Transcript
Speaker: Many of you are probably still recovering from a very difficult lesson on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. And in this lesson, going to begin with a quick review just in case you didn't quite grasp everything that we covered last time. But if I could summarize it in an extremely pithy way.
Speaker: The whole point of the last lesson was to show how Immanuel Kant made room for both science and free will and morality.
Speaker: And as we will see in today's lesson, even belief in God and souls. So it is an extremely... ambitious project that Kant is embarking on. Moreover, he is trying to do it all from pure reason. It is a heroic attempt, in other words, to reconcile some ideas is that many enlightened philosophers thought were fundamentally irreconcilable, such as free will and causal determinism.
Speaker: So let me begin by telling you why it was such a difficult lesson and it has to do with the field of philosophy that we covered that would be metaphysics now metaphysics is many different things to many different people if you have to define it in sort of a general and vague way You would say, metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the fundamental nature of reality.
Speaker: What exists and what a reality is ultimately like. That is sort of a catch-all. If you just kind of say that, it gets at what most people mean when they say metaphysics.
Speaker: But of course we are covering the views of Kant and so that means it's a little bit different. Kant believed that traditional metaphysical claims about things that lie beyond possible experience, for example, the idea of God or the idea of an immortal soul, things that you can't really check with your eyes and ears, right?
Speaker: Those claims cannot be known with any degree of certainty at all. They are utterly utterly unknowable. However, Kant did believe that some kind of metaphysics is possible.
Speaker: He believed that you can't, that you can arrive at synthetic a priori knowledge, which is what we spent a lot of time covering last time. And through these courageous acts of reasoning,
Speaker: You can establish that there are necessary truths about the structure of possible experience. The things that we see, we know something about how we experience them.
Speaker: We structure them as we get that raw data from the world itself. That is what Kant's project is all about. So if the last lesson was going from Kant's metaphysics and then slowly broaching into his moral philosophy, what I want to do today sort of go in the opposite direction. We're going to begin with his moral philosophy and then do kind of work through a brief review of his metaphysics. So let's get started with that now.
Speaker: The starting point for Kant's moral philosophy is freedom. Kant says that freedom makes morality possible. In fact, if you had no actual true genuine choices about what you can do, it doesn't make any sense to hold you morally responsible for anything.
Speaker: If what you do was determined by the state of affairs that was launched by the Big Bang and then the laws of nature acting upon those state of affairs, you know, your choices aren't real.
Speaker: So unless your choices are real in some sense, genuine in some sense, then morality is impossible. So freedom is necessary for morality to be possible. And also morality gives us reason to regard ourselves as free. When you are in the face of a moral dilemma, you know that you have a choice, right? You can either do the right thing or not. And so morality itself actually makes you aware of your own freedom.
Speaker: Now, it is something that I did not stress enough in the last lesson. I thought it was already difficult enough. So that's why. but Let me just emphasize it now, Kant does not believe that we can theoretically prove that we are free.
Speaker: In other words, we can never establish that we have libertarian free will, not in an ah an objective way. However, it does seem to Kant that when we are in the grips of a moral dilemma, when we are confronted by moral demands,
Speaker: We must regard ourselves as free agents capable of obeying or disobeying them. You have no choice but to consider yourself free when making moral choices.
Speaker: So with that in mind, there are two systems that are very popular in modern philosophy today, deontology and consequentialism.
Speaker: Kant is in the former camp, he provides a deontological moral philosophy. And so let's begin with that one. Deontology is the view that an action being right or wrong depends on the principle or intention that motivated that action.
Speaker: What does that mean? It means that if you reason in this way, there ends up being a class of actions that are not okay to do. For example, maybe lying is one of those types of actions and you just can't ever do them. So deontology is a kind of morality that focuses on rules and principles. And once you establish that there's a rule that you have to follow, for example, don't lie, you can never lie. It is an absolutist position in that way that the rules always apply to everyone, no exceptions.
Speaker: Consequentialism is a little bit different um in in the way it starts off its reasoning, which makes it very different in the way that it concludes which actions are morally okay and which ones aren't.
Speaker: Deontology focuses on the principle, but consequentialism focuses on the consequences, what happens at the end of the action. And that subtle shift in emphasis makes a world of a difference.
Speaker: So for the consequentialist, An act is right or wrong depending on the consequences of the action. So maybe lying is actually permissible in some cases.
Speaker: Yeah, for the most part, lying doesn't produce good consequences. But what about a little white lie that actually spares someone's feelings? or maybe a lie that saves a life or does some other kind of good. The consequentialist would say that actually is okay.
Speaker: You can maybe consider some other examples for Kant, who again, produces a deontological moral system, things like recreational drug use are not okay because the whole reason why you are a moral being is because of your rationality.
Speaker: And of course, many drugs make you irrational temporarily. So you are supposed to protect your own rationality and not abuse substances that um stupefy you, I guess is one way to put it.
Speaker: For the consequentialist, they aren't as hung up on the rationality part. They just want to make sure that there's good consequences overall. And so if someone, for example, were to do drugs and it would be in a very limited way, right? They didn't become addicted and it maybe served some good end like relaxation and socializing. And it doesn't have to be um cannabis. It could be alcohol, whatever, they say as long as there's no negative consequences and you ultimately maybe even had some positive consequences like some enjoyment and some relaxation, then that's okay, right? Of course, if you become addicted, that's not okay, right? So it's all about the consequences for the consequentialist.
Speaker: Now, today we are going to focus on deontology. In the next lesson, we will dive into consequentialism to see a competing kind of moral philosophy. But let's talk again about rationality.
Speaker: Kant says that the only beings that are a part of the moral community are those beings that can actually act ah according to moral principles.
Speaker: Those he calls rational beings and they're the ones that have the status of having moral rights. They are part of the moral community. And what this essentially means is that beings that act purely off instinct or desire like many animals,
Speaker: They, you know, they can't actually apply principles to themselves. you You don't see a dog go on a diet, right? That doesn't make any sense. But human beings can choose how they live. And that's why humans are rational beings.
Speaker: So those are some key aspects of Kant's moral philosophy. Now we can dive into his metaphysics. Remember, Kant divided the way that we can experience the world into two distinct realms.
Speaker: There's phenomenal realm, which is the world as it appears to us. And there is the noumenal realm, which is the realm of things in themselves. We have no access to the noumenal realm ever.
Speaker: We can make some inferences about the phenomenal realm that are a little bit beyond the senses, but we can never really peer directly into the noumenal realm. Nonetheless, we do know that we are...
Speaker: things in themselves, right? We are objects, so we must exist in the noumenal realm. And so that's where we are But still, all that we can actually really experience is the phenomenal realm.
Speaker: So the big question is, is everything that we know based on the senses, like the empiricists claim? So, is everything that we know what we learn from the phenomenal realm in Kantian terms?
Speaker: And Kant said no. So now Kant is going against David Hume and John Locke and Barclay, the empiricists. So, contra these empiricists, Kant argued that successful metaphysical inquiry is possible. You can know something that isn't directly known from the senses.
Speaker: And he calls these fundamental truths, what I'm going to call sometimes metaphysical truths, um synthetic a priori judgments.
Speaker: And these are arrived at through pure reason. And these include moral truths. So the very first thing that he discovered is that we structure our perception of reality. And that's what we spent almost...
Speaker: now know an hour last time covering. And later on in the lesson, we also covered that Kant believes we can arrive at moral truths in the same way.
Speaker: So today we are focusing on the moral philosophy aspect of the Kantian system. So let me say this about discovering moral truths, according to Kant,
Speaker: He says that we do not need to look at the consequences of the action in the phenomenal realm to see whether they are right or wrong. Why is this important? Well, first of all, Kant is trying to say that you don't need to use your senses to figure out whether an action is right or wrong. You can just think about it.
Speaker: And in that way, you can say, oh, there's actually some actions that they They just don't even make any sense. They are morally wrong. That is the first thing that we want to stress when we consider this idea from Kant. but The second thing is maybe a little more subtle.
Speaker: Kant is trying to arrive at metaphysical truth. In other words, this is something that is like the realist of the real. It always applies, right? He's looking for a moral law that applies to everyone at all times forever, regardless of context. As such, he actually can't look at the phenomenal realm, right? He can't consider ah people's experiences about moral actions and their predictions about them and all that stuff.
Speaker: He has to use pure reason because he wants pure fundamental moral truth. If he's looking at the consequences of an action, that means that some actions sometimes, you know, sometimes they have good consequences, sometimes they don't. And so then it just depends and it's a kind of a 50-50 thing, right? or whatever probability you want to assign to it. But he wants to figure out what is for sure, 100% always the case. And as such, he cannot look at the phenomenal realm. He has to only use reason to figure out which actions make sense and which ones don't. And the ones that make sense are permissible or morally right.
Speaker: And the ones that don't are morally impermissible or wrong. So he figures out, he thinks about it a lot, obviously, and he says, yes, I think we can arrive at these kinds of fundamental moral truths, things that we know without even looking at the phenomenal realm. And he calls this class of ah command from reason, a categorical imperative.
Speaker: This is a command from reason that applies across any situation, no matter what you desire. In other words, it's a set of rules you must follow since they always apply.
Speaker: to not do so is literally to be irrational. So this is exactly what I was saying just a minute ago. Kant wants to know if this kind of fundamental moral truth is possible.
Speaker: if If it's not possible, then I guess you do have to look at the consequences to figure out whether or not something is right or wrong. But he thinks ultimately we can know that some things are before you even look at the world itself. We can know that some things don't make any sense and we're not allowed to do them. It doesn't make sense to do them.
Speaker: So those are captured under the term categorical imperative. And let's remind ourselves of one last thing that Kant contributed to the realm of moral philosophy. One that has enduring value because Kant really clarified what it is that we mean by moral worth or moral value.
Speaker: Think about a good action that you might do. Maybe you donated blood or you gave to charity or you helped someone do something difficult, right? You helped them move or something like that.
Speaker: Which of those actions or when can you call those actions truly moral? Well, if you did one of those things, let's just say you donated blood because you felt guilty if you didn't.
Speaker: That technically makes it so that it's not a moral action. That just means really you did it out of self-interest. You were trying to avoid guilt.
Speaker: Or maybe you donated to charity so that someone you know sees you donating to charity and you can get some moral praise. In that case, you also did it out of self-interest, right? You were looking for, ah you were fishing for compliments basically, right?
Speaker: Or what if you help someone move? If you help someone move and you did it because you really care about that person, that was motivated by altruism, which is not exactly the moral law. You you did it because you cared for that person.
Speaker: But Kant says that the only time that an action has moral worth, it is actually, in other words, a genuinely, truly moral action, is when it's done out of respect for the moral law. In other words, you were thinking about a moral principle and you said to yourself, this is the right thing to do because this moral principle says that I should do it. and that's why you did it, that's when that action becomes a moral action.
Speaker: So barry you know there's all kinds of ways of being pro-social, but out of all those different ways of being pro-social, only one of those is morality-driven, right? Only when you act out of moral principle and your actions are rooted in that moral principle can we call it a moral action.
Speaker: Okay, believe it or not, that was all review. So the good thing though, is that now you are ready to understand how to use Kant's categorical imperative to figure out which actions are right and wrong. And we are ready, that means to cover the universal law formulation.
Speaker: Kant actually gives us multiple formulations of the categorical imperative. That is different ways of figuring out what actions are right and wrong. And this is easily the most popular one. So let's begin with that one.
Speaker: Here's what it states. Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
Speaker: Did you catch all that? ah Probably not, right? It is so difficult to understand Kant's moral philosophy. that even during his own day, people didn't understand his book on moral philosophy. And so he had to write other books to clarify the other books.
Speaker: So um don't worry, let me break it down for you a little bit. Let me just say two things that I think will help you understand this. First of all, we have to understand that for Kant to do something that is morally wrong,
Speaker: means that you're doing something irrational. When you really think about that action, it doesn't even even make sense to do it. So that's what he means by moral wrong. And so you have to think about what would happen if everyone was doing what you're doing.
Speaker: Would that not allow you to do the thing you're doing anymore? So that's my first pass at it. Let me give you um a recipe from philosopher Christine Korsgaard, who is one of the most popular interpreters of Kantian moral philosophy.
Speaker: And here's roughly the recipe that she gives us so that we can follow Kant's universal law formulation. Step one, identify the action, right? what What are you talking about? Okay. Then identify the maxim or the principle that motivated that action. Step three, imagine everyone acting on that same maxim.
Speaker: Step four, ask yourself, could this maxim still function as a universal law? Or would universalizing it undermine the very practice it depends on?
Speaker: If universalizing the maxim creates a contradiction, the action is morally wrong. If not, the action is morally permissible. Let me give you an example here. And let me set this up by saying that it used to be the case that theaters didn't necessarily have assigned seating.
Speaker: So back in my day, we're talking 20 years ago, more probably. ah You used to be able to buy a ticket and get into the theater and then just sort of stay there. Because what I would do at least, and you're not supposed to do this, but what I would do is I would buy a matinee ticket for like $5, go watch one movie, and then just kind of stick around and watch another you know, one or two movies, right? Three movies, maybe total in one day.
Speaker: This is called theater hopping. And that is the action that we are going to consider. Now, what motivates theater hopping? That's step two.
Speaker: Well, basically, I wanted to watch some movies, but I didn't want to pay for them. And so I theater hopped. Okay. Imagine everyone acting on that same maxim.
Speaker: Would What would happen if everyone did that? Well, one thing is that, nope you know, if you never paid for movies that you wanted to watch, guess what wouldn't get made anymore?
Speaker: movies, right? So if everyone did what I was doing, then there would be no movies. So I wouldn't be able to theater hop. So now you could see if everyone did what I was doing, i wouldn't be able to do the thing that I was doing.
Speaker: That is what Kant refers to as a contradiction in terms of ah morality. And that means, in fact, something that you probably had already guessed, but theater hopping is morally impermissible. It is wrong.
Speaker: Very, very... um Kind of ah a simple example to to get us going with here. Let's still keep it a little bit simple so you can kind of see each step ah very clearly. So let's talk about lying. And of course, the reason why you lie typically is because it suits your interests, right? it's You don't want people to know the truth, so you tell them something else.
Speaker: What happens if everyone does that? Well, if everyone lied whenever it suited their interests, people would eventually stop trusting what others say, right? If I expect you literally to lie because everyone's lying, then you can't lie to me, right? So once trust disappears, successful deception becomes impossible.
Speaker: So if everyone did that thing, lie, then lying is no longer possible. That, of course, is a contradiction. Thus, the maxim, lie whenever it serves your interests, cannot be conceived as a universal law of nature without contradiction.
Speaker: Of course, this means that lying is wrong. That's how you use the universal law formulation of the categorical imperative.
Speaker: Let me one more with you and then we'll kind of let you do two on your own. Here is a thief. This is what they all look like. um So imagine um you're considering now theft or stealing.
Speaker: Why would someone steal? Well, basically, you know, you if you want something and you can get it, just take it. That's sort of the ah maxim behind why people steal. What would happen if everyone were to act on that maxim? And honestly, think about how easy it is to steal. ah there's a way more trust than you imagine in society because every day we all have opportunities to steal but we don't so what were to happen if you were to actually act on that well if everyone stole whatever they wanted
Speaker: Just think about it. Eventually, the institution of private property would collapse. There is just no respect for ownership. So there doesn't even make any sense in saying that we have something like private property. And of course, without property rights,
Speaker: there would be no longer anything to steal. So if everyone stole all the time, then you wouldn't be able to steal anymore. Right? and that's sort of the idea here here behind the universal law formulation. Thus, the maxim steal, whatever you can, whenever you can,
Speaker: cannot be conceived as a universal law of nature without contradiction stealing therefore is morally wrong let me switch it over to you now i want you to try this and i'm gonna sort of spoil it a little bit by telling you that um um Murder is wrong. That is the conclusion you should arrive at. But I want you to practice going through the reasoning itself, right? So why would someone murder? I mean, you know, it it's a dark topic, but it's an easy one for you to go through, right?
Speaker: I think it's because someone is in their way in some way, right? Someone is impeding your aims and your desires and you... get tired of it and you want to get rid of them.
Speaker: So um can that maxim, if anyone gets in the way of your goals, permanently remove them? Can that maxim be conceived as a universal law of nature without contradiction?
Speaker: I'll wait while you think about it.
Speaker: Hopefully you came to realize that murder is morally wrong. If everyone did that, first of all, I'm not even sure that I would be alive. I'm sure that I've been in someone's way before. Either you know professionally, maybe someone wants the job that I have, or romantically, maybe someone wants the partner that I have. right There's all kinds of ways in which I'm quote unquote in the way of someone else. And so if they really were to just act on their desire to get rid of me, I'd be gone. Maybe you would be too, right? And so that kind of society would be probably unsustainable. If everyone did that, there would be no society. And so, you know, that's clear evidence here that that's this is a contradiction. It's irrational.
Speaker: And so murder is morally wrong. Let's do one more here and it has to do with large language models. Can the maxim whenever AI can complete an assignment for me, I should let it do so, be conceived as a universal law of nature without contradiction?
Speaker: In other words, what if everyone cheated with AI whenever they could? I hope you came to the realization that cheating is morally wrong.
Speaker: Just think about the case of literally everyone cheating literally every single time that they could. Well, if that were to really actually happen, ah teachers wouldn't give assignments that can be completed in that way anymore, which means people wouldn't be able to cheat anymore.
Speaker: Or maybe another situation is that at that point, grades wouldn't even indicate any kind of learning, which means that degrees wouldn't really indicate any kind of learning, which means that There'd be no reason to get them. So there'd be no reason to cheat. Right. So this is kind of a more indirect line of thinking. But hopefully you can see that either way, it seems like a kind of behavior that is inconsistent with the repercussions of everyone acting upon that maxim.
Speaker: So that is how you use the universal law formulation. I hope that you're beginning to grasp this a little bit, although I must admit that I'm actually keeping it artificially simple in a way.
Speaker: so let me complicate this a little bit now. And it's actually, you know, not very complicated what I'm going to add to this, but there's just two other dimensions that we have to speak about.
Speaker: There is something that Kant identifies or some things that Kant identifies as perfect duties. And then there's imperfect duties. So what are these?
Speaker: A perfect duty um is basically the result of you going through this process that we just went over. and you got a perfect you know contradiction. All the ones that we covered, and like the one on stealing and lying, those were perfect contradictions in the sense that you literally can't do that thing anymore if everyone else were to do it too.
Speaker: So whenever you do the analysis and you get a contradiction, you have a perfect duty to not act according to those maxims. In other words, never steal, never lie, never murder, never cheat, right? So those are perfect duties.
Speaker: But imperfect duties are a little bit different. If you run through the analysis, maybe you won't get a perfect contradiction. But you realize, i don't want to live in that kind of society. And so you shouldn't, um here's there's here's the the fancy word that we're going to learn for this. These are called supererogatory.
Speaker: What this means is basically you don't receive moral blame if you don't always follow these, but you do get moral praise when you do. You should try to do these imperfect duties as much as possible, but you don't have to always be doing them.
Speaker: This will be much clearer when I give you some examples of imperfect duties. Develop your talents. Okay, if you were to try to universalize the idea that, oh, you never have to develop your talents, you won't get a perfect contradiction because if everyone else is not developing your talents, their talents, you can still develop your own.
Speaker: But Think about it, that's not a society that you want to live in And so you don't have to always be developing your talents, but you should when you can, you should put some effort into this.
Speaker: Let's try this again with help those in need. What if someone were to say, hey, I never want to help those in need. What maxim is that? Basically, don't help people in need, right?
Speaker: if it If it's an inconvenience, don't help others. What would happen if you were to universalize that? Well, I mean, no one would help others. Would that mean that you can't help others anymore?
Speaker: No, you still can, right? So you don't get a contradiction like in the case of stealing and lying. And so that's why we call this an imperfect duty. Nonetheless, if no one helped other people, that kind of society sucks. And so Kant says, well, you know, you you don't have to do it all the time, but do it when you can. Do it some of the time at least. And that's the basic idea behind imperfect duties. You don't have to be constantly doing them all the time, but make time for them.
Speaker: So that is the ah the basic gist of the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties. And one more thing that I want to add here, and that has to do with who we have duties towards.
Speaker: So it's not only duties to others that we have, but duties to our self. And so let me begin here with the duties of self. These are things like preserve your rational nature.
Speaker: Remember earlier i was chatting about recreational drug use and Kant would say that's not something that you want to be doing. You want to keep your rationality. If anything, you want to enhance your rationality. So no to that.
Speaker: Also, another duty to self, develop your talents, respect your own dignity. Those are things you owe to yourself. And of course, for the most part, when we think of morality, we do think of duties to others. So that's things like tell the truth, keep your promises, help those in need, respect the dignity of others.
Speaker: So with all that in mind, we can sort of consider the cross-section of all this. You can think of perfect duties to yourself, imperfect duties to yourself, perfect duties to others, and imperfect duties to others. And here are some very famous examples of just that.
Speaker: So according to Kant, we have a perfect duty to ourselves to not ever commit suicide. Suicide is one of those things that um comes up in moral philosophy all the time. For example, in the case of whether or not physician assisted suicide is permissible, Kant clearly comes on the side of no, it's not okay.
Speaker: He says that the desire for suicide comes from self-love and self-love is what gets us to preserve ourselves. Basically, we realize that our life is going to be suffering from now on and so we don't want to live it anymore.
Speaker: But he says that is actually contradictory. You can't go from self-love to I want to kill myself. And so suicide is never permissible for Immanuel Kant.
Speaker: Okay, how about an imperfect duty to ourselves? That one's an easy one. Develop your talents, right? If no one else is developing their talents, that's okay. You can still develop your own and you should go ahead and do so. you don't have to spend all your time doing that, but you should spend some time doing that.
Speaker: Okay, what about a perfect duty to others? Well, you should not make false promises. If everyone was making false promises, it would be impossible to make promises at all because no one would believe each other.
Speaker: And so because of that contradiction, this is a perfect duty. You are never allowed to make false promises. And of course, we typically make promises to others, not necessarily to ourselves. And so that is a perfect duty to others.
Speaker: Last but not least, imperfect duties to others will help those in need. Again, I've already run through the logic here, but it's not something that you need to do 100% the time but you should do it whenever you can, right? Maybe even as often as you can.
Speaker: And so with all that said, here is a table that I generated that is basically a list of the sort of duties that you can expect to derive using the universal law formulation of the categorical imperative. And I did add some you know notes here. So i I labeled each one of these one, when it's a duty to self, two, when it is a duty to others. And I put a little dagger or cross
Speaker: to signal which are imperfect duties. And so this kind of summarizes what Kant generally believes. Here are the things that are morally permissible. You should be honest.
Speaker: You should respect property, respect human life, preserve your own life, help others, develop your talents and fulfill your civic responsibilities. Here the things that are morally wrong and you should basically never do them.
Speaker: Lie. By the way, I shouldn't have said basically, you should never do them. Lie, steal, murder, commit suicide, refuse to help others, neglect your talents and neglect your civic responsibilities.
Speaker: Refusing to help others and neglecting your talents are imperfect duties, right? So you should try to do them sometime, but you don't have to always be doing them. And if you always refuse to do them, then you are doing something wrong.
Speaker: So there you go. There is a nice summary of the things that you can do, that you can derive from the universal law formulation. But that's not all.
Speaker: Kant, as I mentioned earlier, has multiple formulations of the categorical imperative. And so let's cover one more formulation before wrap this lesson up.
Speaker: Now, let's say you are having a difficult time with the universal law formulation. Well, guess what? Immanuel Kant says that this other formulation is equivalent, meaning I guess that means that if you know you are having a hard time with the universal law formulation, you may use instead the humanity formulation, another way of arriving at arriving at what is morally right and what is morally wrong.
Speaker: So what is a humanity formulation? The way Kant would put it is something like this. Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.
Speaker: That sounds very complicated, but the underlying idea is actually quite simple. Don't just use others. Don't treat others merely as a means to an end.
Speaker: So just to be clear, We do indeed always you know use each other. When I go to a restaurant, I use the server to get my food. You are using me right now to get some information or a grade or whatever.
Speaker: But the point that Kant is trying to make is that we shouldn't merely use each other as a means to an end. For example, when I am at a restaurant,
Speaker: i try to treat the person as a human being with feelings and you know an autonomous will right they are not there to be abused and you know some people do abuse them right and so when you are treating them as a means to an end like an object basically well then that is a violation of the humanity formulation always when you're dealing with others and yourself Treat them as a human.
Speaker: Don't use them as a tool, but always respect their humanity. So with this formulation, there's all sorts of actions you can realize are morally wrong. Lying, of course, gives other people wrong information, which manipulates their decision making. And of course, that means you're not respecting their autonomy.
Speaker: And so that is wrong, according to the humanity formulation. Stealing is, you know, if you take someone's stuff without consent, you are not respecting their humanity.
Speaker: Of course, if you refuse to pay them for something that they did, you're also not respecting their humanity. They chose to do this for you and you are saying, yeah, yeah, I lied. I'm not going actually give you what I owe you now. That's wrong. According to the humanity formulation, murder is quite obviously not okay.
Speaker: Not respecting someone else's humanity. Academic dishonesty. If you cheat literally every chance you get or actually ever, um You're treating your teachers and your classmates as mere instruments, right? Your teacher is just some hurdle that you have to get over so that you can get some grade or some degree.
Speaker: And your classmates, you know, you're disrespecting the effort and time that they put into whatever assignment that you cheated on So either way,
Speaker: academic dishonesty violates the humanity formulation. Neglecting your talents, right? That is a duty to yourself. And if you refuse to develop your own potential, well, you are not respecting your own rational capacities.
Speaker: Finally, if you refuse to help others, you are ignoring their humanity and their rational ends, right? They cannot achieve their own personal potentials because you are not helping them.
Speaker: So of course, those last two we had decided earlier are imperfect duties. So you don't always have to be doing them. But you can see here pretty clearly that if you refuse to ever develop your talents or refuse to ever help others, you are violating the humanity formulation.
Speaker: So, as I said, according to Immanuel Kant, these formulations are equivalent, which means that anything that you can derive from the universal law formulation, you should also be able to derive from the humanity formulation.
Speaker: And, at least with the ones that I covered, both formulations do appear to generate the same duties. However, we must ask, can one formulation justify duties that the other cannot? In other words, are these really the same theory? Are they equivalent?
Speaker: Well, many philosophers have questioned the equivalence of these formulations. Maybe you can kind of break it down this way. The universal law formulation is about consistency. Am I applying principles impartially or am I making exceptions for myself? If you say to yourself, like, I can steal, but others can't, That is not being consistent and that seems to be what the Universal Law formulation focuses on.
Speaker: However, it seems like the Humanity formulation emphasizes respect for rational persons. That is a different approach. And it might be the case that these two formulations overlap a lot, maybe even most of the time.
Speaker: But maybe it's also possible that they won't always reach the same conclusion. Now, I do have here on the screen Chidi from the show The Good Place. And if you've never watched the show,
Speaker: Chidi is an extremely indecisive human being. And by the way, he is a Kantian moral philosopher.
Speaker: So very interesting. um You don't get many of those in pop culture, but Chidi is one of them. And at least one person that I've heard who is sort of knows someone who knows someone who was tied to the show,
Speaker: told me, you probably can't trust this, but they told me that the reason why Chidi's character is so indecisive is because the different formulations don't arrive at the same conclusion. If you reason using the universal law formulation, maybe you'll get one conclusion, but then use the other formulation, the humanity formulation, you come to another conclusion.
Speaker: If that's the case, coming to a decision will be very difficult. And so that's why Chidi has a hard time with that. Is that true? I have no idea, but it's too good to leave out. Okay, let's consider now the Kantian worldview as a whole.
Speaker: I have given you Kant's moral philosophy, at least two formulations. There's others. It's actually disputed how many formulations there are of the categorical imperative, but you have two now. And you know the basics of his metaphysics.
Speaker: Let's look at kind of a big picture approach to Kantianism now. And I think it is... In my opinion, i have to stress this, this my personal opinion, but Kant is best understood in the context of the crisis of the enlightenment.
Speaker: During the Enlightenment, there was a newfound confidence in reason, and as such, there was the emergence of the scientific approach beginning with the groundbreaking work of Isaac Newton.
Speaker: And so, many who were extremely confident in the capacity of human beings to understand the world were beginning to question various traditional authorities. Not only the religious authorities, the clergy, but even the state and even their own human free will.
Speaker: So these enlighteners varied in how radical they were and how much they... questioned traditional authorities, but some of them went pretty far indeed as we have seen in this course.
Speaker: And Kant did not like that, not one bit. In one way of looking at him, he was definitely an enlightener. He was in that camp, but he thought that the others were going a little bit too far and he sort of was putting the brakes on the project a little bit. And it was through his transcendental idealism that he, you know, kind of slowed things down a bit.
Speaker: First and foremost, he argued against the idea that causal determinism threatens libertarian free will. He says, the laws of nature...
Speaker: are not, you know, in existence in and of themselves. They aren't objectively real. They are the byproducts of how our minds structure reality.
Speaker: And so they subsist or exist only in the phenomenal realm. They're just our ways of understanding how we see what we see.
Speaker: We as humans though, we exist in the noumenal realm as things in themselves and as such, these are two distinct realms which means that causal determinism cannot threaten free will.
Speaker: And in this way, he sort of establishes that we know some things through pure reason and makes room for things like free will and of course, also morality.
Speaker: And it is through Kant's moral philosophy that he argued for yet two more ah traditional beliefs, the belief in God and the immortality of the soul. Now, to be clear, he does not think that we can know with certainty or in any way that God in fact exists or that the soul is in fact immortal.
Speaker: But he says they are... This is actual language, postulates of reason or they are sort of necessary assumptions. Right. As I mentioned earlier, when you're in a moral dilemma, you sort of have to assume that you're free. That's kind of the same idea here. You kind of have to assume these. And so here is the way Kant works that out.
Speaker: He says, again, using pure reason, another synthetic a priori judgment, he says we can come to the idea of the highest good. What is the highest good?
Speaker: a state of being where everyone is maximally morally good and maximally happy. In short, everyone's virtuous and happy.
Speaker: Okay, again, using pure reason, once we imagine this state of being, we also realize that we have to reach this state of being. That is sort of the direction that humanity should take.
Speaker: Okay, that's all fine and dandy. But then we realize that we can't reach maximal moral perfection in just one lifetime. It's just too hard to become morally perfect in the average human lifespan. And so Kant says that we have to assume that we are immortal.
Speaker: Because only when we go beyond the average human lifespan can we even imagine periods of time long enough for becoming morally perfect.
Speaker: So that's how Kant makes room for the immortality of the soul. And he also says that we can assume the existence of God. How so? He says, well, you know,
Speaker: We all know that when you are doing the right thing, when you're doing the morally right thing, sometimes that's actually to the detriment of your own happiness.
Speaker: Sometimes doing the right thing is hard because it kind of sucks, you know? And so how will we ensure that moral progress will coincide with actual happiness? In other words, if everyone's being super, super morally good, how do we also make sure that everyone's super, super happy?
Speaker: Well, Kant says that's where God comes in. God will guarantee that it happens. And so that's why we have to assume in the existence of God. And so that is how Kant puts the brakes on the Enlightenment project.
Speaker: He realized there was a tension between some things like science and radical political philosophy and other things like traditional authorities, right? And so he wanted to have basically, he wanted his cake and he wanted to eat it too. And so he made room for basically all of the above. And I'm sure he was quite pleased with himself, right? That was his whole approach. How can we have them both? I want all of the above. Okay, one last thing I want to cover here is Kantian political philosophy.
Speaker: And this is where we see that Kant is really honestly difficult to classify. In some ways, he was a moderate philosopher. Of course, he's sort of making room for, you know, religious belief and free will and all that. And the radicals were going in the other direction. so in that way, he's a moderate. But despite being a moderate, Kant did agree with the radicals in one way.
Speaker: He advocated for universal republicanism, basically get rid of the monarchies and we should make every government a republic. So that is more so a radical position but obviously we can't call Kant a full radical but he did agree with them there.
Speaker: However, this is more the moderate side of Kant, he said that revolution is not morally justified. If we are to transition from a monarchy to a republic, it would have to come through enlightened princes. basically the monarch has to voluntarily give up power and create republics. Right. So revolution is wrong. Political violence is wrong.
Speaker: So that is definitely a more moderate position. Still, now moving in the other direction, a little more, you know, radical. To ensure peace, Kant envisioned a global order of constitutional republics operating with a universal right of hospitality. What?
Speaker: which means you would be allowing individuals to travel and interact peacefully across borders. That sounds a lot like open borders and that's definitely more on the er radical side of things.
Speaker: And still on the more radical side, um Kant opposed fixed social classes and colonialism. So It's definitely the case that some moderate enlighteners, like even Voltaire, were okay with social classes, maybe having an elite and a commoner kind of thing. But Kant was opposed to that and he wanted legal equality within a state.
Speaker: Now, I do have an asterisk here as I had it earlier in the lesson as well. And what I mean by that, or what I want to signal there, is that some people challenge whether or not Kant was consistent when he was ah making some of these claims. And so we will come back to those challenged conclusions in another lesson. But for the most part, it's you know you can kind of see that Kant is...
Speaker: sometimes verging on on the radical position, but then sometimes seems really moderate, sometimes even seems conservative and kind of wanting to put brakes on the whole thing. So Kant is definitely a difficult individual to classify.
Speaker: Be that as it may, Kant is undoubtedly immensely influential in the history of Western philosophy. His metaphysics launched a movement known as German idealism.
Speaker: Opposition to his methods, as well as the other enlightenment philosophers, brought about a movement known as Romanticism that emphasized things like emotion and creativity.
Speaker: His account of the history of philosophy is still relevant today. In fact, when I did my lesson on empiricism and rationalism or the lessons on those topics, those are because Kant basically wrote the history that way. He is the one that made the two camps, the empiricists and the rationalists. Finally, his moral philosophy, along with consequentialism, is one of the predominant orthodox views in moral philosophy today.
Speaker: in other words, if you were to look at, you know, do a survey of all the moral philosophers around today and see what views they subscribe to the two clear winners that are almost at a dead heat, right? They're almost at a tie are the Kantians,
Speaker: and the consequentialists. So more on that in another lesson. Let me say one final nice thing about Immanuel Kant.
Speaker: His philosophical system, if you really accept it, right, if you just kind of forget any doubts that you might have for the moment, just imagine that it's actually accurate and true.
Speaker: Well, it would resolve many of the tensions that we've seen so far in this course. It really is sort of nice because it would solve our dilemmas.
Speaker: First of all, working backwards, it would solve or dissolve the problem of free will. It also would establish a reason for allowing us to believe in some kind of supernatural deity.
Speaker: It would also resolve the dispute between the rationalists and the empiricists. We do know things mostly from the senses, but there are some things that we can know from reason alone.
Speaker: So there you go. Kant tries to avoid the mistakes of both the empiricists and rationalists, but also tries to learn from both of them. And finally, we would figure out the whole matter of what knowledge is.
Speaker: Kant does say, yeah, it is true that mostly we learn from the senses. And then he kind of clarifies what that means. And then he establishes that we can also know some things from pure reason. And so if only Kant's system...
Speaker: were perfectly accurate and perfectly defensible, we would have so many solutions to the problems that we've come up with in this course. And yet, if we are to keep within the spirit of the course, we now have to challenge Immanuel Kant.
Speaker: Let me give you another way of looking at Kantian philosophy. I've already hinted at this, but maybe Kant, perhaps intentionally, perhaps unintentionally, ended the Enlightenment project. Maybe Kant is a counter-Enlightenment figure.
Speaker: So think about his system. Kant created a way of looking at reality that ended the belief that anyone who employs reason can discover the true nature of reality. Let me pause right there.
Speaker: Kant, by creating two distinct realms, basically, you know, he's trying to tell us there's limits to reason, but the limits that he imposed are pretty dramatic. He says you can never know the world as it really is. All you ever see is your representation of reality.
Speaker: That basically cordons off the power of reason and says, no, no, no, you cannot really know things as they are You can just, you know, play around over here with your construction of reality, but it's not the real thing. That is when you look at it in one another way,
Speaker: pretty dramatic, right? pretty A pretty radical hamstringing of the power of reason. Moreover, many of the enlighteners that we've talked about, like David Hume and John Locke, they wanted to go even further. They wanted to devise a system of ethics that would be based on human nature. Basically, we figure out what humans are really like, and then we derive an ethical system from that information, not from old books, not from old authority figures, not from the church, but based on human nature itself. Well, Kant comes in and says, no no to all of that.
Speaker: That is all impossible if there is a true moral law. You're not going to get it from the phenomenal realm. So studying human nature, that that's not going to cut it.
Speaker: In fact, what he ends up coming up with seems a lot like the Ten Commandments, if you think about it. Don't lie, don't steal, that kind of stuff. And so maybe Kant is a conservative reactionary.
Speaker: me give you one more opposition to the Kantian system that will set us up for the next lesson. Many historical figures, both philosophers and non-philosophers, have charged that Kantian duties are too rigid. Of course, lying and stealing are wrong for the most part.
Speaker: But some actions, although perhaps harmful in general, true, can at times be conducive to a greater good.
Speaker: And this could include lying, stealing, and even committing acts of violence. So what exactly are we talking about here? Well, imagine...
Speaker: a really exploitative system of oppression, a horrible state of affairs where one group of people systematically abuses and dehumanizes another group of people.
Speaker: Moreover, the exploiters have so much power and so much wealth that it is virtually impossible for the opponents of this institution to overcome them in any non-violent way.
Speaker: In fact, it seems to many people who oppose this system that the only way to end it is through warfare. If there is something so awful and so entrenched that the only way to get rid of it is through violence, well, maybe in those cases,
Speaker: the ends justify the means.
