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But then why pretend to value freedom most of all when you are ultimately a pragmatist?
When I say that we should enact freedom of association, why can't you just say no? Why do this shell game of pretending you actually care about some kind of freedom that isn't actually upholding principle in any meaningful way?
"There is a spectrum of principle" is quite literally the devil's position on the matter. Kant is wrong about a lot of things but he is right about this: if something does not bind you and can be compromised on, then it is not something that provides any moral content to your decision making. It's just an aesthetic.
When did I say I valued freedom most of all? And saying no means I don't value freedom of association at all, I value it, just not exclusively. So my answer would be Yes, but.
Kant is wrong about many many things and this is one of them. It may be the devil's position but if it is, he inherited it from God. The bible explicitly supports justifiable lies. God rewards the midwives who lie to save male children for example. Because they were not lying for themselves but to save lives, and this showed they "feared God" i.e. correctly valued some of His laws over others. God is is not a Kantian.
There is a difference between something not providing ALL the moral content of your decision making and not providing ANY moral content to your decision making that you seem to be struggling to grasp.
I'll admit, I don't understand how you can claim to stand for anything if you're ready to compromise it to practicality.
It seems the utterance is entire inconsequential as it bonds you in no way. What's the difference between this and whim?
Reason and intellect. I prefer people to tell the truth, I also prefer people to be alive. The murderer at the door scenario covers this perfectly. Sometimes one of those is more important than the other. Entirely depends on the scenario in question. I prefer people to be able to act freely, I also prefer people not to murder other people. Therefore some level of balance needs to be there given that some people do want to and will murder others if they are not prevented. They cannot have full freedom, otherwise they undermine others rights to life. So we try to cobble together some kind of set of rules that acknowledges that.
It is not a perfect process by any means, and of course it is open to bias just like anything else. But rigid adherence to principles is simply not how we are built. There are vanishingly few Kantians in the world as far as I can tell, and I think that is simply because it does not work. In some circumstances lying is the more moral thing, in some circumstances it is not. Applying your principles to the circumstances and working through what that means is part of being human. Perhaps you might decide that telling the truth to the murderer at the door is best and I decide to lie. That doesn't mean I necessarily think lying is good, just like doing the opposite doesn't mean you think murder is good.
That's why we have multiple competing schools of moral and ethical thought, because the world is complicated and deciding what is the right thing to do is not necessarily straight forward. Principles can clash, and you have to have some way of deciding which is most important, in scenarios where it is impossible to fulfill them all.
Now of course we are also very good at rationalizing our choices to ourselves and to other people, so it is very difficult to know if people are legitimately trading off their principles and beliefs to try and get the best possible outcome that meets as many of their principles as possible, but that is part of the deal, until we invent mind reading, we are alienated from each others thoughts. We cannot truly know each other, only the outward faces we wear.
But it would only be a whim, if I had no principles at all, and wasn't trying to at least reason through how to satisfy them as best I can in any given situation.
I suppose the question is, if you were in a position where your principles clash, how do you deal with that? If fulfilling one of your deeply held principles means breaking another and vice versa, how do you decide?
I have a formal hierarchy between them. Some things are more important than others. Truth > Freedom > Nation and so on. And of course my own ranking is going to be different than someone else's. But if you want to make real moral decisions, you have to write your own Catechism as Nietzsche advices or adopt an existing one. You can't just make it up as you go along.
I've always held this to be basic moral reasoning, which is why I'm puzzled that you're claiming this wishy washy compromise stuff to be logic. It is simply too easy to rationalize anything so long as you're willing to open that door. As soon as you allow yourself to do so, you are doomed.
There's this scene from the later seasons of Barry where the titular character, who has repented from his life as an assassin and swore off violence, has to kill someone to escape prison. On his way to meet that person, he listens to increasingly insane pastoral podcasts trying to find one that will manage to reason him into the idea that "thou shalt not kill" doesn't actually apply to what he's about to do.
My experience of people using "it's complicated" as an excuse has only convinced me that ethics are an absolute matter. You either do the right thing (within your own set system) or you're lapsing.
People (including myself, unfortunatly) lapse all the time, as you pointed out earlier, anti abortion activists ought to be doing a lot more violence, and environmentalists are not willing to enact nuclear fascism to get what they claim they want.
This to me shows either that these people are not living to their moral standard, or that they are truly beholden to a different hidden moral standard through their revealed preference.
I find that we would all be in a much better place if people understood the true nature of the gods they and the people around them serve. And this rationalizing, whilst it has merits as social lubricant, is the enemy of this true understanding.
Truth > Freedom > Nation and so on.
But you do have to apply that on the fly? As in presumably not all truths are weighted over all freedoms. If you had to tell a white lie, to save all of humanity from being murdered/enslaved, is truth still over freedom?
I'm not sure we mean the same thing by truth in the first place. Being in accord with God/Reality does not preclude deception altogether. In fact sometimes it requires it. I think Taoists have an aphorism for this.
Kant does fail when he attempts to logically ground the primacy of truth because truth isn't wholly understandable of characterizable through logic. As logic itself can demonstrate.
But in any case, I stray closer to virtue ethics than consequentialism these days, so the usual "fuck the pig or destroy the universe" thought experiments are not going to yield the expected results.
I have said true things that might have landed me in prison before, if that answers the question.
For me truth are just things I know (or think I know, more correctly I suppose) to be true. So if someone asks me Is there a God, if I say No, I am telling the truth, and if I say yes I am lying. It's certainly possible I am wrong, and God does exist, but my statement isn't a lie, just incorrect in that case.
I don't myself hold to a specific ethical structure, because I think they all have some useful things to say and some wrong things to say. All of them are groping at part of the unseen elephant as it were. My joke is I am not a consequentialist, I just played one in politics. As in, if you are deciding whether to allocate funding for a new hospital, a new school or an adult social care facility, you kind of have to try and quantify which brings the most "good" to your nation and citizens given you are spending their tax money. So you'll try to quantify emergency department waiting times vs crowded classrooms vs how many care home places you currently have in the region. And because you may be subject to judicial review, you will have to justify your decision beyond I felt that a hospital does the most good. But outside of that I find utilitarianism particularly goes some places I think are incorrect. Virtue ethics is a little wishy washy and deontology can also break down at scale.
Try to be a good person, consider the outcomes, treat people as you would like to be treated, think hard about difficult problems, allow people to make their own choices, are all useful, but I think they all have to be taken as a kind of gestalt where each is shining a light on one particular part of moral thought. I think two genuinely good people can come to very different decisions on the same moral conundrum, even ones they each find in the other to be monstrous and still be good people.
I'm a skeptic so I can't use the word in this way. Otherwise examined thoroughly enough it'd be an empty set. It's a fine coherent definition, we're just not talking about the same thing.
I can't disagree. But I think our disagreement rests not on this, but on the standard of what this demands of people. How serious and rigorous we must be if we are to embark on the journey of actually trying to hold ideals. I am harsh because I do not trust humanity to do right by itself without an incredible amount of discipline. You only get the overman by MK-ultraing people with criticism and debate.
That's my continental brain really. I do think your more gentle approach is a better embodiment of the English tradition in this case.
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Well, your argument in favor of consistent moral principles kinda falls flat when your most important moral principle is something inscrutable in practice.
I am a skeptic. Acatalepsy means nothing is scrutable.
The fact that we're shambling through the dark doesn't suspend us from an obligation to do our best, however.
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