the world in itself, this sort of outside thing that only reason can get at, says we're really free. I think it's the opposite. We experience ourselves as free. And it's this external thing, this rule of reason about everything must have a cause that tells us that we're not free. So I don't buy his take on that at all.

1:56:38 Wes: Says we experience ourselves as free.

1:56:40 Mark: He says we must necessarily assume that we are free in order to have a moral deliberation the way we do.

1:56:46 Wes: The feeling of being free is just as predominant as the feeling of being a subject. The I think the I that we attach to everything, the moral version of the I in epistemology, is the sense that the I is free anyway, we can Discuss that. Seth, do you want to give your general reaction to this?

1:57:03 Seth: And let's see. So general reaction is, I'm a fan of human dignity. Rereading it or coming back to it or reading it for the first time, however you want to say it, it was more interesting than I thought it was going to be. I think having to find a way to connect all this to the larger metaphysics and so forth really almost makes the enterprise, I want to say, impressive.

1:57:30 Mark: Yeah.

1:57:30 Seth: You know, there's less in here. That's as intuitively clear on the surface as there was with the principle of utility. Obviously, a lot of meat on the bone from a philosophical sense, but I'm going back to different systems or different principles if I'm trying to come up with some useful practical guide for my life. Okay.

1:57:50 Mark: There are some things that are intuitively attractive about Kantianism, but. But I don't see how. Why those intuitive things couldn't be expressed in a much simpler form of ethics. That doesn't have anything to do with the craziness that is his epistemology, as valuable as that is in itself. I just think that he was so consumed in his own system that, you know, we're just spending all our time decoding the elegance of the system, that he finds it very hard. Give. I was gonna say he finds it very hard to give a defense of these fundamental things.

In fact, what he has is a defense of why we can't understand them. Right. If these things ultimately have to do with the world in itself, well, that's why we can't make any sense of it. So that's, to me, is very comparable to, you know, the kind of arguments that Leibniz or any other, like, really heavily religious person is going to say to say, oh, yeah, there are things that we can know about God and morality and the order of the universe, but we can't delve too far into it because it's unknowable and it's. We're just finite creatures. Like, he ultimately pulls that.

That same shit that I didn't appreciate when people were doing it hundreds of years before, and I don't appreciate it now.

1:58:55 Wes: I entirely agree with Kant on all that. I'm serious.

1:58:58 Mark: Okay, well, you liked Leibniz so much, so it makes sense.

1:59:02 Wes: First of all, I don't think religion and science have any implications for each other. And that's a very Kantian position. And I believe that, yes, this realm of the meaningless and the senseless, yes, you can talk about them. No, they're not Empirical science. Science. So philosophy is a legitimate enterprise even though it's not empirical science. And technically speaking, we're bullshit artists, but it's still worthwhile. So there you go.

1:59:24 Mark: Well, we'll see.

1:59:24 Wes: That's it in a nutshell.

1:59:25 Mark: Nietzsche's alternative to that, that he still thinks that there's a lot you can talk about in terms of philosophy, you know, without resorting to the. The kind of considerations that Kant does. So for next time, we are going to talk about Nietzsche's genealogy of morals. Please, again, look@PartiallyExaminedLife.com now. You know, if you go to PartiallyExaminedLife.com and post a comment, send us an email, go on our Facebook page, join the Facebook group and send us something. Post us to something, we actually will read it. Maybe we'll respond to it on the air, so to speak. Probably not. But if you do it now as opposed to when we have a hundred thousand subscribers, you have a way better freaking chance of us paying any attention to you at all.

2:00:09 Wes: Four of us having a hundred thousand subscribers.

2:00:12 Mark: In fact. If you like what you hear, please, please, please send the URL to some friends of yours that might be into philosophy, even if you don't know it could be a conversation starter. Or join the Facebook group and send the Facebook group invite to all of your Facebook friends so they can all

2:00:29 Wes: see what spam everyone often

2:00:33 Mark: do your duty.

2:00:37 Wes: He does not mean, number two

2:00:40 Seth: will that you would share this. Good night.

2:00:44 Mark: Actually, if you share this with everyone and if everybody shared this with everyone, then the server would get completely fucking overrun. So I guess you shouldn't.

2:00:54 Seth: That's not a moral issue. God, what do I have to keep telling you guys this?

2:00:59 Mark: Goodbye.

2:01:00 Wes: Goodbye it.

2:01:44 Unknown speaker: You terrify me, all of you. You dent the space that I live through your sweaty and invading hands. You're conscious of constant and implied demands Just stop making me nervous just stop stealing my peace just stop boring me senseless just stop looking at me. I'm lost for words I, I'm not to blame I shrink inside me if I can my spinal cord is poised to strike well I don't judge but I don't like just stuff making me conscious of not feeling myself just stuck feeding my sadness Just stop bleeding my health, Your emotions spear me through I feel 2 inches close to you I'm feeling scarce and out the door I'm wanting to cling to you more Just stop leaving me lonely just stop making me boil just stop feeding me envy Just stop being my Just stop scaring me badly Just stop feeling me sick Just stop loving me sadly just stop making me need. Stop.

2:04:54 Wes: Up.