@@PhiloofAlexandria This was a really helpful response. Utiliarianism sounds fair on the basis it is more economical or practical in the current order of human society. I had to stop the video where his formula of universal law broke down for me at the topic of stealing. This is not practical in human society but we steal (universally speaking) from Mother Earth every day. If she is just an extension of ourselves than we are stealing from ourselves everyday. However, for this reason I understand why everything proceeds from his Human Formula especially the Kinddom of Ends. If your going to steal from this planet it should be in the spirit of Goodwill. Never mistake activity for achievement. The problem I always reach in determining what is universal (and this is where the Golden Rule seemingly breaks down) is when you are dealing with a Masochistic person. Any outliying imaginary end.
@@brentwood7660 most people who discussion moral philosophy do it strictly in regards to human on human interaction. This is because to be a moral agent you need, well, agency. You can’t apply morality to a bear, and if you could, you couldn’t teach or enforce that morality on it. The same could be said about all of nature. It steals from us and won’t ever have ethical kantian discussions about how moral it is.
@@PhiloofAlexandria my only critique on it being utilitarian in nature is that it doesn’t attempt to set the greatest amount of utility as the goal. Rather it sets an unspecified lower threshold where utility is so low that it’s unacceptable. Which is interesting, it’s like a shy utilitarian that cares about virtue and deontological ethics but acknowledges at some point things can get so bad it’s no longer moral.
Kant is an important philosopher for me, because after playing MMOs a fair bit and trying to read the Critique of Pure Reason with a limited understanding of philosophy was the closest thing in real life I've ever had to being ganked. Good thing death of vanity in this world leaves us with more experience points, and not less. 😏
for things like promises ect yeah sure it’s a good argument :), but for example being home from work because you feel sick, or quitting your job because you feel it doesn’t suit you would under the same treatment lead to absurd conclusions. if everyone quit their job right now then the economy would collapse, and if everyone was sick at home simultaneously as well the same thing would happen. it depends on how you approach the proposal ofc, for example an there isn’t a problem with being home from work if everyone just did it sometimes, and i’m not sure all of these things are moral questions alone either. take for example a revolution in a country with really oppressive government, in such cases its really not wether it can be universal at all but rather a much more involved consequentialist mess to figure out if its worth trying to overthrow the government, you could say stuff like “if everyone always could complied with authority, then society would spiral into misery eventually”, but i feel like in this case such an argument only tells you not to blindly obey, not really wether you should join the freedom fighters. so you can apply it broadly in certain situations, and i think it works quite well fir many things, but in some situations its so hard to define the context and criteria of universality that it becomes mostly useless. for example if you are considering killing hitler in 1933 Germany, doesn’t seem ti me that the criteria for universality can really exist in such a case, there are geopolitical consequences, maybe reprisals, you have no idea what it will lead to politically in Germany ect, or in what way killing hitler is different or the same as killing some other dictator in some other nation. at least in my mind such actions can be said to always be good or always be bad at all, which kind of limits how a universal argument can apply, certain situations are spesific to themselves, infact all of them are, and in some cases it might be better to make an exception, but how we know when is a much more difficult question to answer, especially because an individual os very limited in the ability to foresee consequences. 👍🏻
Suppose: 1- smith is a masochist and sadist. 2- smith says; be masochist and sadist,and exercise masochism and sadism. Now, is that moral ( what smith says) ? It seems also that if we apply kant's reasoning to chess playing (breaking chess rules will make chess impossible ),then chess will become a perfect duty. But chess being a perfect duty is a little bit odd.
I've been watching many Jordan Peterson videos recently, and I find the language he uses is very difficult to understand for the layman. Your videos help provide context to many of the concepts he talks about in a very easy to understand way. I appreciate these videos a lot as they are helping me redefine my view/opinion on the world.
Why not distinguish between Contradiction in Conception and Contradiction in Will for the moral test? I feel like it would make it clearer. Nevertheless, loved the video, just curious about the decision.
But wouldn’t the categorical imperative technically also stand outside of very maximy maxims? “Should I steal the apple? Well I’m a really hungry 8 year old Kant fanatic. I see that if everyone stole we would be worse off, however I see my circumstances and conclude that it is probably reasonable to let hungry
An excellent point, which is why I cannot get behind Kantian deontology. Every category is arbitrary (not to mention self-defeating) and every maxim can be fit into a million categories. The utilitarians took the opposite route and said the best action is whichever one leads to the best consequences (isolated from every other decision). This also has problems because every choice you make is dependent on past choices, the choices of others, some degree of randomness (or uncertainty if you rather), and also affects every other choice you make afterwards. Virtue ethics focuses on a person’s character, which is probably the one I can get behind most readily, since character is composed of habits which is composed of actions so its kind of taking into account the totality of your life instead of scrutinizing your every action. But overall I would say Im more of a Nietzschean because I think moral interpretations only make sense in relation to your values, and thus is highly historically and culturally relative. I also agree with Nietzsche that every part of your life is so complexly interrelated with the rest of existence that to deny any part of what we deem as “evil” seems silly in the light of all that is good.
I used them interchangeably. Some people distinguish them, but there's no consensus about that. The most useful version of a distinction that I've seen is to treat morality as the public part of ethics-the part expressed in principles, used for evaluation, criticism, and justification-while ethics also includes the ways we go about reaching decisions, many of which aren't articulated in words.
On the example of the thief: I think you can make a case here that a thief does not make a special case for himself. let's take a marxist thief, who believes the rich should give a part of their money to the poor, when he is poor, he might steal money from the rich, however, if he was rich , he would have been willing to let others steal away from him, for money. In that case, the maxism isn't. "You are allowed to steal from humans." but, "The poor is allowed to steal from the rich." Which is law that is true for all, but relevant only to a few. That is, nuance
This is one of the fundamental problems of ideology. Glad you mentioned this, it gets right to the heart of why Marxism is fundamentally flawed. What I like about how you posed the question is that you have allowed that taking on behalf of one certain population through force by the state is at least akin to theivery. But it could be ethical? Well in order to make stealing on behalf of the poor obey the categorical imperative you would have to allow everyone to steal from anyone because the imperative demands your law is extended universally. He pretty much covers this halfway through the video. You would have to make several more claims towards imperatives to claim that being "poor" is somehow fundamentally unique in a way that demands theft from another fundamentally unique category-"wealthy". This problem crops up in any liberal or remotely free society the moment the question of ANY wealth redistribution is implemented. We see forms of this problem manifested in tax bracketing, in social security payments, in all forms of welfare. What INEVITABLY occurs is that the state must define then choose a "lower class" on whose behalf it has the moral authority to steal from the necessarily defined "upper class". Immediately, this generates all kinds of problems for the well-meaning Marxist, but quickly becomes the boon of authoritarianism. Why? because Marxism is a Hegelian utopian vision that is, at its heart, split down the middle-one side being naive and the other devious. I say that because, by alchemizing the first little bit of Marxism into actual policy creates, automatically, at least two separate classes in order to, by wealth distribution, hopefully synthesize a more equal spectrum of wealth. Why is it a problem? Because the goal of Marxism is to reach a classless society, and by instituting any welfare policy while retaining some ethical or moral authority, you MUST DIVIDE THE POPULATION INTO SEPARATE CLASSES. So if you're a Marxist who actually naively believes it's possible to reach a fair classless society, you've just cemented into the structure of that society a lower and upper class-all in order to "steal" on behalf of the other. Now, it creates problems for EVERYONE in a different way: because society has now accepted that stealing from one class to give to another and the right of the state to steal from one class by force is a sort of categorical imperative, this imperative will be universalized, and the state can simply began oppressing certain classes or populations with impunity as long as the state defines that class as oppressors of another class. It doesn't take a lot of brains to see how this is an absolute wet dream for authoritarian regimes. When confronted with the problems of developing institutional Marxism without entrenching the very inequality it pretends to solve, regimes have often, historically speaking, just skipped the whole process of developing their society democratically and fairly while keeping basic universal rights and gone straight to a "classless" (in the most hollow sense of the word) totalitarianism, which absolves them of ethical or moral standards.
This is a huge problem I have with this Kantian ethics, it acts as if you can lump every maxim into a box with every maxim similar to it, when the specific circumstances of an action make it totally unique from every other action. And if you dont want to distinguish between “taking from the rich” and “stealing,” it seems like you could just as easily put “taking without someone’s permission” and “taking with someone’s permission” in the same box. You could go a step further and lump “taking” in the same category as every other action (since words are just sometimes-useful-categories not anything inherent to nature) and now we have no meaningful way to distinguish between actions. Of course, if you treat every choice of action as a unique choice with unique circumstances, you end up with act-utilitarianism, which has its own issues and inconsistencies. But it seems to me that kantianism is very much logically inconsistent.
@@efleishermedia I agree with most of the points you say here, except for your claim that Marxism is inherently unethical. I think rather the case of Marxism helps to illustrate a flaw in deontology as I pointed out in my other comment on this thread.
@@bret6484 I don't mean to say it's inherently unethical-my point is that it's inherently flawed and cannot be ethically implemented. As a theoretical model I think it has many fair conclusions.
I've been stealing beer from convenience stores because IRS still hasn't sent me any stimulus. If they can't stick to the UNIVERSAL LAW.... why would I?
I don't recommend stealing. But you're pointing out an important feature of laws and policies that tends to reinforce Kant's point. Making an exception for yourself or some group you favor is a paradigm of immorality, Kant says. And when people see those in authority doing it, they interpret it that way, lose trust in those authorities, and no longer feel any ethical obligation to follow those rules. Governors, mayors, and others who have made rules for their populations and then violated those rules themselves have undermined the very policies they enacted. We seem to be moving away from the rule of law; increasingly, there seem to be two sets of rules, one for those in power and one for everyone else. That undermines respect for those in power as well as the rules they expect the rest of us to follow.
hehehe. a Lawyer once told me that THE SAME RULES DONT APPLY to EVERYONE. i didn't really agree with that in the case we were discussing.... but I suppose sometimes this can be reasonable. Cops running red lights for an Emergency I guess. There should be a good reason for exceptions.
@@ddyatlov I do believe there are legal exceptions for officers in situations like this to avoid lawsuits. I don’t think it’s breaking the law regardless of your moral position, in the same way killing a person isn’t breaking the law under some circumstances, such as self defense in certain states.
Good Will - Good without Qualification Categorical Imperative - An Ought that must be done 2:38 Formula of Universal Law - (Act as if your actions were to become law?) 5:57 Exception to The Maxim 7:06 A MoralTest (If everybody stole, the concept of property would be worn out so Stealing would not exist conceptually) 13:56 Promise to Self, Promise to Others 15:48 Breaking of Promises destroys Promises, then there is no way to make a commitment
'Good' and 'goodwill' are entirely subjectivistic (herein not synonymous with subjective but rather meaning no grounding in physical actuality). This, in turn, makes the conception of 'Universal law' entirely subjectivistic. As an aside, the conclusion of there would be no such thing as property deriving from could (more aptly should) everyone go around stealing from everyone else is a false conclusion.
Another great video. Thank you for presenting such knowledge with such lively energie 🙏🏼
Glad you enjoyed it!
I watch your videos all the time and they are such great presentations of the arguments and background of the philosophers. Thank you.
My understanding of Kant's position is: Would the world be a better place if everyone did as I do? The answer should be yes.
That's what John Stuart Mill said about Kant as well-which is why he thought Kant's ethics collapsed into a form of utilitarianism.
@@PhiloofAlexandria This was a really helpful response. Utiliarianism sounds fair on the basis it is more economical or practical in the current order of human society. I had to stop the video where his formula of universal law broke down for me at the topic of stealing. This is not practical in human society but we steal (universally speaking) from Mother Earth every day. If she is just an extension of ourselves than we are stealing from ourselves everyday. However, for this reason I understand why everything proceeds from his Human Formula especially the Kinddom of Ends. If your going to steal from this planet it should be in the spirit of Goodwill. Never mistake activity for achievement. The problem I always reach in determining what is universal (and this is where the Golden Rule seemingly breaks down) is when you are dealing with a Masochistic person. Any outliying imaginary end.
@@brentwood7660 most people who discussion moral philosophy do it strictly in regards to human on human interaction. This is because to be a moral agent you need, well, agency. You can’t apply morality to a bear, and if you could, you couldn’t teach or enforce that morality on it. The same could be said about all of nature. It steals from us and won’t ever have ethical kantian discussions about how moral it is.
@@PhiloofAlexandria my only critique on it being utilitarian in nature is that it doesn’t attempt to set the greatest amount of utility as the goal. Rather it sets an unspecified lower threshold where utility is so low that it’s unacceptable. Which is interesting, it’s like a shy utilitarian that cares about virtue and deontological ethics but acknowledges at some point things can get so bad it’s no longer moral.
Thank you for the video!
Kant is an important philosopher for me, because after playing MMOs a fair bit and trying to read the Critique of Pure Reason with a limited understanding of philosophy was the closest thing in real life I've ever had to being ganked.
Good thing death of vanity in this world leaves us with more experience points, and not less. 😏
New Subscriber here ✋
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for things like promises ect yeah sure it’s a good argument :), but for example being home from work because you feel sick, or quitting your job because you feel it doesn’t suit you would under the same treatment lead to absurd conclusions. if everyone quit their job right now then the economy would collapse, and if everyone was sick at home simultaneously as well the same thing would happen. it depends on how you approach the proposal ofc, for example an there isn’t a problem with being home from work if everyone just did it sometimes, and i’m not sure all of these things are moral questions alone either. take for example a revolution in a country with really oppressive government, in such cases its really not wether it can be universal at all but rather a much more involved consequentialist mess to figure out if its worth trying to overthrow the government, you could say stuff like “if everyone always could complied with authority, then society would spiral into misery eventually”, but i feel like in this case such an argument only tells you not to blindly obey, not really wether you should join the freedom fighters. so you can apply it broadly in certain situations, and i think it works quite well fir many things, but in some situations its so hard to define the context and criteria of universality that it becomes mostly useless. for example if you are considering killing hitler in 1933 Germany, doesn’t seem ti me that the criteria for universality can really exist in such a case, there are geopolitical consequences, maybe reprisals, you have no idea what it will lead to politically in Germany ect, or in what way killing hitler is different or the same as killing some other dictator in some other nation. at least in my mind such actions can be said to always be good or always be bad at all, which kind of limits how a universal argument can apply, certain situations are spesific to themselves, infact all of them are, and in some cases it might be better to make an exception, but how we know when is a much more difficult question to answer, especially because an individual os very limited in the ability to foresee consequences. 👍🏻
8:15 this is specifically addressed. He isn't specifically saying that everyone should do it, or will do it; just that people are ALLOWED to do it.
Suppose:
1- smith is a masochist and sadist.
2- smith says; be masochist and sadist,and exercise masochism and sadism.
Now, is that moral ( what smith says) ?
It seems also that if we apply kant's reasoning to chess playing (breaking chess rules will make chess impossible ),then chess will become a perfect duty.
But chess being a perfect duty is a little bit odd.
I've been watching many Jordan Peterson videos recently, and I find the language he uses is very difficult to understand for the layman.
Your videos help provide context to many of the concepts he talks about in a very easy to understand way.
I appreciate these videos a lot as they are helping me redefine my view/opinion on the world.
Why not distinguish between Contradiction in Conception and Contradiction in Will for the moral test? I feel like it would make it clearer.
Nevertheless, loved the video, just curious about the decision.
But wouldn’t the categorical imperative technically also stand outside of very maximy maxims?
“Should I steal the apple? Well I’m a really hungry 8 year old Kant fanatic. I see that if everyone stole we would be worse off, however I see my circumstances and conclude that it is probably reasonable to let hungry
yeah the problem is that there are several ways to frame the issue.
An excellent point, which is why I cannot get behind Kantian deontology. Every category is arbitrary (not to mention self-defeating) and every maxim can be fit into a million categories. The utilitarians took the opposite route and said the best action is whichever one leads to the best consequences (isolated from every other decision). This also has problems because every choice you make is dependent on past choices, the choices of others, some degree of randomness (or uncertainty if you rather), and also affects every other choice you make afterwards. Virtue ethics focuses on a person’s character, which is probably the one I can get behind most readily, since character is composed of habits which is composed of actions so its kind of taking into account the totality of your life instead of scrutinizing your every action. But overall I would say Im more of a Nietzschean because I think moral interpretations only make sense in relation to your values, and thus is highly historically and culturally relative. I also agree with Nietzsche that every part of your life is so complexly interrelated with the rest of existence that to deny any part of what we deem as “evil” seems silly in the light of all that is good.
what's the difference between moral and ethic professor?
I used them interchangeably. Some people distinguish them, but there's no consensus about that. The most useful version of a distinction that I've seen is to treat morality as the public part of ethics-the part expressed in principles, used for evaluation, criticism, and justification-while ethics also includes the ways we go about reaching decisions, many of which aren't articulated in words.
@@PhiloofAlexandria nice
Thanks 👍
On the example of the thief: I think you can make a case here that a thief does not make a special case for himself.
let's take a marxist thief, who believes the rich should give a part of their money to the poor, when he is poor, he might steal money from the rich, however, if he was rich , he would have been willing to let others steal away from him, for money.
In that case, the maxism isn't. "You are allowed to steal from humans." but, "The poor is allowed to steal from the rich." Which is law that is true for all, but relevant only to a few.
That is, nuance
This is one of the fundamental problems of ideology. Glad you mentioned this, it gets right to the heart of why Marxism is fundamentally flawed.
What I like about how you posed the question is that you have allowed that taking on behalf of one certain population through force by the state is at least akin to theivery.
But it could be ethical?
Well in order to make stealing on behalf of the poor obey the categorical imperative you would have to allow everyone to steal from anyone because the imperative demands your law is extended universally.
He pretty much covers this halfway through the video.
You would have to make several more claims towards imperatives to claim that being "poor" is somehow fundamentally unique in a way that demands theft from another fundamentally unique category-"wealthy".
This problem crops up in any liberal or remotely free society the moment the question of ANY wealth redistribution is implemented.
We see forms of this problem manifested in tax bracketing, in social security payments, in all forms of welfare.
What INEVITABLY occurs is that the state must define then choose a "lower class" on whose behalf it has the moral authority to steal from the necessarily defined "upper class".
Immediately, this generates all kinds of problems for the well-meaning Marxist, but quickly becomes the boon of authoritarianism. Why? because Marxism is a Hegelian utopian vision that is, at its heart, split down the middle-one side being naive and the other devious.
I say that because, by alchemizing the first little bit of Marxism into actual policy creates, automatically, at least two separate classes in order to, by wealth distribution, hopefully synthesize a more equal spectrum of wealth. Why is it a problem? Because the goal of Marxism is to reach a classless society, and by instituting any welfare policy while retaining some ethical or moral authority, you MUST DIVIDE THE POPULATION INTO SEPARATE CLASSES. So if you're a Marxist who actually naively believes it's possible to reach a fair classless society, you've just cemented into the structure of that society a lower and upper class-all in order to "steal" on behalf of the other.
Now, it creates problems for EVERYONE in a different way: because society has now accepted that stealing from one class to give to another and the right of the state to steal from one class by force is a sort of categorical imperative, this imperative will be universalized, and the state can simply began oppressing certain classes or populations with impunity as long as the state defines that class as oppressors of another class.
It doesn't take a lot of brains to see how this is an absolute wet dream for authoritarian regimes.
When confronted with the problems of developing institutional Marxism without entrenching the very inequality it pretends to solve, regimes have often, historically speaking, just skipped the whole process of developing their society democratically and fairly while keeping basic universal rights and gone straight to a "classless" (in the most hollow sense of the word) totalitarianism, which absolves them of ethical or moral standards.
This is a huge problem I have with this Kantian ethics, it acts as if you can lump every maxim into a box with every maxim similar to it, when the specific circumstances of an action make it totally unique from every other action. And if you dont want to distinguish between “taking from the rich” and “stealing,” it seems like you could just as easily put “taking without someone’s permission” and “taking with someone’s permission” in the same box. You could go a step further and lump “taking” in the same category as every other action (since words are just sometimes-useful-categories not anything inherent to nature) and now we have no meaningful way to distinguish between actions. Of course, if you treat every choice of action as a unique choice with unique circumstances, you end up with act-utilitarianism, which has its own issues and inconsistencies. But it seems to me that kantianism is very much logically inconsistent.
@@efleishermedia I agree with most of the points you say here, except for your claim that Marxism is inherently unethical. I think rather the case of Marxism helps to illustrate a flaw in deontology as I pointed out in my other comment on this thread.
@@bret6484 I don't mean to say it's inherently unethical-my point is that it's inherently flawed and cannot be ethically implemented. As a theoretical model I think it has many fair conclusions.
I've been stealing beer from convenience stores because IRS still hasn't sent me any stimulus. If they can't stick to the UNIVERSAL LAW.... why would I?
I don't recommend stealing. But you're pointing out an important feature of laws and policies that tends to reinforce Kant's point. Making an exception for yourself or some group you favor is a paradigm of immorality, Kant says. And when people see those in authority doing it, they interpret it that way, lose trust in those authorities, and no longer feel any ethical obligation to follow those rules. Governors, mayors, and others who have made rules for their populations and then violated those rules themselves have undermined the very policies they enacted. We seem to be moving away from the rule of law; increasingly, there seem to be two sets of rules, one for those in power and one for everyone else. That undermines respect for those in power as well as the rules they expect the rest of us to follow.
hehehe. a Lawyer once told me that THE SAME RULES DONT APPLY to EVERYONE. i didn't really agree with that in the case we were discussing.... but I suppose sometimes this can be reasonable. Cops running red lights for an Emergency I guess. There should be a good reason for exceptions.
@@ddyatlov I do believe there are legal exceptions for officers in situations like this to avoid lawsuits. I don’t think it’s breaking the law regardless of your moral position, in the same way killing a person isn’t breaking the law under some circumstances, such as self defense in certain states.
Good Will - Good without Qualification
Categorical Imperative - An Ought that must be done
2:38 Formula of Universal Law - (Act as if your actions were to become law?)
5:57 Exception to The Maxim
7:06 A MoralTest
(If everybody stole, the concept of property would be worn out so Stealing would not exist conceptually)
13:56 Promise to Self, Promise to Others
15:48 Breaking of Promises destroys Promises, then there is no way to make a commitment
'Good' and 'goodwill' are entirely subjectivistic (herein not synonymous with subjective but rather meaning no grounding in physical actuality). This, in turn, makes the conception of 'Universal law' entirely subjectivistic. As an aside, the conclusion of there would be no such thing as property deriving from could (more aptly should) everyone go around stealing from everyone else is a false conclusion.