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I don’t just find it unsettling or just an idea I don’t like - I hate this idea. Why? Because it actually renders everything, anywhere, ultimately arbitrary.

I don’t just find it unsettling or just an idea I don’t like - I hate this idea. Why? Because it actually renders everything, anywhere, ultimately arbitrary. Can you say there isn’t an underlying truth in the perspective of the anti-vaxxer? Can you say there isn’t an underlying truth in the perspective of the pedophile? Can you say there isn’t an underlying truth in the perspective of the flat earther? According to Kant… well, you can’t completely. The logical consequences of this, if fully realized, would annihilate society. It would seem in Kant’s view that Nobody, ultimately, has any right to pronounce objective truths on anything. Not even basic ones like “you shouldn’t kill the innocent.” That’s just a reflection of your own personal reality that has no inherent value over someone else’s reality.

ThinkBeat 3y ago
Anti-vaxxer is an extremely ill-defined label that you apply to people because you judge them. Then you seem to think that everyone else should accept and agree with your judgement. Because if people do not agree with your judgement, then everything is ultimately arbitrary and if fully realized, would annihilate society. Now I can tell you that I do not care about how you judge a person. I will make up my own mind. So there you are, by your own definition society is annihilated. Yet here we still are. [You picked some bad examples on which to argue your point. You should though spend time to figure out good examples]
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  I’m picking examples that I believe will resonate with most people on this forum, simply because all of them tend to get the most vitriol. My personal views are a bit different. My point remains though that if Kant is correct, the moral high ground most people here feel over these groups is quite thin.
  - staunton 3y ago
    Kant famously "derived from basic moral principles" that it's acceptable to kill unwanted newborns provided they are born out of wedlock. Make of that what you will... Edit: Polemics aside, I looked it up and of course people don't agree if Kant really meant it that way. https://doi.org/10.1515/agph-2021-0034 https://doi.org/10.1515/agph-2021-0034
    - allturtles 3y ago
      It's pretty clear he never said it was "acceptable." He waffles on whether it should be punishable by death and decides in the end that it must be, but, as one might say today, "that it's pretty fucked up." The reason is that having an illegitimate child in the eighteenth century was a source of dishonor that would see you effectively rejected from society. So out-of-wedlock mothers were in an impossible situation: kill the child or have their own lives destroyed. See this article https://www.jstor.org/stable/20484950 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20484950, which quotes Frederick the Great, among others, who pointed out this same quandry: > A girl, only too easily fooled by the presence of a seducer, does she not find herself compelled by the very force of circumstances to choose between the loss of her honor and the elimination of the unhappy fruit that she has conceived? Is it not the fault of the laws to place a girl in such a desperate situation?
adasdasdas 3y ago
Everything is arbitrary. What's even more arbitrary than descriptive truths are moral truths - like - don't kill the innocent. The sooner we reconcile our differences and realize that society is only possible through tethered connections biologically programmed into us, the better we will all be. The alternative is groups of people feuding over "moral truths" that are IMPOSSIBLE to reconcile because "moral truths" are inaccessible.
- svnt 3y ago
  What an underdeveloped perspective. You would constrain humanity to the biology that birthed it. By your reasoning we ought to crawl back into our mothers because that is where we are meant to be.
  - adasdasdas 3y ago
    First off, the logical conclusion of my statement is that we should procreate. Second, calling biology constraining is a gross underestimation of our complex normative system which gives birth to the best and worst of humanity.
    - svnt 3y ago
      You opened with “everything is arbitrary” and now the only thing you’ve said isn’t is that we should procreate? > The sooner we reconcile our differences and realize that society is only possible through tethered connections biologically programmed into us, the better we will all be. The alternative is groups of people feuding over "moral truths" that are IMPOSSIBLE to reconcile because "moral truths" are inaccessible. Moral truths are not impossible to reconcile and they are not inaccessible. You just aren’t yet equipped with the discernment to distinguish between accurate ones and arbitrary ones. Biology is constraining when you rely on it to dictate the path forward.
- vacuity 3y ago
  We will cease to be "humans" as we are now. It's weird to talk about consciousness as a being who is conscious but can't explain how, but the fact that I have the capacity and disposition for moral deliberation drives me to pursue morality. Perhaps it's because of an emergent biological state, or a supernatural soul, or something else, but regardless it's a core part of who I am. I recognize the moral relativism pitfall, but I don't think that means we should ignore morality either. I have beliefs on at least core moral principles that should be upheld, if nothing else. I couldn't tell you why I do, but I do. That's enough for me to keep going.
edgyquant 3y ago
> hy? Because it actually renders everything, anywhere, ultimately arbitrary They are arbitrary though. You don’t like it because it forces you to admit everything you consider objective about the universe is little more than your cultural meta narrative.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  Are you alive and breathing right now? It’s arbitrary, so I say you aren’t.
  - steelframe 3y ago
    Whether I am breathing or not really is arbitrary to you, until our realities interact. Now that you're reading this you've suddenly lost the option of saying I'm not in the model of the world your brain has formed. However exactly what I am in your own mind, that's not for me to say. At least, that's what your mind is saying.
xyzelement 3y ago
I didn't read the article yet but I did make a valiant attempt through actual Kant on a trip through Uruguay and Argentina a few years ago... My understanding is that Kant "simply" says that you cannot rely on yourself to know something objectively. That there's a limitation to perception and ... reason. Would you ask a cat what is right on the topics of vax, shape of earth, etc? No, because you know they are limited. Well, according to evolution we're just a bit more evolved but still have no claim to objectivity. But that doesn't take away from morality. One way to look at religion is - it begins from the Kantian view that you can't just work out everything logically. That there's some great unknown and unknowable that is beyond you. And then enables you to engage with it in that world. That's why religion anchors morality in "G-d said" because man certainly has no grounds to say "I've figured this out and it's right"
woodruffw 3y ago
This interpretation is, roughly speaking, the polar opposite of Kant’s moral philosophy. He has very precise, concrete, views on right and wrong, views that he is able to persuasively substantiate because he starts from such a basic, skeptical position. Put another way: Kant’s observation about the basic unknowability of things in themselves doesn’t somehow imply that we have to throw up our hands and accept moral relativity. The bulk of his moral philosophy is dedicated to explaining the necessary connection between our phenomenological existence and our moral duties.
lukeasrodgers 3y ago
The parent comment glosses Kant's distinction between noumena and phenomena as between perceived reality and "underlying reality", and while that is a common way of putting it, I think it's not quite accurate, and leads to this kind of interpretation gone astray. What Kant is saying is basically that categories like cause, and concepts like substance, are fundamentally bound up with the structure of our mind. We cannot "get outside" our own minds to know anything else, but there must be something beyond our perceptions, which Kant variously calls noumena, things-in-themselves, or transcendental object=X (there are minor differences between these notions that I cannot recall). Here IIRC his language kind of unfortunately but necessarily breaks down into metaphor. He can't quite say that the noumena are the source of phenomena since that would imply a causal relationship, and he's just argued that cause is a structure of the human mind. Considering the "perspectives" you mention, e.g. that of the flat earther - a perspective is not a perception, nor is it a judgement, and it is these that Kant is primarily concerned with in the 1st critique. I'd say a perspective is more like an agglomeration of more or less (but not necessarily) coherent and self-reinforcing beliefs, attitudes and probably even non-propositional content like dispositions. Kant didn't have much to say specifically about that in any of his major writings that I can recall (maybe in the lectures on anthropology). But his entire life work was devoted to how we can provide a solid foundation for claims of knowledge, morality, and aesthetics, so to say that "Nobody, ultimately, has any right to pronounce objective truths on anything" would quite a misinterpretation. You could argue "well but it isn't objective knowledge since the noumena are the real objects" but that would be begging the question against him, his whole argument is that concepts like "object" are part of the structure of our mind. Objective knowledge and the human mind go hand in hand.
Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
I think you only hate the idea because you're misinterpreting it. Statements like "the Earth is spherical" or "this vaccine has 90% effectivity" fall fully in the phenomenological realm, i.e., the things that we experience through our senses and we can know. Since we have consistent sensory experiences (also aided by technology) that point to the Earth being spherical, Kant would say that we can be confident that it is spherical as a phenomenon - which is what actually matters, and the same with vaccines: dying and getting sick are experiences that we can perceive as a phenomenon, so antivaxxers will find no excuse in Kant's philosophy. In this example, some aspects of the noumenon (what we cannot know) are for example: OK, but what actually is dying from COVID? Maybe we reincarnate? Maybe we go to heaven? Maybe we are just bits in a simulation? Maybe dying is an illusion? We cannot know. But this doesn't affect the usefulness of taking the vaccine (someone could choose not to take it because they think death is an illusion or they will reincarnate or something like that, but then that's their beliefs' fault, not Kant's, and they would still have to admit that taking the vaccine makes sense for people who don't want to die because they don't share those beliefs). I think it's hard to find these ideas unsettling, as they actually have become so ingrained to seem like common sense for most rational-minded people. The core idea is just separation between scientific knowledge and metaphysics/religion (but it's of course compatible with atheistic/materialistic views, because one doesn't need to assume that the noumenon contains anything of practical importance -like heaven, immortal souls or stuff like that-, it could be basically irrelevant for all practical purposes).

ThinkBeat 3y ago

Anti-vaxxer is an extremely ill-defined label that you apply to people because you judge them. Then you seem to think that everyone else should accept and agree with your judgement. Because if people do not agree with your judgement, then everything is ultimately arbitrary and if fully realized, would annihilate society. Now I can tell you that I do not care about how you judge a person. I will make up my own mind. So there you are, by your own definition society is annihilated. Yet here we still are. [You picked some bad examples on which to argue your point. You should though spend time to figure out good examples]

gjsman-1000 3y ago
I’m picking examples that I believe will resonate with most people on this forum, simply because all of them tend to get the most vitriol. My personal views are a bit different. My point remains though that if Kant is correct, the moral high ground most people here feel over these groups is quite thin.
- staunton 3y ago
  Kant famously "derived from basic moral principles" that it's acceptable to kill unwanted newborns provided they are born out of wedlock. Make of that what you will... Edit: Polemics aside, I looked it up and of course people don't agree if Kant really meant it that way. https://doi.org/10.1515/agph-2021-0034 https://doi.org/10.1515/agph-2021-0034
  - allturtles 3y ago
    It's pretty clear he never said it was "acceptable." He waffles on whether it should be punishable by death and decides in the end that it must be, but, as one might say today, "that it's pretty fucked up." The reason is that having an illegitimate child in the eighteenth century was a source of dishonor that would see you effectively rejected from society. So out-of-wedlock mothers were in an impossible situation: kill the child or have their own lives destroyed. See this article https://www.jstor.org/stable/20484950 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20484950, which quotes Frederick the Great, among others, who pointed out this same quandry: > A girl, only too easily fooled by the presence of a seducer, does she not find herself compelled by the very force of circumstances to choose between the loss of her honor and the elimination of the unhappy fruit that she has conceived? Is it not the fault of the laws to place a girl in such a desperate situation?

adasdasdas 3y ago

Everything is arbitrary. What's even more arbitrary than descriptive truths are moral truths - like - don't kill the innocent. The sooner we reconcile our differences and realize that society is only possible through tethered connections biologically programmed into us, the better we will all be. The alternative is groups of people feuding over "moral truths" that are IMPOSSIBLE to reconcile because "moral truths" are inaccessible.

svnt 3y ago
What an underdeveloped perspective. You would constrain humanity to the biology that birthed it. By your reasoning we ought to crawl back into our mothers because that is where we are meant to be.
- adasdasdas 3y ago
  First off, the logical conclusion of my statement is that we should procreate. Second, calling biology constraining is a gross underestimation of our complex normative system which gives birth to the best and worst of humanity.
  - svnt 3y ago
    You opened with “everything is arbitrary” and now the only thing you’ve said isn’t is that we should procreate? > The sooner we reconcile our differences and realize that society is only possible through tethered connections biologically programmed into us, the better we will all be. The alternative is groups of people feuding over "moral truths" that are IMPOSSIBLE to reconcile because "moral truths" are inaccessible. Moral truths are not impossible to reconcile and they are not inaccessible. You just aren’t yet equipped with the discernment to distinguish between accurate ones and arbitrary ones. Biology is constraining when you rely on it to dictate the path forward.
vacuity 3y ago
We will cease to be "humans" as we are now. It's weird to talk about consciousness as a being who is conscious but can't explain how, but the fact that I have the capacity and disposition for moral deliberation drives me to pursue morality. Perhaps it's because of an emergent biological state, or a supernatural soul, or something else, but regardless it's a core part of who I am. I recognize the moral relativism pitfall, but I don't think that means we should ignore morality either. I have beliefs on at least core moral principles that should be upheld, if nothing else. I couldn't tell you why I do, but I do. That's enough for me to keep going.

edgyquant 3y ago

> hy? Because it actually renders everything, anywhere, ultimately arbitrary They are arbitrary though. You don’t like it because it forces you to admit everything you consider objective about the universe is little more than your cultural meta narrative.

gjsman-1000 3y ago
Are you alive and breathing right now? It’s arbitrary, so I say you aren’t.
- steelframe 3y ago
  Whether I am breathing or not really is arbitrary to you, until our realities interact. Now that you're reading this you've suddenly lost the option of saying I'm not in the model of the world your brain has formed. However exactly what I am in your own mind, that's not for me to say. At least, that's what your mind is saying.

xyzelement 3y ago

I didn't read the article yet but I did make a valiant attempt through actual Kant on a trip through Uruguay and Argentina a few years ago... My understanding is that Kant "simply" says that you cannot rely on yourself to know something objectively. That there's a limitation to perception and ... reason. Would you ask a cat what is right on the topics of vax, shape of earth, etc? No, because you know they are limited. Well, according to evolution we're just a bit more evolved but still have no claim to objectivity. But that doesn't take away from morality. One way to look at religion is - it begins from the Kantian view that you can't just work out everything logically. That there's some great unknown and unknowable that is beyond you. And then enables you to engage with it in that world. That's why religion anchors morality in "G-d said" because man certainly has no grounds to say "I've figured this out and it's right"

woodruffw 3y ago

This interpretation is, roughly speaking, the polar opposite of Kant’s moral philosophy. He has very precise, concrete, views on right and wrong, views that he is able to persuasively substantiate because he starts from such a basic, skeptical position. Put another way: Kant’s observation about the basic unknowability of things in themselves doesn’t somehow imply that we have to throw up our hands and accept moral relativity. The bulk of his moral philosophy is dedicated to explaining the necessary connection between our phenomenological existence and our moral duties.

lukeasrodgers 3y ago

The parent comment glosses Kant's distinction between noumena and phenomena as between perceived reality and "underlying reality", and while that is a common way of putting it, I think it's not quite accurate, and leads to this kind of interpretation gone astray. What Kant is saying is basically that categories like cause, and concepts like substance, are fundamentally bound up with the structure of our mind. We cannot "get outside" our own minds to know anything else, but there must be something beyond our perceptions, which Kant variously calls noumena, things-in-themselves, or transcendental object=X (there are minor differences between these notions that I cannot recall). Here IIRC his language kind of unfortunately but necessarily breaks down into metaphor. He can't quite say that the noumena are the source of phenomena since that would imply a causal relationship, and he's just argued that cause is a structure of the human mind. Considering the "perspectives" you mention, e.g. that of the flat earther - a perspective is not a perception, nor is it a judgement, and it is these that Kant is primarily concerned with in the 1st critique. I'd say a perspective is more like an agglomeration of more or less (but not necessarily) coherent and self-reinforcing beliefs, attitudes and probably even non-propositional content like dispositions. Kant didn't have much to say specifically about that in any of his major writings that I can recall (maybe in the lectures on anthropology). But his entire life work was devoted to how we can provide a solid foundation for claims of knowledge, morality, and aesthetics, so to say that "Nobody, ultimately, has any right to pronounce objective truths on anything" would quite a misinterpretation. You could argue "well but it isn't objective knowledge since the noumena are the real objects" but that would be begging the question against him, his whole argument is that concepts like "object" are part of the structure of our mind. Objective knowledge and the human mind go hand in hand.

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago

I think you only hate the idea because you're misinterpreting it. Statements like "the Earth is spherical" or "this vaccine has 90% effectivity" fall fully in the phenomenological realm, i.e., the things that we experience through our senses and we can know. Since we have consistent sensory experiences (also aided by technology) that point to the Earth being spherical, Kant would say that we can be confident that it is spherical as a phenomenon - which is what actually matters, and the same with vaccines: dying and getting sick are experiences that we can perceive as a phenomenon, so antivaxxers will find no excuse in Kant's philosophy. In this example, some aspects of the noumenon (what we cannot know) are for example: OK, but what actually is dying from COVID? Maybe we reincarnate? Maybe we go to heaven? Maybe we are just bits in a simulation? Maybe dying is an illusion? We cannot know. But this doesn't affect the usefulness of taking the vaccine (someone could choose not to take it because they think death is an illusion or they will reincarnate or something like that, but then that's their beliefs' fault, not Kant's, and they would still have to admit that taking the vaccine makes sense for people who don't want to die because they don't share those beliefs). I think it's hard to find these ideas unsettling, as they actually have become so ingrained to seem like common sense for most rational-minded people. The core idea is just separation between scientific knowledge and metaphysics/religion (but it's of course compatible with atheistic/materialistic views, because one doesn't need to assume that the noumenon contains anything of practical importance -like heaven, immortal souls or stuff like that-, it could be basically irrelevant for all practical purposes).