Transcript
Speaker: This lesson is sort of a transitional lesson. We just covered the problem of free will and we are moving toward moral philosophy.
Speaker: But let's be honest, when we covered the problem of free will and we covered those three primary solutions, hard determinism, compatibilism, and libertarianism,
Speaker: Something about the way we left things was quite unsettling. It's sort of the case that there's problems with every single view.
Speaker: But we can't leave it at that. That is not only philosophically unsatisfactory, but it's actually socially unsatisfactory.
Speaker: Do we have the ability to make things happen that wouldn't otherwise have happened or not? That seems pivotal, essential to know that to continue to live the way we do.
Speaker: So many of our institutions sort of rely on the assumption of free will. For example, let's talk about the courts, our judicial system.
Speaker: If I commit a heinous crime, by the way, I haven't, but if I do, i think that if it's the case that it was determined by the Big Bang and everyone believed that,
Speaker: It's not clear that you should be upset with me because it had to happen. It was determined literally 14 billion years ago or whatever.
Speaker: And so having free will seems to be an assumption for the way that our courts work, our judicial system. This sort of argument um is extremely compelling and maybe I can summarize it for you this way.
Speaker: Without genuine freedom, in other words, libertarian free will, none of that compatibilist nonsense, there can be no moral responsibility.
Speaker: Clearly, we are morally responsible for our actions. So we must have libertarian free will. We have to assume freedom.
Speaker: Otherwise, so many things kind of don't make any sense whatsoever. Voting? What's the point of voting? It's already determined what who's going to happen, who's going to vote, who you're going to vote for. That's already determined by the laws of nature and prior conditions. So this is a very thorny issue. It's not a mere philosophical problem that we can contemplate and say, oh that's really interesting.
Speaker: It seems to have real... gravity in that it affects how we build our society. If you accept that general way of thinking, well then you might agree with the philosopher we are covering today. His name is Immanuel Kant.
Speaker: Now, if you look at Kant's dates, they are 1724 to 1804. That is actually a little bit behind the time period we're currently in.
Speaker: We're supposed to be, you know, around 1815, let's just say, maybe the eighteen twenty s And Kant has been dead here for over a decade. 1804 by the way, the same year that Napoleon crowned himself emperor.
Speaker: Nice ah date to keep in mind. But why are we covering Kant now? Well, the first thing I want to tell you about Kant is that he has been immensely influential.
Speaker: in the history of Western modern philosophy. In fact, he was already the most famous living philosopher in German-speaking territories when he was alive.
Speaker: But after his death, he set off, I don't even want to say one movement, but multiple movements. There are so many movements that in a way...
Speaker: can sort of trace their philosophical origin origins back to Immanuel Kant. So it's okay to cover him a little bit after his death because his presence is still, you know, at least in philosophy, still there in the eighteen hundreds and still there in and...
Speaker: Yes, still there today in the 21st century. So this is the individual we're covering today. He was not only a philosopher, he engaged in scientific inquiry as well.
Speaker: In fact, in the field of astronomy, he made some predictions that ended up being true. Very interesting. He also dabbled in physics and anthropology.
Speaker: Kinda. We'll get to that later. He wrote about education. If you are not aware of this, the 1700s was sort of the time period when the modern university was being born. It was evolving out of the medieval universitas, which you might call the medieval version of the university.
Speaker: And as we were we are getting the modern version of the university, A lot of people were writing about what that should look like and Kant was one of those people.
Speaker: I'm going to tell you about two things that Kant is known for. He is known for a lot of things, but I'm going to narrow it down to two in this lesson and the next.
Speaker: Transcendental idealism. is a view about reality and what degree of access we have to reality.
Speaker: So we'll talk about that in just a second. And then there's the categorical imperative. That is the name given to Kant's moral philosophy.
Speaker: And so we will start to look at that today, but more so next time is when we will really try to wrap our minds around the categorical imperative. Kant has many, many writings, but I will be focusing on two of his three critiques.
Speaker: So beginning in 1781, Kant published three critiques where he laid out his views against prior philosophers. The first one was the critique of pure reason.
Speaker: The second one was the critique of practical reason in 1788 where he lays out his moral views. And then there was a third critique which covers aesthetics. We will not be getting into that.
Speaker: but I wanted to give you a quick snapshot of the individual because he is really kind of a towerhouse a powerhouse and you kind of have to know ah Kant if you are going to know the history of modern Western philosophy.
Speaker: But he is also an incredibly challenging thinker. It is very difficult to wrap your mind around what Kant was trying to say. and so I'm going to kind of go slowly here for you in the hopes that maybe with a little bit of context, you will better understand what this gentleman is all about.
Speaker: You may remember a division that we had between thinkers in earlier lessons, the division between the empiricists and the rationalists. The empiricists here on the left-hand side believed that the senses are the source of our knowledge of reality.
Speaker: That is the way that we learn. It's the only way we learn. Maybe you remember that John Locke stipulated that we are born with a blank slate. We have nothing in there and we furnish our minds with ideas of the external world through our senses, through our eyes, ears, etc.
Speaker: On the flip side, the rationalists believe that we can know some things from pure reason and based off of those things is how we build the rest of our knowledge, right? So we covered Descartes in a very meticulous fashion and that is exactly what he believes. And so we have people that champion the senses on one hand and people that champion pure reason on the other hand now kant comes in here and by the way this division between these thinkers was kant's idea to begin with so he's the one that put them into these different camps so kant realized that they kind of both have their problems
Speaker: And what Kant realized is that he needs to avoid the problems of both the empiricists and the rationalists. Both camps have shortcomings. There's problems that they seem to have not been able to solve. And Kant is going to try to solve it for them.
Speaker: Right. Sort of take a not a middle position. That doesn't make any sense. But try to learn what he can from both sides and go from there.
Speaker: How should we understand Kant? Well, to really understand Kant, you need to understand his nemesis. David Hume.
Speaker: So here David Hume is pictured and apparently David Hume basically wrecked Kant intellectually for about a decade. Kant actually stopped publishing because once he read David Hume, he realized that his prior philosophical work was of limited value and he had to respond. So he literally took a decade to kind of ah gather his wits about him.
Speaker: and so there you go that's that's very important to know equally important to know is that maybe you really want to understand kant in what is sometimes called the crisis of the enlightenment so the enlighteners in general were going you know, what from our perspective maybe seems like the right direction, they were arguing against unjustified authority, whether it be political, religious, having to do with knowledge, whatever, right? It seems to be that we need to ground authority and intellectual matters in reason and in science. And that's the way to proceed away from superstition and magic.
Speaker: And of course, this movement had many figures in in it. The Enlighteners were both moderate and of course radical. And among the radicals, there were some really skeptical philosophers who were essentially arguing that you can't know much of anything.
Speaker: And these radical Enlighteners and skeptical philosophers were challenging the structures of authority and knowledge and religion a little too aggressively for Kant's liking.
Speaker: Kant and other ah individuals like him basically thought that we can't go too far and too fast in that direction. We can't just abandon traditional religion altogether as well as traditional morality and the views that we have on libertarian free will. And it's just too much and too fast, right? And so Kant wants to basically slow things down and say, look, there's still room
Speaker: for believing in traditional religion, in the afterlife, in morality, in free will, etc. So Kant is basically trying to put the brakes on the enlightenment.
Speaker: Does this mean he is a counter enlightenment philosopher? That is a difficult question to answer. I'm going to just plant that seed there and maybe after we've thought about Kant a little bit, we can come back to that question.
Speaker: But of course, I have to stress, it really is the case that Hume was the most influential on Kant. Kant says that Hume's writings made the scales fall from his eyes or something like that.
Speaker: So he was asleep before this, Kant says. And what did David Hume argue? Well, we've covered some Hume. Hume argued against the intelligent design argument. We covered that.
Speaker: Hume also charged that induction is circular and maybe it's kind of not rationally justified even though we practice it all the time.
Speaker: Hume has all kinds of arguments by the way. He wrote against miracles and the idea of causation. So it's a very complicated ah philosophical picture that Hume paints. The thing that I want to now tell you about is how he argued against the rationalists.
Speaker: Now, I'm not exactly going to give you Hume's arguments against the rationalists. What I want you to know is that Hume believed that the rationalists were deluded about thinking they can arrive at informative views about the world through reason alone.
Speaker: People like Descartes thought, if I just sit on my armchair and think really hard, I can learn something about the world. I can realize there are some self-evident truths that I can build other beliefs on.
Speaker: And Hume says, no, that is not what reason can do. Reason does not have that capacity. You are saying things that are psychologically unrealistic, right?
Speaker: The best that reason can do is work with the information that the senses bring to it. And so David Hume here is saying that the rationalist dream is exactly that, a dream, not possible.
Speaker: Kant basically takes it from there. Kant wants to know, are there things we can know just through reason alone, from pure reason? In other words, are there things we can discover about the world as we see it?
Speaker: And his answer after again, 10 years of ah trying to figure it out is yes. There's actually couple of things we can know.
Speaker: And let me begin with this first one, which he tells us about in the Critique of Pure Reason. In this book, Kant's central thesis is that human beings experience only appearances, not things in themselves.
Speaker: if we are to pause right there so far this seems just like John Locke right there's the world over there the external world and then there's our ideas of the world and they match reality that's what John Locke says at least well here is where Kant differs Our experience of these appearances is structured by our faculty of understanding.
Speaker: If that didn't make any sense to you, let me try that two more ways. Here's the first try. When we look upon reality, we take that raw sensory data, right?
Speaker: Information going into our eyes and we process it. And during that processing, we give it a structure. All right, let me try that one more time.
Speaker: This time, beginning with the structure part of it. The structure that we see, the regularities, the patterns that we see in nature, we're the ones that add those to our experience of nature.
Speaker: In other words, I guess this is my third try. When you look at things, you don't see them exactly as they are. You give them a pattern, a structure, and you construct your experience of reality.
Speaker: What's another way of saying this that is maybe less a cryptic? Well, what Kant is trying to say is that there's two ways of thinking about the world.
Speaker: There is the world as it is, independent of our perceptions of it. And there is the world as we perceive it. And our act of perception actually alters reality.
Speaker: It actually gives it a structure that wouldn't have otherwise been there. Our faculty of understanding, in short, constructs our representation of the world as we see it. We never see it the way it really is. That would be the world on its own.
Speaker: We only see our construction of it. Okay, let's put some jargon on ah on these ideas.
Speaker: So there is a thing in itself, right? The world on its own. And there is our representation of it. Kant calls these respectively, the noumenal realm and the phenomenal realm. The noumenal realm is the world independent of our cognition. It's the world as it is, basically.
Speaker: If there were no humans ever, the noumenal realm would still be there. The phenomenal realm though is the world as we perceive it, our representation of the world, our interpretation of reality, in other words.
Speaker: And if you accept this basic idea that there is the world as it is and the world as we perceive it, and that you can't bridge those two realms, then you're basically accepting something known as transcendental idealism.
Speaker: Now, don't get too excited and say, yeah, I'm a transcendental idealist. There's actually quite a few other details we should add before you readily adopt this view.
Speaker: But that is the basic idea that we don't see reality exactly as it is. We have no access to that reality. In fact, we only have access to our interpretations of it.
Speaker: And in our interpreting of nature, we actually impose a structure on nature, a structure that actually isn't there.
Speaker: We're the ones adding that little bit to it. So I know that part is a little bit challenging to understand and it takes some time to to get it.
Speaker: So let me try that part again. On this view, all of our experiences of the world will be law governed due to the structuring concepts through which we grasp our world, our cognition.
Speaker: So what that means is that when we look at nature, when we look at the world, we see all kinds of patterns.
Speaker: In fact, scientists like to collect measurements of those patterns and eventually they write up formulas and equations and they say, ah, I've captured the laws of nature.
Speaker: in mathematical form. What Kant is going to say is that all of that, all that scientific inquiry that scientists engage in all those patterns that they recognize, those patterns are actually the result of our cognition.
Speaker: We are the ones imposing those on the world. Indeed, even space and time are forms of human intuition and not things in themselves. Literally, time, just to take one example, is not objective.
Speaker: It's actually something that we add to our experience of reality. And before you think that this is way too weird and spooky to be true, that is indeed what some modern cognitive scientists and physicists believe.
Speaker: that time is not objective but you know relative if i'm on earth and you are on a spaceship going really read really really fast time will go slower for you than for me because time is not objective it's relative to well the person and how they're moving right how how fast they're moving in this example Maybe another example that I can give you to try to understand how it is that humans impose structure on reality has to do with stencils.
Speaker: Here we have stencil of a lion and let's just say you tape that on the wall and then you spray paint all over it. And then you remove the stencil and what do you see on the wall?
Speaker: You see a lion that has been spray painted on there, right? Well, that lion, the way that we create a lion is through different patterns, different general, you know, tendencies of what a lion looks like, different designs, right?
Speaker: How did that pattern come about? Was it the paint? Not exactly. Was it already on the wall? No, we added it, right? So in this example, the pattern that creates a lion is only possible because of the stencil.
Speaker: So in this analogy, our human cognitive processes are the stencil. We take the raw data, on the paint, from the world and we interpret it and we structure it and we construct an image basically of reality.
Speaker: The lion is our image of reality. And sometimes we do science on that and develop formulas and say, oh, you know, The ratio of the eye to the nose tends to be like this and that's basically analogous to our laws of nature.
Speaker: And so that is another way to think about this, that the laws of nature arise through our cognitive processes. Okay, why is Kant doing all this? Why is his view so complicated? Weren't we talking about free will when we started this whole thing? And now we're talking about cognition and the laws of nature again. What it is this all about? Okay, let me just kind of get to the first punchline here.
Speaker: Kant will ultimately attempt to argue that human understanding, that is the capacity to judge, is the source of the laws of nature.
Speaker: Okay. And human reason, the capacity to infer, is the source of moral law, which is the basis for our belief in God, freedom, and the immortality of the soul.
Speaker: What? Earlier, i told you that Kant was going to say, there are some things that you can know from pure reason. Here is one such thing.
Speaker: When we look at reality, we don't see it the way it really is. We impose a structure on it. That is one thing that you can know from pure reason, that we interpret reality. We don't see the raw data,
Speaker: We see law-governed version of it. We see a patterned version of it. We make sense of it, in other words. And that process of making sense of it is what allows us to do science, which then allows us to come up with things like the laws of nature.
Speaker: But the laws of nature are the product of us interpreting nature. They're not in nature itself. Here is a second thing you can learn from pure reason.
Speaker: There are some actions that are completely irrational and it doesn't make any sense to do them. Those actions are morally wrong. So through pure reason, we can discover the moral law. And once we know the moral law, we will also learn that it is justified to believe in God freedom, libertarian free will that is, and the immortality of the soul.
Speaker: So those are, you know, in a way it's Kant rescuing traditional religion, traditional views about free will, and traditional views about the afterlife.
Speaker: This is Kant's way of both putting the brakes on, um you know, the radical and skeptical philosophers of his day and his in the prior days, but also saying, but we still get to do science.
Speaker: So it's a little bit like he wants to have his cake and eat it out of his own free will too, you know. But what is different here than than other thinkers?
Speaker: How is it that he can protect free will from science? Isn't science itself the threat to not only free will, but religion? Isn't that what we've been seeing in this course? That the more that people adopt a scientific worldview, the the more skeptical they become of traditional religion and politics, right? So they seem to be at odds with each other, well here is Kant's solution.
Speaker: We, as in we humans, exist in the noumenal realm. We are, in other words, in the realm of things in themselves, the world as it really is.
Speaker: And as we've been saying for the last couple of minutes, the laws of nature only apply in the phenomenal realm. In other words, we and the laws of nature exist in two separate realms.
Speaker: So, the laws of nature and the belief that they give rise to, causal determinism, they cannot threaten free will.
Speaker: They exist in two different realms and they can't cross over. And so that is how Kant protects free will, but still preserves science.
Speaker: You can do science. He liked science, remember? And that just gets done in the phenomenal realm. And we as human beings exist in reality as it really is. right So these are two completely different domains.
Speaker: Okay, you might be thinking to yourself, what? i completely understand. It is quite a lot to get your mind wrapped around this idea of transcendental idealism and the way that he tries to make room for free will through his views on reality. Let me try one more time here. Maybe this will do the trick.
Speaker: Now I have here two planets, even though that's totally not the right way to think about it right? It's not two worlds. It's true it's two perspectives on the world. This is your noumenal realm goggles, right? So this is when you're thinking about the world as it is in and of itself, right? Things in themselves. This is independent of human cognition.
Speaker: In this realm, there is no space and time because remember, we add a space and time when we are processing the sensory data of reality.
Speaker: Scientific inquiry is not possible because you can't even look at the noumenal realm. Again, this is independent of human cognition. It's completely dark. It's inaccessible to us. So you can't study it scientifically.
Speaker: It's the world as it is. And of course, we are objects in the world, which means we are in the noumenal realm. Put another way, we're not appearances. We're not just thoughts, right? We're actually real things, which means we exist in the noumenal realm.
Speaker: Okay, what about the phenomenal realm? That's the world as we see it. And again, it is structured by our human cognition. It is our interpretation of reality.
Speaker: Space-time is imposed by the mind, right? We temporalize things and we spatialize things. And those are not features of the world itself. We add those features to our the appearances of reality that we are conscious of of course because we are perceiving it and we are recognizing patterns we are literally imposing patterns on the data that means that we can do science so scientific inquiry is possible in the phenomenal realm
Speaker: We can even study ourselves like in the social sciences, but these are just representations of ourselves, right? These aren't the real thing. The real thing exists in the noumenal realm.
Speaker: Here is what I want you to focus on now. The traditional threat to free will and religion and religious authority and a bunch of other stuff is science.
Speaker: So what if we are able to protect, just thinking about free will now, free will from science? Well, free will exists in us, in rational beings, and we are in the noumenal realm.
Speaker: And science, of course, is only possible in the phenomenal realm. It is actually a byproduct Our ability to do science is a byproduct of our structuring our experience of reality.
Speaker: Okay, so if we realize that one of those things is in the noumenal realm and the other of those things is in the phenomenal realm and there is no way of bridging between these two realms, we realize that we as human beings are completely protected from causal determinism.
Speaker: Even though it may appear that we are determined to behave in certain ways, that is not the real us. We exist once more and the world as it really is.
Speaker: Now, i know that this is an extremely difficult idea to wrap your mind around. Let me give you sort of one last crack at it here. I'll just summarize the point for you.
Speaker: ah i will nutshell this for you. Through his transcendental idealism, Kant has made it so that scientific inquiry and libertarian free will can coexist.
Speaker: As well as, by the way, belief in God and belief in the afterlife. The way he does this is by arguing that they are features of different perspectives we can take of the world.
Speaker: They are literally in different realms. One is the world as it is and the other is the world as we perceive it. And by doing this and by protecting free will,
Speaker: Kant feels like he has basically averted the crisis of the Enlightenment. Now we can believe in God and have free will and believe in the afterlife and still do science.
Speaker: That is Kant's Copernican revolution.
Speaker: In this somewhat challenging lesson, we are trying to wrap our minds around the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Now Kant has already tried to show us that there is at least one thing that you can know from pure reason and that is that when you look at reality,
Speaker: you impose a certain structure on it. And there is something that your mind does in this processing of reality that allows us to engage in scientific inquiry and outline the laws of nature. Now, maybe you weren't wild about that argument.
Speaker: Let Kant have another try In his critique of practical reason, he's going to argue that through pure reason, you know that there are some things that are not morally permissible.
Speaker: They are wrong, in other words, and that this awareness that some things are wrong indicate to you that you indeed are free.
Speaker: You know that some things are permissible and other things are impermissible. That is, you know some things are okay and some things are not okay. And this awareness alerts you to the fact that you can choose between the good thing and the bad thing.
Speaker: So there you go. Yet another case for the view that we do indeed have something like libertarian free will. Now jumping into Kant's moral philosophy is easier said than done.
Speaker: So let's look at some words that will hopefully serve as preliminaries for engaging with Kant's moral philosophy.
Speaker: And the first pair of terms we will look at have to do with the so-called analytic synthetic distinction. So there's analytic statements and there's synthetic statements and they're not the same. So Let's begin with analytic statements.
Speaker: The predicates of analytic statements are somehow inherent in the subject. What does that mean? Well, here's an example of an analytic statement.
Speaker: All bachelors are male. The subject class is bachelors and the predicate class is male. And what makes it an analytic statement is that the predicate male is inherent in the subject.
Speaker: bachelors. Let's think about that for a second. What is a definition of bachelorhood? Basically, if you are a bachelor, you are an unmarried male.
Speaker: I guess of a certain age, right? It wouldn't make sense to call ah a two year old boy a bachelor, but you know, unmarried male of a certain age, over 18, let's say.
Speaker: Okay. Within that definition, we actually have the term male. So, the concept male is inside of or inherent in the concept bachelor.
Speaker: And so you can actually even see that more clearly if you replace the definition of bachelor with the word bachelor in the sentence. All unmarried males are male.
Speaker: That makes it super obvious that the predicate actually is already in the subject. This statement, in other words, is sort of true by definition.
Speaker: Okay, so much for analytic statements. What are synthetic statements? Synthetic statements connect subjects to predicates that are not implicitly inherent in them.
Speaker: So unlike bachelors and male, where one is inside of the other, um This sentence of ah this example of a synthetic statement is all bachelors are happy.
Speaker: the concept of happiness is not inherent in the concept of bachelorhood. You can spell out bachelorhood as clearly as you want to.
Speaker: You won't find anywhere in there happiness, at least not necessarily. Maybe you have your own weird definition of bachelorhood where you include happiness in there. That's not the way the rest of us talk about bachelorhood.
Speaker: Happiness seems to be a separate category. Now, what's the big deal with synthetic statements? Well, These are the kinds of statements that are very informative.
Speaker: The analytic statement we covered before, like all analytic statements, they're true by definition. But if you happen to discover a true synthetic statement, you have new information, right? Oh, all bachelors are happy. That's actually an important thing to know. I'm not saying that statement is true.
Speaker: I'm saying that if it were true, you would know a new thing about the world. Now, this color wheel that I have on the screen is a good example of this. Sometimes you can't really just think about colors and figure out what it would be if you blend them together. Maybe if you studied art history, you're really good at this kind of stuff. I'm terrible at this. So I forget all the time that if you blend red and let's just say green together, you get yellow.
Speaker: So In other words, if you synthesize red and green, you get yellow. That is new information to me because I keep forgetting no matter how hard I try. Actually, I don't try to remember this information, but that is new information. That is what synthetic statements do.
Speaker: They are informative and that is extremely valuable. They go beyond a simple definition. So that is the analytic synthetic distinction.
Speaker: Let's get into the distinction between a priori and a posteriori justifications. So justifying an a priori knowledge claim doesn't require any particular experience.
Speaker: Here is an a priori knowledge claim. Two plus two equals four. That is something that I can justify to you basically just by telling you, look That's what math says. Or I can bring to you, you know, two bundles of two pencils and put them together and count them and say, see, one, two, three, four.
Speaker: Now, if you were to come up to me and say, i don't want you to prove this to me with pencils. I want you to do it with cookies. That would be super weird. And maybe you're a philosopher.
Speaker: But the point of an a priori knowledge claim is that it doesn't require some specific empirical observation to be justified. If you only believe that two plus two equals four is true because they showed you cookies, you know, two bundles of two cookies put together to make four, that is extremely weird. You don't need necessarily that kind of empirical justification.
Speaker: A posteriori statements are the kind of statements that do require some particular, very specific empirical justification. For example, how would I say to you, there are four white pawns on the chessboard.
Speaker: How would you know that's true? Would you just think to yourself, oh, yes, no, that's not how it works. That's how it works with two plus two equals four, but that is not how it works with this particular sentence. You would have to actually go to the chessboard look around, identify all the pawns and count them. And it would be the visual experience of four white pawns on the chessboard that would justify your belief in the statement, there are four white pawns on the chessboard.
Speaker: So that is the difference between a priori and a posteriori justifications or statements. A priori is prior to experience. You don't need a specific experience to justify them.
Speaker: A posteriori is posterior or after an experience. You need to go look at the world to actually establish those kinds of statements as true.
Speaker: Okay, so with all that jargon in place, here is what Kant was arguing. He said, we can make synthetic a priori judgments. In other words, judgments whose justification is independent of experience.
Speaker: but which are objectively true about the world of human experience or of course, as we know it now, the phenomenal realm. Let me say that in one other way.
Speaker: We can discover true facts about the world without necessarily having to experience the world or needing to have some particular sensory experience.
Speaker: maybe put in a very small nutshell, you can know some things about the world from pure reason. But now, of course, we have more jargon so that we can really be specific about what that means.
Speaker: One of his principal examples is geometry. You can develop geometry just like Euclid did with basically just a paper and pencil and I guess ah a protractor.
Speaker: But you don't need to go out and really measure things to kind of establish geometric principles. And so once you have geometry, you can actually discover things about, you know, geometric figures. So that's one example of a synthetic a priori judgment.
Speaker: Maybe the better example is the one that we covered in the first half of the lesson. Kant says that we know that we structure our experiences of reality through our faculty of judgment.
Speaker: That itself is a synthetic a priori judgment. He knows, he says, in other words, that he structures reality as he perceives it.
Speaker: And so that is something that we can only, if you think about it There's nothing about the world itself that tells you that you are structuring it.
Speaker: You learn this actually from your experience of it. Maybe I can give you a quick example of this. When you look at a dog at a specific time period, let's call it T1.
Speaker: You look at a dog at t one then you look away from the dog and then you look back at the dog, T2, right? Time slice number two. Is there anything about your experience of the dog itself out in the world, right? Is there anything out in the world that tells you it's the same dog at T1 and at T2?
Speaker: No. What tells you that it's the same dog at T1 and at T2 is a category in your head. Let's just say you name this dog Fido.
Speaker: You look at Fido at T1. Then you look at Fido at T2 again. It's not like when you're looking at Fido, there is like a little cloud on Fido that says, hey, this is Fido.
Speaker: That cloud, that category is actually in your mind. And so when you experience Fido at T2, it's something about your mind that is sort of making that conscious experience possible.
Speaker: That recognition of FIDO is due to something in your mind. Now, I don't want to spend any more time on that because that was the first half of the lesson.
Speaker: But the basic gist is something like this. Kant argued that through reason alone, we can come to know certain truths about the world we experience.
Speaker: In the first half of the lesson, we thought about how he argued that we can know we structure our experience of reality. Okay, that's one thing.
Speaker: The second thing though, the one that we're going to move into now, is this idea that through pure reason, we can figure out, look, there's some actions that are not okay, they're literally irrational.
Speaker: And for that reason, we know they're wrong. And as such, we can discover actions that are morally impermissible or wrong through pure reason. We can discover the moral law through pure reason, a synthetic a priori judgment, in other words.
Speaker: So that is what we're moving into now. Let's look at some important concepts. It is very common too when we are covering Kant's moral philosophy, we cover these two labels for two different approaches to moral philosophy, deontology and consequentialism. Now, i don't think about consequentialism yet. Let's think about deontology.
Speaker: This is the view that an action's being right or wrong depends on the rules, duties, or intentions behind the action. It assumes that certain actions are inherently wrong.
Speaker: Sometimes, you know, you say to yourself, Based on principle, I'm opposed to this. That's the basic idea behind deontology.
Speaker: Some actions are just never okay. right There's a rule against them. Or we have a duty to not engage in them. Or if you ever have that intention, that's a wrong-headed intention. right There's something about these actions that just shouldn't be done.
Speaker: that's the deontological perspective, the consequentialist paints a different picture. According to consequentialism, an act is right or wrong depending on the consequences of that action.
Speaker: By implication, the same action can be right in some contexts and wrong in others. For example, lying, maybe you might say in general it's wrong, but a consequentialist would say, well sometimes lies can have good results.
Speaker: And if that's the case, like you lied to save a life, well then that's okay. That lie was morally permissible. So I think one thing I want to make sure is very clear here though, is that the difference between deontology and consequentialism is more or less absolute. What I mean by that is that I think some people want to say, well, you know, I'm a deontologist about some things. There are some things that should never be done, but I'm a consequentialist about other things. There are some things that it just depends on the context.
Speaker: That's not exactly allowed here, at least not in any straightforward way. For deontological philosophers, basically every single moral category has an absolute value. It's either right, it's either permissible or wrong, impermissible.
Speaker: And that's it. And for the consequentialist, basically every action has a moral value that depends on the consequences. And so you can't be, you know, you can't blend it up. It's just not possible. You have to choose one or the other.
Speaker: And so we today will explore first deontology and we'll flesh out the view as much as we can. and then we will look at consequentialism.
Speaker: Now, there is something I want to say here because now we are basically going full speed ahead toward moral philosophy. What I want to say is this, it didn't exactly have to be this way.
Speaker: Once you cover Kant's philosophy, there are so many directions you can go in. There is something known as the counter-enlightenment. We could have explored that direction.
Speaker: There is something known as the Romantic Movement. The Romantics said, hey, you know, you Enlighteners are focusing way too much on reason. What about creativity?
Speaker: What about feelings? Don't they matter too? And so that's the Romantic Movement. Oh, and by the way, there's German idealism. That is a whole other thing that is very interesting and i won't get into it, but some important figures from that movement will come up a little bit later.
Speaker: So we could have gone in all those directions. But when you cover the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, it sort of behooves you to cover his moral philosophy because that might be his most enduring legacy.
Speaker: He might be known, I mean, some people call him, the most influential moral philosopher of the modern era, maybe be of all time.
Speaker: So we sort of have to go in the direction of moral philosophy in an introductory course because you can't cover Kant without cover covering his moral philosophy. So that's what we're doing. And after you cover Kant, you sort of have to cover consequentialism.
Speaker: So that's going to leave us pretty much in the middle of moral philosophy. And so we'll just kind of pick it up from there. But I wanted to say that very quickly so that you know that there's quite a few options here. Kant is really a central node in Western modern philosophy. So there's all kinds of directions we could have gone.
Speaker: But okay, all right, let's get into Kant's moral philosophy. And here is a quote from Kant, and it is Roger Scruton quoting Kant.
Speaker: But here is how Scruton sets it up. sets it up The starting point of Kant's ethics is the concept of freedom. The moral agent judges that he can do certain things because he is conscious that he ought. And he recognizes that he is free, a fact which but for the moral law, he would have never known.
Speaker: If that doesn't quite make sense to you, hey, what's new? It's Immanuel Kant. All of it is extremely challenging. What Scruton is trying to say, that Kant is trying to say, is that freedom and morality mutually imply each other.
Speaker: When you realize that you have options, in other words, that you are free to choose between options, you realize that some are better than others. Some are okay and some are not okay.
Speaker: And so your awareness of your freedom makes you aware of morality. The same is true the other direction. When you realize some actions are morally wrong, you suddenly realize that you've got some options. You can do the morally wrong thing or you can do the morally right thing.
Speaker: And so freedom and morality, as we began this lesson, we noted they are sort of intertwined necessarily right you you sort of have to have one if you have the other and so that is what what Kant is saying here and so this is why when we cover Kant's moral philosophy we sort of have to you know it's a nice piggyback to the problem of free will Kant is basically saying look if you get morality you you need to have free will with it and so that is the basic message here
Speaker: Now let's remind ourselves that for Kant, um You know, freedom is not just acting on your desires. That's a form of enslavement. He actually said, you're a slave to your desires.
Speaker: For Kant, freedom is the ability to be governed by reason. You can stop and you can override all your impulses and all your desires and your feelings and moods. You can kind of put a stop to them too. And you can say, I'm going to act based on rational grounds and so this capacity to impose rational rules on yourself that is what freedom is you can be guided by a reason so that is freedom i have to remind you of that anyone who is capable of doing that
Speaker: Kant calls a rational being, a being that is free and can thus live according to principles they impose on themselves.
Speaker: If you are a rational being, you have moral personhood. In other words, the status of having moral rights. So putting this all together, everyone that you see in this image is a rational being and therefore they have moral rights. They are part of the moral community.
Speaker: You can't just violate their autonomy and tell them what to do and lie to them. That's not okay because they are moral beings, rational beings. and they deserve your you know respect and they have moral worth, right? So these individuals are part of the moral community.
Speaker: You know who's not a part of the moral community officially, according to Kant, is non-human animals. And that's because they are, at least for the most part, as far as Kant knew at the time, they are not rational beings.
Speaker: What that means is that non-human animals can't impose rational principles on themselves. For example, it would be kind of hilarious if a tiger decided to go vegetarian.
Speaker: that That doesn't even make any sense, right? Tigers can't decide to go vegetarian. That's not how it works. And so that is not a principle that a tiger can impose on himself.
Speaker: or herself. Now, Kant didn't know about dolphins and all that stuff and if you want to get into that, Kant died in 1804, right? So he he didn't get have any ah specific writings on that. One thing I can say though is the fact that animals or non-human animals aren't part of the moral community doesn't mean you can do whatever you want to them.
Speaker: Kant specifically said you can't go around herding animals willy-nilly that's actually that's that's bad for the individual doing the harm it sort of brutalizes them gets them used to being very callous so that's not okay and of course you'd be violating the rights of the owners of the animals and that's not okay either so you know for the record just don't go around kicking dogs in the face right that's kant didn't think you could do that uh even though they don't have strictly speaking moral rights so
Speaker: Okay, let's talk about something that of course is review at this point, but For Kant, remember we are in the noumenal realm. We human beings, we rational beings are a part of the world as it is independent of human cognition.
Speaker: Of course, morality is also rooted in the noumenal realm. And so the only way we can really decide on moral matters is through pure practical reason.
Speaker: That is, we have to reason about practical things, basically what things we should do, what things we shouldn't do. And so what this means is that we don't need to look at the consequences of an action in the empirical realm, by the way, in the phenomenal realm to see whether it is right or wrong.
Speaker: The only thing you have to look at to figure out if something is right or wrong is whether it fulfills a universal duty. Now, this will make a whole lot more sense in the next lesson. There's just two things that I want to say right here that will be important for understanding the next couple of slides.
Speaker: Number one, Kant basically has to stick to pure practical reason. He actually can't look at the phenomenal realm because remember, he is trying to make it clear that in the phenomenal realm, that's where science lives.
Speaker: But in the noumenal realm, that's where we live with our free will and our morality. So the only way we can figure that out is through pure reason. That's we can't look at the noumenal realm. All we have is reason available to us.
Speaker: That is the first thing that it has to be based off pure reason. And the second thing is this. Now we have to wonder about how it is that reason guides us.
Speaker: So typically when you perform an action, at least in my case, It's not exactly reason. We've talked about this before.
Speaker: Kant doesn't believe that every single one of our actions is free. He only believes that we have the potential to be radically free if we really develop this capacity.
Speaker: So for me, in my case, most of my day is not really guided by reason. I eat because I'm hungry, you know, and what I choose to eat depends on how hungry I am and what I'm craving. And those are all based on desires and cravings and preferences. None of that is reason, right?
Speaker: So most of our actions... aren't really guided by reason. So when are our actions actually guided by reason? Well, here's one example.
Speaker: Kant calls it a hypothetical imperative and that's sort of a command from reason, but that's a result of you having a particular desire or a desired outcome or a goal or an aim or a consequence or whatever.
Speaker: And so you come up with a plan, a particular set of actions to achieve that outcome. For example, maybe you want to run a marathon. That is a very bold and courageous and challenging endeavor.
Speaker: And if you are going to be successful, you need a plan. And so you invoke reason to set up a plan and you come up with a routine and you make sure you stick with it. And maybe it's a couple of months long, maybe it's a year long. I don't know. It depends on where you start.
Speaker: And then you follow that program and then you've actually let reason guide you. You have systematically altered your behavior in a rational way to achieve some aim.
Speaker: That is a hypothetical imperative. That is not morality. That is just one way that reason can guide us. There is a more specific or a different way, I should say, that reason can guide us. And that would be a categorical imperative.
Speaker: A categorical imperative is a command from reason that applies across any situation, no matter what you desire. right so it doesn't matter if you want to run a marathon or not, if you want to read a thousand books by the end of your life or not. what like Whatever goal you can think of, that's irrelevant.
Speaker: there are some kinds of actions that just simply don't make any sense for you to do. And so you're not allowed to do them. It is a command from reason that you not do them.
Speaker: In other words, it's a set of rules you must follow Since they always apply, if you were to not follow them, you would be being irrational, right? You would be going against your nature and doing irrational things, self-contradictory things.
Speaker: Kant believes that morality is a categorical imperative. It just always applies in all contexts for everyone, no matter what they want or feel or any of that stuff.
Speaker: Some things don't make sense to do and so they're wrong. And some things do make sense to do and so they're permissible. That is the basic idea. it is a moral law, the categorical imperative is, that is commanded upon us by our own reason.
Speaker: One more thing that I want to clarify before we dive into the categorical imperative, and that is the idea of moral worth. If you think about it, there's a bunch of things that might motivate you to do a good deed.
Speaker: For example, maybe you do a good deed because it makes you feel really good. Maybe you do a good deed because you're avoiding guilt. Oh, you know, if sometimes people need help and you say no and then you beat yourself up for it for like the rest of the day or week or whatever.
Speaker: so that's another reason why you might do a good deed. Maybe you do a good deed because you identify with the people that you're helping. I remember a few years back, Mexico City had a very large earthquake and I immediately donated a bunch of money to them. Now, I grew up in Mexico City.
Speaker: And so I sort of felt like a kinship with them, you know, and I was like, oh, no these are these are my people, you know, I got to help them out. And so that is doing a good deed for the sake of a cared for group, right? That's my group. So I want to take care of them. You probably do do good deeds all the time because you care about the group that you're doing the good deed for.
Speaker: Or maybe you do a good deed for a specific individual. There's someone that you really care about and you're very altruistic toward them and you want to do nice things for them. These are all great reasons to do good deeds.
Speaker: However, None of these are morally good deeds because according to Kant, an action only has real moral worth or moral value if it is done out of duty.
Speaker: What does that mean? Doing something out of duty is to do something because one is motivated out of respect for moral law, even if you don't really want to do it.
Speaker: So Kant here is clarifying what true morality is. It's not just doing good deeds because as we saw, you might do a good deed for all kinds of reasons. You might do it because it feels good. You might do it because you want some moral praise. You know, people see you do good things and they're like, oh man, you're really awesome. You want that, don't you? Maybe you wanted to help out the individual ah that you ah that you did a ah good deed for. Or maybe it's the group or whatever. There's all these reasons why you might do the good deed, but it's only a morally good deed if what actually motivated your actions was the moral law.
Speaker: If you donate money to charity and as you're donating money, you're thinking to yourself, I'm doing this because it is right to donate to charity if I have something to offer, if I have the opportunity.
Speaker: If that's what's motivating you, then it's a morally good deed. If instead what's motivating you is impressing the person you're next to or feeling really good about yourself afterward or feeling really good that the people that you care about are going to receive the help that they need, that doesn't count as a morally good deed. Morality is what we do out of respect for the moral law.
Speaker: Moreover, the moral worth of the act is derived not from the consequences of the act, but from the principle or maxim that motivated the act.
Speaker: We can't control what ends up happening after we decide to do a good deed. Maybe your good deed was for nothing. I actually heard that the charity that I donated to, they actually had too much money. And so after a certain point, a lot of the donations didn't really make a difference. But for Kant, that wouldn't really matter.
Speaker: If you did it because you had an opportunity to donate and you felt that the moral law compelled you to donate, that's it. That's still a morally good action.
Speaker: The consequences are not really up to you. And so it's all about the principle that motivated the action, the intentions. It's all about what's before the action that makes it a morally good deed.
Speaker: So now we have gone through several of the key terms that sort of set up Kant's moral philosophy. Now this has been quite a doozy and it's definitely the case that you want to review some of these terms. But once you do,
Speaker: you are ready to take on the categorical imperative. That is, you'll be ready to learn how it is that you can discover which actions are morally permissible and which ones are not.
Speaker: So when you're ready, it's time to discover the moral law through pure reason.
