Ep. 372: Kant’s Ethics Lectures (Part Two)

0:04 Mark: Hey, everybody. I just want to let you know that as of September, our membership rates will be going up purely due to inflation. We've had them at the same place for over a decade. So you may want to consider signing up for a subscription on our website or Patreon or Apple at the yearly rate, which will lock you in at the current rate for the whole year. You would not be affected by the price change until next year. Just a thought. Enjoy the show. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 372, part 2. We've been discussing Kant's ethics lectures.

We had sort of finished the first two sections, the first two lectures that we'd read on his introductory observations and the Supreme Principle of Morality, his metaethics. And now we're going to get down to. We read several sections on duties to oneself, which he thinks are sort of the most important, the primary ones, and then duties towards others. And a lot of these follow. So even lying, right, the quintessential duty towards others is not really because of the harm it's going to cause other people. It's about what it does to you and your integrity and respecting humanity as an end in itself, which, you know, you're the humanity that you are most aware of, that you have the most immediate control over and contact with.

So, yes, a lot of these things sort of actually fall out of our duties towards ourselves. In fact, some of the other, like charity, we were saying he doesn't emphasize positive virtues, that it's all about prescriptions. And some of what you would consider positive virtues above and beyond, like charity are actually like, well, nature distributes things unequally and that's kind of not fair. So when we give to charity, when we give to somebody that's in need, we're just making up for that natural. So it's actually just our duty. It's not above and beyond.

Like, we owe those people. We owe the poor, unequal share.

1:59 Wes: Like, so nature, like social arrangements. Society is unjust. It sounded very, yeah, almost communist, social warrior type stuff. Like. Yeah, society is structured to marginalize certain groups or to be unjust and they have a right to be compensated for that. It's not just charity. Pretty unexpected idea from Kant.

2:22 Dylan: Yep.

2:22 Mark: Even has a section in this whole thing about, like, how judgy can you be about other people? Because clearly he wants to judge other people quite a lot. But he recognizes, like, well, you only really, you know, your own breast. And so you should be really disciplined and strict with yourself because you actually are in a position to do that, whereas you're not in a position to do that with other people. But yeah, and like, when is it okay? Like, he gets down to manners. When is it okay? Like, is it part of friendship to tell your friends their flaws? Like, well, no, we need to just

2:53 Wes: kind of say yes and no. I mean, there's a lot of.

2:56 Mark: Yeah, there's a lot of nuance. Yep, yep.

2:59 Wes: But to begin with here, he, you know, he starts off this duties oneself section by saying, usually these are subordinated towards duties to others and they're, they're explained in terms of happiness. Right. You know, my duties to myself are kind of about what make me happy. But he's going to say no. They actually take first place because we can't obligate ourselves if we degrade our own persons. And we're going to describe these in terms of obligation just as much as duties to others. It's not just consequentialist. Like, if you're a drunkard, it's bad for you, it's unhealthy or whatever. It's actually no, dishonors your own person is the idea. So it's not what's good for you necessarily, it's about what dishonors you or shows disrespect for yourself.

3:48 Dylan: And all of that is through the lens ultimately of rightly using your freedom. Then that goes back to the categorical imperative about whether or not the rules that you set for the regulation of your inclinations can be universalized.

4:02 Mark: And you think that with all this emphasis on avoiding dishonor that it would be, well, death before dishonor. And he does say that like in terms of if you're a soldier and you're being commanded to go into war, like, don't let your niggling fear of death, you know, get in the way of your duty. But it doesn't go so far as like the stoics on suicide, like, if this is an intolerable situation for you, you should just kill yourself. Like, no, it's actually you, because that is the fundamental thing. So we had a whole section on suicide as the primary duty.

Like if you don't stay alive, you can't do any of these other things. So it's certainly not like degrading, you know, using your freedom to eliminate the possibility of freedom altogether, to eliminate your corporeal self, that is off the table. Even if, you know you would suffer dishonor, you'd be put in chains, whatever the kind of things that.

4:55 Wes: What if everyone killed themselves? But no, he's very into this whole self contradiction idea, right? Using my freedom to eliminate freedom. Because again, the will to be, you know, to actually truly will something in this autonomous sense can't be self contradictory. That ideas is at work throughout this. I don't think he's correct even by the lights of his own theory here. I don't think this works as an argument just because our. Yeah, maybe I'm wrong about that. I have to think about it more. But my feeling was it doesn't quite work in the way that the whole lying example works where I universalize and then I imagine a world in which everyone is lying and therefore I undermine the possibility of lying. If I universalize suicide, I don't really undermine it anyway.

5:48 Dylan: Yeah, and he seemed to be also. I agree with Mark, your summary about being categorically against suicide, though his example of Cato he does seem to allow it. From the standpoint of the exception that proves the rule. It seemed to be like there were cases where you could choose akin to the way in which your honor would require you to sacrifice your life in battle, your honor would require to sacrifice your life. Not certainly in terms of intolerable, you know, anything that's just sort of dealing with the trials and tribulations of life that would be not universalizable, but the notion that you could have so dishonored yourself or be so dishonored or also that you would be in such dire straits that physically, that it wasn't, you know, as. I'm just uncomfortable. It didn't seem to be like that was.

6:49 Wes: Yeah, you can't do it from prudence, right?

6:51 Dylan: You can't do it from prudence. No, no, that's right.

6:54 Wes: Because it would be convenient in many cases. It would be, you know, yeah, it'd be convenient to kill yourself. But I think you're onto this distinction, Dylan, where he says, this is not to say that suicide is cowardly. It can be done courageously. It can be done from honor. But Kant says, you know, that's just the psychology of it. My problem is not that it's cowardly or dishonorable. It's that it's unfree. You're letting your freedom be limited by an externality, which is your misfortune. So Cato should have let Caesar torture him. Lucretia should have fought to the death. You're allowed to fight to the death. So suicide by cop, maybe. Maybe that's allowable, but you're not allowed to. Yeah, just take your own life.

7:38 Mark: For you cannot allow to let yourself be raped. But you should not, like, kill yourself because you're about to be raped, but you could die fighting the rapist. Like, that was a main thing. You know, along with his arguments against various sexual activities.

7:52 Wes: Is that Lucretia activity, the Lucretia example, she ought to have fought to death in defense of her honor and her modesty.

7:59 Mark: Seth Reuse.

8:00 Seth: So just that he actually gives, in addition to the Lucretia and the Cato example is like, there are many examples where it seems justified. And he's saying it's not that those examples are justified, it's that they're psychologically understandable why people would make that choice, but they're not morally defensible. And prior to the discussion of suicide, he says, look, you're not permitted to sell your limbs for money. And this is what I thought. This actually, I really like this part where he says, your body is your instrument of action on earth in this life.

And morality is about action. So harming, damaging, or destroying the vehicle, your vehicle for acting morally, for basically functioning as a human being is not permitted. He's like, if we could switch bodies, then sure, if we had a, you know, like a spirit that we could just inhabit other bodies, then we could maybe make the excuse that you could do something to a body and then switch to a new body. But he's like, this is what you have and this is what you got. And damaging it, destroying it, selling off parts of it is not permitted. So if you buy into that logic, or even just assuming that, then the notion of why suicide is morally indefensible makes a lot more sense because it's essentially the destruction of your instrument of moral acting.

So it's almost like self contradictory in some respect. But yeah, he's very sympathetic to why people do it. And this, I think would be one of those where you start to push the limits of like, can't be right. If you're talking about something, let's say, let's say assisted suicide because you're dying of cancer and you're in a tremendous amount of pain. And so, well, it's morally indefensible for you to commit suicide. But I totally get it. Like, go ahead. And you're like, well, this body that is my instrument for moral action on this earth has failed me.

I can't use it for moral action anymore. So what's the point? I don't know. That's maybe an intro to philosophy course kind of discussion to have.

10:12 Dylan: But you would obviously go down the road there of I'm using my body as the instrument of moral action against my own body, which he considers self contradictory. But you're coming up with an example that doesn't seem so self contradictory because you've changed the conditions, because you no longer. It's pretty easy to see that in the face of a complete lack of freedom regarding your demise that your final act of freedom would be the act of suicide in that respect. This whole. He does a lot of work with using our responsibilities and duties towards our bodies and the kinds of parsing out of the ways in which we can use it, morally or not morally.

And so we can't sell parts of our body. And he gives an example of a limb, but you immediately wonder, like, where the edges are here, right? Can we not sell our hair? Is it immoral for us to sell our hair in order to buy our husband a watch? Or is it so clear that work isn't selling ourselves.

11:20 Wes: Well, he brings up that example.

11:22 Dylan: He does bring up the example. And so. But he focuses on notions of like that are sort of typical, like, well, I'm going to prostitute my body, I'm going to sell my body for the sexual pleasure of another. And so where is the line between that and other kinds of degradation of work? And why is it just that things like sexual penetration versus other kinds of degrading physical labor.

11:47 Wes: Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. I mean, he does say earlier on in 124, he gives a more ordinary example of where I mean doesn't give an example, but he says it is utterly absurd that a rational being who is an end where to every means exists should use himself as a means.

12:02 Dylan: Right.

12:02 Wes: Very familiar Kantian idea. A person can indeed serve as a means for others. So remember, and this is something people often get wrong about Kant, it's not that we can't use each other as a means. We do that when we have coffee and get pleasure in each other's company. We're using each other as means all the time. It's just that we can't use others merely as a means. We also have to do it in a way which is consistent with their personhood, which means observing their rights. So he says a person can indeed serve as a means for others by his work, for example, but in such a way that he does not cease to exist as a person and an end. So you have a groundwork there for saying some forms of labor violate rights, some forms of labor are degrading, as you pointed out, Dylan, and then they fail the test.

12:53 Dylan: Yeah.

12:54 Mark: So yeah, on that page 124, a man can indeed dispose over his condition, but not over his person earlier. He's able to dispose of over everything pertaining to his person, but not over the person itself. So it might be a little arbitrary, but I think we make it is. Yes, the fingernails and the hair are different than your finger. Like one is a living part of you.

13:20 Wes: It depends. If the roots of the hair go all the way down into your person, where do they stop?

13:29 Mark: Yes. Okay, so you can't scalp. You can't scalp yourself.

13:32 Wes: There you go.

13:32 Mark: And give your scalp to someone else. But you could cut your hair and give your hair to someone else, that's fine. But it does get to right, isn't it Locke? And then all these libertarians and things follow him that are like the private property is rooted in the idea of I own my body, I can do whatever I like, with my body, it's about consent. And Kant just fundamentally disagrees with that. You do not own your body. If there's justification for property, it has to be something else, because your body is not your property. In fact, it is more like God owns your body.

He brings in these religious things explicitly. Not because he's saying, oh, just defer to religious authorities or something like this, but that these religious ideas express the fundamental facts of the matter, that it is as if we have borrowed our bodies. This is another thing that made me feel like he was very stoic. That, like, we're not the owners of this life. We just are granted something for a temporary time and then fate will claim it back. Very early on we said that the only evils. For Kant, the only real evils are the evils that other people choose to do.

Which seems like, well, a lot of things, like disease and things. But he's like, no, those are just. Those are not evils. Those are just part of life. So, yeah, yeah, your body could be taken back from you at any point by illness. That's not your business, like, but it is. You can't be betraying that sacred trust that you've been given this body to use by cutting off pieces of it or selling it, renting it out.

15:06 Dylan: I agree with you about the way in which it. He doesn't use words like sacred trust, though, right? I mean, he. I mean, unless he. We say that his. He is just dressing up conventional Christian morality with notions of a argument of contradiction with reason. I take him at face value as saying, oh, the reason that you are a steward of your body has to do with a contradiction that comes up with respect to the notion that you are at free will to dispose of your body.

15:40 Wes: He does use the word sacred, but it comes up later. Page 178. There's nothing more sacred than the rights of others. But yeah, you're right, Dylan. He doesn't use it. It doesn't use that word in this section.

15:54 Mark: Well, so 149, suicide is rebellion against God.

15:58 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, you're right, Mark. I was back and forth on this whole question about whether it's imbued with Christianity and as a context of his time, or is he basically taking a Christian position and acting as an apologist from the standpoint of reason?

16:15 Seth: I think the latter. But I mean, to be fair to him, in this text, you could just cut out the sections where he talks about God. There's nothing that hangs in his argument. He's just trying to show right. Because that whole thing, it's, it's a rebellion against God because God put us on earth here for a reason. And if you commit suicide, you're basically just flouting gods, you know, you're giving in the middle finger or whatever. So. But he doesn't need that to bolster his argument.

16:40 Wes: He does argue against command theory. So it's not wrong because God says it's wrong. God says it's wrong because it's wrong. Morality comes first. Although he does say a very Korsgaardian thing where he acknowledges that we do need an enforcer. Right. It sounds almost like the Korsgaard compromise between Kant and Hume and Hobbes. There's a little Hobbesian element where he says at a certain level the enforcer of a sovereign doesn't determine the content of morality, what's good or bad, but we need some sort of authority. It'll turn out to be the will in the end.

But the other thing I just. In this. Before we leave the section on duties to oneself, this introductory section and go into the more detail in the other sections, I just wanted to point to this thing that I had said before about the basis in honor. So on page 127. So he'll say that this is towards the bottom, the principium, principium of the self regarding duties does not consist in self favor but in self esteem. Our actions, that is, must be in keeping with the worth of humanity. We have two foundations for our actions, inclinations which are animal and nature and humanity, to which our human inclinations have to be subordinated.

And then a little farther down he'll say all such duties are founded on a certain love of honor consisting in the fact that that a man values himself and in his own eyes is not unworthy, that his actions should be in keeping with humanity. I thought that was very important. And this again, Hume says something very similar, a little throwaway line about pride. And I just can't help but think he's expanding on this and that his whole self respect formulation, his whole end, you know, you respect people as ends in themselves. That's kind of built off of that little nugget in Hume, I think, and this idea of honor and respect.

So it's really interesting because it's not inclination based on the typical way we would think in terms of more obviously sentimental things like sympathy or interest in well being or this word, we call it libido or love. It's not about love. This is why I use that introduction. It's about honor and respect.

18:58 Mark: So there's some subtlety in terms of, like, well, what constitutes a suicide is just being, like, drinking too much, being on living an unhealthy lifestyle. You're. You're committing suicide in slow motion. You want to say, well, no, it's not to be praised, but it's not suicide.

19:12 Seth: Yeah, he certainly doesn't like drinking because

19:14 Wes: you undermine your ability to act freely.

19:17 Mark: So then we've been hedging here toward. Dylan was saying, like, what's special about penetration is that the. I would think, like putting your body in a coal mine and breathing in all those horrible fumes and things like that seems to be just as bad as sexual acts. And maybe he didn't consider air pollution and things like that. Maybe he should have. This is something we could use to improve his theory specifically. But certainly not just like. Or, yeah, something that really, like, debases you reputationally.

19:46 Wes: Right.

19:47 Mark: Just flashing yourself, like, I'm gonna just be a stripper. Like, nobody's gonna touch me. There's no penetration involved. But, like, that still is not okay for him. Yeah. So this duties toward the body with respect to the sexual impulse. And I think we've said quite a bit about this that, you know, at least the sexual act itself inevitably involves revealing, giving your whole self to somebody. And so that there's something contradictory if you're just trying to do that if you're having casual sex or if you're doing something, doing any sexual activity that does not recognize the fact of what sex reveals and connects about yourself. Right. Basically, if you're not using it the way it was meant to be used, then that's terrible. You're not killing yourself. It's bad in the same way as killing yourself.

20:34 Seth: This is certainly the place where you could most directly accuse him of the Christian apologetics, I was going to say,

20:41 Wes: before we slag him off about sexuality, so to say, he starts the section with a very interesting psychological observation. He calls the sexual impulse a quote, unquote, six sense or kind of sixth sense. And I thought, yeah, that's a really interesting observation because it is really weird to desire. You know, you could say, desire the body of another person, desire the flesh of another person. I think years ago I said there's something cannibalistic about the sexual impulse. And I don't think you guys like that. It's a very Freudian idea. But it is really odd when you think about it because it isn't fully physical.

Right. Unless you're a necrophiliac and even Then I think you're. You're doing something interesting. In fantasy, it is in a way about the psyche of the other. But if it's purely lust, it's very focused on the body. And it's not just about touch. Right. It's not just about what animals can do. Oh, this is physically pleasurable. I'm touching a body. I have a certain erogenous zones. There's an interesting psychology to it where we're getting into the head of the other person. But it's this weird mix of the sensual and then something else that makes it hard to categorize this weird way in which we can make other human beings the objects of our appetites, which on another level are directed towards inanimate things like food, for instance, things that we take into our body.

So in that sense, there is a very, you know, he uses. Does he say objectify or. He doesn't use the word objectify, but he says essentially we're turning each other into things and objects. And so we're inherently ashamed of even having the impulse. We're just because of this objectifying quality to it. Because we get so focused on the body, sometimes at the expense of the personhood. The other. I thought that was, you know, pretty

22:38 Mark: psychologically acute and that you could do that to yourself. That we don't normally think like masturbation involves objectifying yourself. But yeah, it makes yourself into making like, look, I'm a pleasure generating machine. I can pull the cranks, so to speak, and rack up more pleasure points. Yeah. That is making yourself into a thing.

22:59 Wes: Self abuse, as they say.

23:01 Mark: And there's just nothing worse than homosexuality. It's just, it's the worst possible thing. It's worse than murder. Like, oh my God.

23:12 Seth: Yeah, that point Wes about, he says just, we're ashamed. There's just shame immediately associated with the desire, with the sexual desire. He actually says other interesting things, right. About. Not just about that sixth sense. He says something to the effect of it's the only possible way of enjoying human beings that has the potential to not be treating them as a means. It's a very strange thing. But he says we have this inclination and we're ashamed of it, but we have it. So we have to explain it and we have to find a way that it can be done morally right.

And, you know, to go back to what he says later, well, why are we ashamed of it? Because we're not inherently ashamed. You aren't born ashamed of sexual appetite. It's habitus. Right. So if we were having the conversation. I might question him as to where that shame comes from. But he talks about it as if it's just. Well, this is just natural. This is as natural as anything. That we're just ashamed of having this inclination.

24:19 Wes: Yeah. I think he thinks we're naturally ashamed just because we are in touch with the objectifying quality of it. And this is like Genesis, right? You don't know that you're naked until you eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And then suddenly Adam and Eve are like, holy shit, we're naked. I think that really is about objectification, about our capacity to see other human bodies as objects of desire. It's really weird when you think about it and leads to uncomfortable feelings.

24:51 Dylan: Well, and in that way, he's. He's denying erotic love as a form of love, properly. So at 155, he says love is human. Affection is the love that wishes well, is amicably disposed, promotes the happiness of others and rejoices in it. So seems pretty straightforward. A kind of agape love.

25:11 Wes: Right.

25:12 Dylan: And 156, this is sort of where I think you were. Seth says the sexual impulse is not an inclination that one human has for another qua human, but inclination for their sex. It is therefore a principium of the debasement of humanity, a source for the preference of one sex over the other and the dishonoring of that sex by satisfying the inclination. The desire of a man for a woman is not directed to her as a human being. On the contrary, the woman's humanity is of no concern to him. And the only object of his desire is for sex.

25:45 Wes: He will say, you know, just to be clear, you can combine sex and love in the context of a marriage. Later on we'll learn. Yes, you can. If you set things up so that you preserve the personhood of the person, you can have a ethical sexual relationship with them.

26:03 Mark: Right. We were saying this at the very beginning of the part one. When you married, you give yourself wholly to the person that you receive, but because they then reciprocate, then you receive yourself back. So this sounds very Hegelian. Like this is a primary way of getting that you don't lose anything. Whereas if something is reciprocity. Yes. So the reason that incest between a parent and child is prohibited is because parents and children are just not inherently equals. And so there can't be true reciprocity. That's the main reason that we should.

26:37 Wes: I know you're going to love this, Mark. Yeah.

26:40 Seth: So this is Where. Yeah, this. You know, he's making the claim here that, you know, sex has this kind of like, it's. So you have to establish a condition where you can give yourself wholly to the other. Meaning you have to be in a relationship with somebody where you are fully recognizing them as an end in order to ethically, morally, ethically have or morally have a sexual relationship with them. But in no other sphere of human existence is that the case. I don't have to establish a relationship with the barista at Starbucks to treat them fully as an end in order for them to make me a coconut milk cappuccino grande.

27:31 Wes: You want coffee from me? We don't even know each other.

27:33 Seth: Yeah, exactly. So it seems like. Well, there are many other things where the human body is involved. I mean, yes, it has to do with use of the body, but there's plenty of other things. I hire people to move stuff from one house to another, and you know what I mean? So this feels prudish to me more than a little. But I get what he's saying. I just don't necessarily agree with it.

27:59 Mark: If you order your cappuccino with breast milk, then you do have to. That crosses a certain line.

28:05 Wes: Gross.

28:05 Seth: I can see that. Hey, man, breast milk's good for you. Nature's perfect food.

28:10 Wes: I forgot you're living in Austin,

28:15 Seth: not Boulder. Austin.

28:18 Wes: Do we want to talk about. As we run out of time, duties

28:21 Mark: towards others just to touch on this. So there's this crimina carnis section. Just because that's a weird. His prudish way of talking about these taboo sexual things is to use Latin for them.

28:33 Wes: Yes.

28:33 Dylan: It's like whispering cancer.

28:35 Wes: Instead of using delegate to say in German, have you ever looked at the diary of Samuel Pepys?

28:42 Mark: No.

28:43 Wes: The English guy from the 1600s. He's like. It's a very detailed diary of what he does during the day, including, I woke up and I farted. And it was really good. But he'll talk about getting licentious with his maids. So any time he goes sexual, he starts doing it. Is it Latin or French? I forget which. But, yeah, he has to switch into a different language. You need a romance language. You can't do German or English, if you want to talk about it.

29:10 Mark: So just that these, you know, so they're crimina carnis contra naturam, or in line with naturam. So, like, even adultery or incest? Well, those are, you know, at least go along with instinct. You know, that it is doing something that could potentially produce a child. So it Sounds very teleological in the sort of objectionable sense. Like, this is what sex is. Sex is for making children. That's what it's for. If you're doing anything that could not result in that, then you are violating what it is for. And so then he just runs through the onanism, sexus homogenii, and then the intercourse with animals, which I did not write, if he had a Latin term for that.

He concludes that with suicide is certainly the most dreadful thing that a man can do to himself, but is not so base and ignoble as these crimina carnis contra naturam, which are the most contemptible acts a man can commit. So there you go. Yeah.

30:05 Wes: And he ends with, how do we educate the youth about this? Because if you talk about it, right, you might turn them onto it. So what do we do? We just keep silent about it. That's pretty much the method.

30:17 Mark: It's like those anti drug films and stuff that get kids intrigued about trying drugs. It's that if you're too best to, you know, minimize. But he just recognizes these are so common and it's just. This really bugs him. Hopefully not the animal thing. I don't know what was going on in his time period. Yes, okay, so of duties towards other people, which we've said a lot about, he doesn't say perfect and imperfect duties, but he says two duties of goodwill or benevolence and duties of indebtedness or rectitude. So the latter are the perfect duties.

They are required of us. The first one are kindly. Then there's quite a bit of discussion about can you command somebody to, you know, love thy neighbor or something like that? Like, well, no, love is well wishing from inclination. Inclination is not very reliable. You could just not like somebody and then you don't do your duty by them. The kind of love that is just commanded. Be polite, be considerate, help people out in their rightful pursuits. Those are things that we owe toward everybody. And that is the kind of love we can't command our inclinations, but we can command, right?

31:29 Wes: We cannot be obligated to do things that our will has no control over, over. And our will can't control our feelings. And this is, you know, this is a very important point because I think some people at least tacitly treat ethics as it is more about love and more about how we're comported to people in the domain of sentiment. Which he's all for, right? He thinks ultimately obligation will habituate our sentiments. That's very important. And it's better to have our sentiments habituated, but we can't rely on that as a kernel. Right. So if we observe the rights of someone who's a criminal, give them due process, we don't give them cruel and unusual punishment. Not because we think that they're a nice person and that they arouse our sympathy, but just. That's what we owe to their humanity.

32:20 Dylan: Yep.

32:20 Mark: You can judge people's actions, but you cannot. You should always try to see the humanity in people. You know, this is a surprisingly sort of. Well, again, it's not non judgmental, but it's adding some nuance. Hate the sin, not the sinner kind of that thing. But I just liked his. So, yeah, we talked about where he uses the word sacred and this is the only place on page one. There's nothing in all the world so sacred as the rights of others. They are impregnable and inviolable. Woe unto him who infringes those rights and tramples them underfoot.

32:51 Dylan: Whoa, exclamation point.

32:53 Mark: Yes.

32:55 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting though.

32:56 Dylan: We have a divine ruler and his sacred gift to us is the rights of man.

33:00 Mark: Yeah, that's that literary use of God there, like you don't need. It's not we're doing because God, but like they certainly go together, the religious point of view and the ethical point of view. They can be used to give you that motivation that merely mere recognition of the rights might not give you.

33:16 Wes: He brings up at one point this hypothetical of what if we were. We lived in a world where we had unlimited benevolence for each other, we wouldn't need to respect the right. It would never occur to us that people have rights because we wouldn't have any inclination to violate them. He says it's a bad thing, actually. It's kind of a perfect utopian world. But we would lose something by not being aware of the rights of others and the respect that we ought to have for them. So benevolence shouldn't be flattered. He says. And then the other aspect, as we pointed out here, I'm on page 180 and doing well out of obligation, habituates us to do it from inclination. And then here he kind of redefines love into two subtypes. Right. We can like another person's quality and then we can wish them well.

34:09 Dylan: Yes.

34:10 Wes: And we can have universal benevolence in a sense. So it's not that we like people, but we can in a way, like their humanity.

34:20 Dylan: By well, wishing we can Wish the best for them, even for the worst person. Right.

34:26 Wes: That's what. Yeah. So you can say love thy neighbor, love thy neighbor, but it doesn't mean, yeah, I'm gonna really like this person even though they're, they're an ass. It just means I'm gonna wish them well and I'm gonna wish them to be worthy. You know, I'm gonna say they should be happy. I hope they're happy and I hope they're worthy of being happy. So part of the sentiment is, is about their moral reform. And even someone who's a king, who's putting someone to death for a crime should be able to make this distinction and just don't make it personal. You know, this is business.

35:02 Dylan: Yeah, that was the part that sort of verged on a kind of. For basically smiling while you beat somebody. It hurts me more than it hurts you. And also a I'm. Or maybe so that's the negative aversion in this line. But it's sending somebody to the gallows and then say, well, I just really wish you the best.

35:24 Mark: There's something that, something horrifying, certainly.

35:27 Dylan: Yes.

35:28 Mark: In that idea.

35:29 Wes: I wish you were worthy of not being killed right now. And I hope you, I wish, you know, all the best in heaven or hell, wherever you're going, Purgatory.

35:38 Mark: I hope this all the best balances the scales. Like you're going to go undergo this punishment, but then maybe after, if it's up to God, what happens to you

35:48 Dylan: after that, it's self righteousness. This is where it's not all that way. Right. I mean there's something really, I don't know, I think right. About the notion of benevolence towards your neighbors is being much more possible in the notion of well wishing as opposed to genuinely liking them. I think that's true. And I think that there is something very civilizing about the notion of being able to get over. You don't need to like everybody, but part of us getting along with one another is basically wishing the best for, for everybody. But there is something self righteous really about the idea of a, a judge or a, a monarch passing such.

36:29 Wes: But I, I think it just comes down to saying though we ought to respect people's rights even when we're punishing them.

36:34 Mark: That's true.

36:34 Wes: We don't, it's not about punishment, is not about hatred. It's not personal. It doesn't deny the personhood of the other such that. Right. We don't torture them, we don't do these things that would violate the personhood of the other person. Obviously execution seems to do that. But the idea is that I don't know how you justify punishment in Kantian terms because we usually justify it in consequentialist terms. Right. We don't want to do it, but society needs it. Society, there wouldn't be any order, we need deterrence, blah blah, blah. But yeah, we don't do it because there's something inherently moral about vengeance.

37:13 Seth: The flip side of that is it says something to the effect of like if somebody was just a totally objectionable human being, just a huge prick, but they always acted according to the moral law, there'd still be something redemptive in them. I feel like he's kind of devaluing. You know, he's basically, he's saying kindness is great, but it's not really praiseworthy. It's not praiseworthy in the same way that acting morally according to duty and obligation is praiseworthy.

37:43 Dylan: Yep. Against your inclinations.

37:45 Seth: It's just inclination. Yep. And it's just practical, just subjective. Pick your category of, you know, whatever. And that just strikes me as somehow uncharitable, if not wrong, because I think this isn't even appealing to like human sentiment. But I think we do believe that. Especially if you're going to buy the Christian line, if he's a, you know, a Christian apologist or whatever, it's like, well, charity, chastity, charity, all those, those things are considered virtues. And I think you could make the case that an Aristotelian type approach to developing virtues would include things about generosity and compassion and kindness and things like that in many cases. So I don't know, it just seems a little harsh.

38:37 Dylan: I do really like the part that Wes just emphasized is he's very strong on treating people humanely and respecting their humanity, even in the face of punishment. That might be part of a well ordered society. There's parts of it that feel like he would be in line with the notion of someone like even Foucault where punishment for the sake of punishment has no business existing. He would have limitations of freedoms and maybe things like helping reeducate people cultivate the change of their behavior so that they could be part of society. But the notion of having degradating conditions in a prison because all those people deserve it, that's part of their punishment and treating people inhumanely because they are serving time or been accused of a crime, that kind of thing. That you would be very, very, very much against that kind of effort.

39:34 Mark: Yes. Here's a quote, page 181 Judges, in punishing crime, should not dishonor humanity. They must indeed penalize the evildoer, but not violate his humanity by demeaning punishments. For if another dishonors a man's humanity, the man himself sets no value on it. It is if the evildoer had himself so demeaned his humanity that he's no longer worthy of being a man and must then be treated as a universal object of contempt. So there are lots of things that we do, these sexual things. But also, as he's going to say in the next section, just telling any kind of lie.

Like, the primary way that we are social animals is we reveal our thoughts to each other. And if you lie, you are completely defeating the point of being a human being. So it's like a very profound thing. It's not just like on some. So there are no white lies, there are no harmless lies. These all just undermine. They make you an object of contempt. So we want to keep people up. If they have degraded themselves in this way, we want to reform them if possible. We want to see the good in them, we want to elevate them. We don't want to reinforce the terrible things they've done to themselves by humiliating them through punishments.

40:44 Seth: It's funny you just said, like, if you lie, it subverts the entire social order. If you commit suicide, you're destroying the nature of humanity. If you sell your body, it's like, there's a lot of shit. This is a lot at stake for Kant, man. Everything, like, everything counts. Every single little thing you do, all the time counts. And if you walked around and you were just like, if I turn left here, am I willing? Is this a universal that can be adopted by everybody turns left here at the street, or should it? I mean, it's like, man, there's a lot at stake. It must have been exhausting.

41:22 Mark: That's why it's not consequentialist. It's not consequentialist. You don't really think that you're going to destroy the world or whatever. It's not like. But it's as if you were saying, screw humanity. And like, we don't just don't want to do that. Like, that's just the a priori thing about morality is we should all be on the up and up and not even in our thoughts, not in any way. So trying to subvert that.

41:44 Wes: Yeah, this is the whole free rider, sensible knave problem. Right? Whenever we talk about, well, it's just me doing it. It's not. I'm not really destroying society because the rest of society isn't going to do it. I mean it raises really big problems for these sorts of accounts. But yeah, Hume tried to address this in a way that I think we weren't fully satisfied with.

42:04 Mark: So. So amping up the rhetoric here might be the response to Hume because like you're not going to really be happy with yourself if you're the sensible knave, are you? That's kind of what he's solution is. And Kant is like you are destroying your humanity.

42:19 Wes: Exactly. Yeah.

42:20 Mark: Well, I think this is a good point to end on. We certainly didn't get to all the sections. I'm hoping I can convince some of you to record a supporter only part three for us to just, just report on some of the other things we read. On truthfulness. There's really interesting stuff.

42:35 Wes: Friendships.

42:36 Mark: Friendship. Yeah. Compare what he has to say to Aristotle. I'm sure there's a lot we could say about that. And what kind of. How cold blooded is he? Is he a good friend? Is Kant a good friend? It's nuanced. He's not the ideal friend.

42:49 Wes: Let's put it that way.

42:50 Mark: It's not the kind of friend that I want. Yeah. You should not reveal too much of your soul to other people. People. Because that would. Yeah, that would burden them. That's kind of dickish.

42:57 Seth: I think.

42:58 Wes: It's really. There's a lot of fascinating stuff in there. Right. It's almost sounds like Nietzsche. Untruth is a condition of sociality. Right. There's truthfulness is grounds our social cooperative nature. But also we need a certain amount of untruth. We can't just go around exposing everything about ourselves, all of our feelings. We drive each other crazy.

43:18 Mark: Yeah. Just don't call it untruth. Call it non disclosure.

43:22 Wes: Yes, yes. Although I do think he thinks we can lie in certain circumstances. You know, if someone is putting a gun to our head and saying, yeah, yeah, tell me where my next victim is. Yeah, we can lie.

43:34 Mark: Well after Michael Walzer's just and unjust wars, if you want to learn about just war theory, very politically timely. Thanks so much for listening. We hope you reach out to us. Plt partiallyexaminedlife.com the blog post associated with this episode you could put any comments on. You could support us of course through Patreon or through Apple or other ways and they're usually channels for communicating with us that way. And we've got a Twitter feed, of course, we've got our Facebook group. Lots of ways to connect. Good night, everybody.