No.94
I think I've misunderstood Kant's "Axeman at the door" scenario this whole time. So he says that you can't lie to the guy who asks if the people he's looking for are inside, but does Kant's philosophy also extend to actions rather than simply words?
I mean like you have to always tell the truth, and let other people do their own moral choices. So let people kill or rape or do other morally wrong things because they have to make their own decisions and you can't intervene.
Is that what Kant would say? Or would it just be "yes mr.axeman they are here, now just let me call the police and grab my knife to defend them" or something like that?
No.153
bump
No.164
Ahh, OP, you're forgetting an important part of Kantian ethics: The Categorical Imperative
Now, I'm more familiar with Kant's metaphysics than his ethics, so anyone who knows more on the subject is welcome to correct me, but how I understand it, Kant's treatment of human autonomy is not as simple as saying that people need to make their own choices. Rather, we humans have NO RIGHT to say what the nature of the Good is and tell others how to act based on this wrongly-formed idea of the Good, because to try to directly define the Good would lead us down a dialectic in which we try to talk about concepts that are without any empirical grounding - trying to talk rationally about the "in-itself". To do so would be to go beyond the scope of reason, leading us down the paths of philosophers like Leibniz, talking about crazy shit like Monads that have absolutely no empirical validity.
Rather, it is our duty as humans to act out of the Good Will, that weird sense we have of what is right in just the same way that we have ideas of things like God and Freedom even though they also are empty concepts with no empirical validity. This does not mean, however, that we can just do whatever the fuck we want and rationalize it into being somehow out of good will; this is where the categorical imperative comes in.
While we cannot directly talk about the nature of things beyond the scope of reason like the Good, we can say what things like that are NOT; so, in the case of the Good, if we want to judge our actions in the absence of a natural inclination towards the Good Will, we simply ask if an action would be right to do in all circumstances. If it isn't right to do it under all circumstances, it isn't Good.
Such is the case with lying, and in the "Axeman at the Door" example, there's nothing stopping one from telling the truth about a person's whereabouts and then calling the police or acting in self-defense.
No.169
>>164thanks for the reply
i realized after posting on /pol/ that i'm actually not like kant at all
more nietzche and others