Something that’s weirdly stuck with me (even though he’s not my favorite philosopher) is Kant’s Categorical Imperative which says, briefly, do only the things that would still be okay if everyone did them.
I think it fills in a nice gap left by the golden rule (treat others as you’d like to be treated) in drawing attention to how some things which don’t seem to do much harm would be a major problem if broadly adopted.
But not everyone wants to do the same thing or be treated the same way. In fact, people all want to do different things. You can’t get 100% of people to agree on anything. If you walked down the street with a hammer and asked 100 people “do you want to be hit in the head?” you couldn’t get them all to say “no”.
There are other objections that are more specific:
One of the first major challenges to Kant’s reasoning came from the French philosopher Benjamin Constant, who asserted that since truth telling must be universal, according to Kant’s theories, one must (if asked) tell a known murderer the location of his prey.
In this reply, Kant agreed with Constant’s inference, that from Kant’s own premises one must infer a moral duty not to lie to a murderer.
Kant denied that such an inference indicates any weakness in his premises: not lying to the murderer is required because moral actions do not derive their worth from the expected consequences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
Basically, the categorical imperative is too inflexible to be practical.
I can’t disagree, except to the extent that I don’t personally view the CI as a means to reaching some objective, universally “good” set of actions. I think Kant was way off the mark with a lot of that pursuit. I do think, however, that an action which fails to satisfy the CI (meaning as I see it, “I want to do this but I don’t think others should”) is often one that should be re-evaluated.
But also I took like 3 philosophy courses so I’m officially in way over my head now but enjoy the discussion!
The categorical imperative is cute but doesn’t work. It ignores all context for actions and assumes all people are pretty much the same.
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A surgeon is allowed to cut open people in an attempt to save them, me a person not medically trained is not allowed to do that. If you applied the rule “to save a person I am allowed to attempt to operate on them and do my best” to every person we would be in serious trouble.
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If I do a small bad thing it will prevent a very bad thing from happening. The categorical imperative forces me to ignore that fact.
Also doesn’t really match how social animals operate and instead demands that we ignore how we are treated in our responses.
- I want people to be kind to each other. This particular person is never kind to me. The categorical imperative tells me that I am not supposed to take that into account and instead just shower resources on someone who has shown no appreciation for them in hopes that they eventually see the error of their ways. Despite having a winning strategy.
Basically it puts way too much on people and demands that they be lawful stupid.
Somebody who isn’t a pedant would interpret that as “All trained surgeons performing this procedure on their respective patients with the same condition would be fine. So me, a trained surgeon, performing this procedure is also fine.”
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that you are making a big mistake to view the present or past events only from your current perspective.