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You can always try do do the Kant thing for questions like these: Would it be good for you if everybody followed your advice? Compared to the chances of getting

by atoav 4y ago

You can always try do do the Kant thing for questions like these: Would it be good for you if everybody followed your advice? Compared to the chances of getting fucked for writing a bad review, aren't the chances bigger to get fucked by a bad actor in a world where nobody left bad reviews? It is simple. If the answer to the question: "How would it be if everybody acted like me?" is "It would be worse", this means you are acting in a way that makes society worse for your own advantage.

workingon 4y ago
It's really unfortunate that this simple principle can't work in real life, just because people's idea of "what is worse" are so different. One has only to look at the very different outlooks people have politically to know the answers to the question "Will this make the world worse?" are going to be wildly different, and some of them downright nonsensical to most people.
dale_glass 4y ago
A bit pedantic, but that's not really the Kant thing. Kant is a proponent of deontology, which is utterly unconcerned with consequences. His thing was more checking if it would still make logical sense. That is, when he asks "What if everybody lied?", what he's getting at isn't that it'd suck if you couldn't even ask for the time and get the right answer, but that it'd destroy the concept of truth, and with that what does "lying" even mean? Kant answered the specific scenario of "What if the Gestapo wants to know if you're hiding any Jews?" (his actual scenario was with a murderer looking for a victim, since Nazis weren't a thing yet), and said that yup, you do not lie, because to him the morality of an action is unrelated to its likely consequences.
samatman 4y ago
This is where the limits of the categorical imperative become apparent. If there were a fund (assume a spherical, frictionless, voluntary society) that was the only way to feed the hungry, everyone should donate to it. Unfortunately it's set up by an evil game master, and one in ten thousand donations is answered with a bullet to the spine. Of course the categorical imperative says we should do it anyway. I wouldn't. You wouldn't. Rational defection on bad payoff matrices is correct behavior.
ziddoap 4y ago
Would it be good for you if everybody followed your advice? Just to be abundantly clear, I offered no advice. I simply offered a clarification to the comment I replied to, with my assumption of what they meant.

by atoav 4y ago

workingon 4y ago

It's really unfortunate that this simple principle can't work in real life, just because people's idea of "what is worse" are so different. One has only to look at the very different outlooks people have politically to know the answers to the question "Will this make the world worse?" are going to be wildly different, and some of them downright nonsensical to most people.

dale_glass 4y ago

A bit pedantic, but that's not really the Kant thing. Kant is a proponent of deontology, which is utterly unconcerned with consequences. His thing was more checking if it would still make logical sense. That is, when he asks "What if everybody lied?", what he's getting at isn't that it'd suck if you couldn't even ask for the time and get the right answer, but that it'd destroy the concept of truth, and with that what does "lying" even mean? Kant answered the specific scenario of "What if the Gestapo wants to know if you're hiding any Jews?" (his actual scenario was with a murderer looking for a victim, since Nazis weren't a thing yet), and said that yup, you do not lie, because to him the morality of an action is unrelated to its likely consequences.

samatman 4y ago

This is where the limits of the categorical imperative become apparent. If there were a fund (assume a spherical, frictionless, voluntary society) that was the only way to feed the hungry, everyone should donate to it. Unfortunately it's set up by an evil game master, and one in ten thousand donations is answered with a bullet to the spine. Of course the categorical imperative says we should do it anyway. I wouldn't. You wouldn't. Rational defection on bad payoff matrices is correct behavior.

ziddoap 4y ago

Would it be good for you if everybody followed your advice? Just to be abundantly clear, I offered no advice. I simply offered a clarification to the comment I replied to, with my assumption of what they meant.