2 ms·

once you 'other' someone, you can justify anything including torture, death camps. Kant did a pretty good job with this stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ca

• lsc 11y ago
  Kant was quite a writer, and yea, an innovator for his time, but the idea that you should act in a way that, if everyone did it, would turn out okay was radical in his time, and still not generally accepted. If anything, your categorical imperative is another argument that people don't agree on what is right across time and culture. In fact, considering his socioeconomic position at the time, I highly doubt he lived anything like a life that could be lived by everyone. We talk about economic inequality now... but in his day the difference between the rich and the poor wasn't the number of dollars, it was who had access to food and who did not, which I personally think is a much greater inequality than any amount of dollars. > once you 'other' someone, you can justify anything including torture, death camps. The point here is that you can go back and rationalize people's actions like that, but to say those people are acting on the same ethical principles that we are makes a mockery of our modern ethics. If you have rules about what you can and can't do to a person, as we do, and you re-define person to not include a bunch of humanity, you are no longer following the same ethics we are following now.