Also good, this weekend: another visit with my friend up from Huntsville Saturday, at the TPA. The epistemology this year was almost relevant to my own concerns, focused on Thomas Reid and Scottish "common sense" about our errors of perception. One bad judgment doesn't constitute a "defeater."
And better: a break from epistemology for the Indian buffet at Sitar.
In CoPhi today we'll turn to I. Kant, whose name has been the source of too many puny puns. William James's English friend F.C.S. Schiller, for instance, once published a parody philosophy journal including the entry "I Can't: The Critique of Pure Rot." In fact, Kant was a most sober and serious sort, definitely not "a real pissant who was very rarely stable." Recent desecrations aside, he was certainly not a moron. His enlightenment project was no joke, it was the bold insistence that we all have a responsibility at least to try thinking rationally and for ourselves.
Susan Neiman (who appeared at the Southern Festival of Books here this year, btw) observes what may have been the lone mild instance of Kantian humor, "the only (faintly) funny footnote in the entire first Critique (of Pure Reason): Deficiency in judgment is just what is ordinarily called stupidity, and for such a failing there is ordinarily no remedy."
Was Kant really so personally deficient of sound and humane judgment as to advise total honesty when dealing with Nazis, as I confess I've sometimes suggested when explicating the differences between an ethic of dutiful reason and one of calculated utility like Jeremy Bentham's? Or was he simply saying that our judgment must begin from a principled place: all else being equal, tell the truth as you know it... but your recognition of a Nazi's intentions is an un-equalizer, if anything is.
Total honesty is then simply a pre-judgmental theoretical starting-place, when we first begin thinking for ourselves about what to say and do in an extreme situation where innocent lives hang in the balance. It does not enjoy unqualified deference in so impure a world as ours. A principled person, then, will lie to a Nazi - not from mere inclination or preference or sympathy, but from emotionally-intelligent reason and dutiful humanity. That's not "playing God" but it is supposing that a properly rational deity would never tell us it's more important to uphold an abstract principle than to save an innocent life, when we can.
"At the heart of Kant's ethics... we are to act only on those principles that we could will to be a universal law of nature. Kant's metaphysics remind us that we are not God; his ethics give us permission to pretend that we are."A.C. Grayling's new history of philosophy, helpfully distinguishing ethics and morality - ethics, ethos, is about personal character, morality is about custom "and even etiquette" - supports a more nuanced view of the Sage of Konigsburg (Kaliningrad)...
Bertrand Russell was right: deontology becomes most relevant and insightful when we "abandon Kant's purely formal point of view, and take some account of the effects of actions."
Just "some account"? What else, challenges the pragmatist, ultimately matters more than the actual effects of our actions?
Kant @aldaily...
I enjoyed listening to this piece on Kant. I have just finished the segment on epistemology in my Intro class. I find immensely interesting and thought provoking, although my talking about it is provoking an unpleasant emotion in my wife. I found that after closely reading Kant my principal reaction was simply admiration; that man could think! The best part of your talk for this autodidact was the perspective on the categorical imperative as a starting point for evaluation. I have always found it difficult to reconcile the apparent imperative to not lie to that damn Nazi at the door with my intuitive notions of morality. Your comments are most helpful to doing that.
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