http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/opinion/sunday/the-data-against-kant.html
>>7717842
>It would be absurd to suggest that we should do what we couldn't possibly do
This would explain why everyone in my Ethics class likes to fold their arms behind their head and smugly deny all moral responsibility by saying 'no I'm too busy to spare the time' not as a joke, but as a serious argument against altruism
>someone will think I'm making this up
I WISH
>>7717886
>"The Data Against Kant"
>tell us why your article is relevant to literature
>>7717842
Another old, dead, white male humiliated and dethroned! Cast down the old idols! SMASH THEM TO PIECES!
>>7717894
>i didn't read the article
You're not even close, fuck off
are they just namedropping kant for people who haven't read him but wish they did, while trying to argue against hume? because that's some hilarious injoke if they're not analytics doing this to troll continentals. if they are analytics, who can really fault them, they didn't get the good autism schopenhauer got to critique kant on numbers. most likely and saddest is they did this because they're idiots and didn't realise hookers were more fun and productive, even if everyone else had fucked them too.
>>7717894
Why do you have to be like this? The history of philosophy has hinged entirely on the fact that each subsequent generation of philosophers remains harshly critical of the assertions put forth by the previous. Disagreeing with Kant has nothing to do with social justice and people have been doing it for 200 fucking years now.
>>7717930
Not really, it's an article about voluntary ethics which is a field that Kant has had an immense influence in.
It's definitely, at best, tangentially related to Kant, but related to Kant nonetheless.
>>7717894
People still use over-shoulder cameras? Jesus, it's sixteen years in the second millennium of christ's reign
>>7717953
no, they're arguing about Kant as though they haven't read him on voluntary ethics at all. the most charitable reading is that they're doing it for lulz, the more obvious reading is that they can't tell the difference between kant and hume who were rivals, and whose rivalry has a bigger impact on not just ethics but rationalism and empiricism than they comprehend. they either have a massive knowledge gap on the philosophy in question, to the point of being idiots, or they're doing this as a joke.
>>7717969
>dismissing them with "for the lulz"
>implying Kant and Hume were rivals
>implying the article even mentions Hume
>implying the article isn't passable, if barely related to Kant through voluntary ethics
>implying you aren't a pseud who's projecting his own ignorance of Kant
If you're going to get upset at least make sure you've read Kant, the article in question and maybe a couple of editions of "Reading Comprehension for Naturals"
>>7717986
you know damn well the is/ought problem is Hume and that Kant's arguments against the ZOMG WHY WOULD YOU NOT LIE TO MURDERERS if you know shit all about this subject, so kindly step the fuck off
>>7717842
Their "data" are just the results of a vote they took?
>>7718004
they were trying to include the empirical XD
>>7717995
T. Bluttflustered Anon
>>7718012
>he hasn't even read schopenhauer
points here are for how much it sounds like you read the book to someone who read the book, not how often you use /sp/ level banter.
>>7717880
The question is: what can you say to get these smug assholes to help others. If there was a real argument FOR altruism, anyone able to understand it would be an altruist. And I don't believe this world is ruled by people who are too stupid or have never heard a single good argument for altruism. Are your classmates faggots for not being able to properly attack your agruments instead of being lazy fuckers? Yes. Can you give any decent argument to tell them off in a sense that will convince them of their wrongness? Well, no, you can't.
>on one point there has been virtual unanimity: It would be absurd to suggest that we should do what we couldn't possibly do.
Fucking dropped. The denial of the impossible is the denial of the ethical.
>>7718015
>Points here are for how much it sounds like you read the article to someone who read the article, not /sp/ level banter
FTFY
>>7717967
>second millennium
>>7718047
>being this butthurt someone knows you haven't read Kant
if you actually go read him, and i mean all of him, you have enough autistic rage to become the next Schoppy, kid.
>>7717967
Yeah bruv, I've already moved on to movable print. I mean come on, it IS the second millennium!
>>7718024
>And I don't believe this world is ruled by people who are too stupid
Well so you know, I actually do believe it's ruled 99% by a mix of stupid people and actual sociopaths
>>7717995
Hume's is/ought is, as is made obvious by a competent thinker upon the slightest reflection, meant to be coupled with the numerous other binaries formed on the "relation of ideas"/"matters of fact" polemic
necessary vs contingent
a priori vs a posteriori
analytic vs synthetic
etc.
in order to cement his empirical scepticism with regards to epistemology and challenge contingent fields of study as well as those with no basis in empirical reality.
This was what "stirred [Kant] from [his] dogmatic slumber" and it wasn't until he proposed his Copernican shift and recognized the necessary dialectic between the polemics illustrated by Hume that the whole Is/Ought distinction was manifest in the form found in the article with the beginnings of Kantian ethics.
If you're going to be a holier-than-though asshole on the internet at least be an informed holier-than-though asshole.
>>7718061
>being this butthurt that someone knows you haven't read the article
FTFY
Return to Aristotle, western man.
>>7718084
So you know that Kant argued that your response should be the same whether they punctured the gas tank driving you to the airport or not? Good, I'm glad you agree the article knows shit all about Kant, and instead tries to argue Hume's position. It's wonderful that you were trying to arrogant about without proving how you were wrong, but thank you for showing your poor workings, nothing like a fruitful error.
>>7717880
The truth about humanity is that they won't care as individuals until it's them who has to live with the consequences, and by that point it will have already been too late.
>But with stories in which the inability to help was accidental, the obligation all but disappeared. Now, only 31 percent of our participants said your friend still ought to drive you.
Tells me all I need to know about their participants.
>>7718094
They're reporting findings, not making an argument
Which you would know if you read the article with a first grade level of reading comprehension
You seem to be convinced that there is a hard and fast distinction between Hume and Kant that is made explicit in an article that is related to ol' Dave only through his influence on Kantian ethics.
You're critiquing Hamlet through the lens of The Lion King and it would almost be funny if it wasn't so obvious you were a raging pseud.
>>7718075
>>7718075
You don't get to rule the world by being stupid. Of course, the ones who rule know how to use the stupidity of the majority, but that has nothing to do with what we're talking about. Being a sociopath means you have your problems with empathy and this kind of shit, but it still doesn't impair your reason. You just kind of admited there's no rational argument for altruism, and if this is a matter of emotions then your classmates are rationally justified to be as smug as they want when telling you they don't give a fuck about altruism. If it ends up being a matter of being able to feel empathy then there's no real reason other than "muh feelings" to defend altruism, "you are a sociopath!!1!" doesn't count as an actual argument.
>>7718117
Kant got loads of responses saying "This is not how it works in real life" when he posited the idea you don't lie to save your family from murderers, because how his voluntary ethics work is that it doesn't matter the other's intention. His responses to it are famous for doubling down on "the world is not as it appears" not for saying "welp, I guess empirical science doesn't deserve criticism". Trying to argue that it matters the other person's intention to your ethical stance is a problem for Hume. Kant can't be proven wrong by people getting the answer wrong in real life because his entire point was that voluntary ethics aren't meant to be a reflection of the empirical "real" world or effected by circumstance, because the empirical real not being as real as it seemed would be just as likely to get your family killed because you lied about where they were in an attempt to hide them and led the murderers to them. Please tell me someone's flunked you for this idiocy, and didn't give you an NYT opinion space for it.
>>7718141
Try again, but this time in English with an actual point
>>7718149
Go read the Kantian Ethics 101 reading concerning lying to murderers, educate yourself on the massive part of Kantian ethics you are missing. Unfortunately for you, a lot of it is originally in German, but, I won't ask for miracles. It caused quite a sensation back then and if you were at all interested in the subject instead of world salad, you'd know about it already.
>>7718159
>world salad
i like the implications of this. stet.
>>7717842
>Would it make any sense to tell your friend, stranded at the side of the road, that she ought to drive you to the airport? The answer seems to be an obvious no (after all, she can’t drive you), and most philosophers treat this as all the confirmation they need for the principle.
No problem so far.
>Suppose, however, that the situation is slightly different. What if your friend intentionally punctures her own gas tank to make sure that you miss the flight and she gets the job? In this case, it makes perfect sense to insist that your friend still has an obligation to drive you to the airport. In other words, we might indeed say that someone ought to do what she can’t — if we’re blaming her.
Right, she is blameworthy because she *could have* ("can") been true to her obligation, but instead chose to betray her promise for her individualized, unshared goal, probably happiness. Still no problem.
Though if we agree that she still "ought" to remain true to her promise and help get a new means of transportation for her friend, then I think we can also agree that in the first instance of an innocent car breakdown, the woman also ought to help find a new means of transportation for both her and her friend. (Though ideally this would be explicitly part of the initial promise between the two.)
But later the article gives us:
> Even when we say that someone has no obligation to keep a promise (as with your friend whose car accidentally breaks down), it seems we’re saying it not because she’s unable to do it, but because we don’t want to unfairly blame her for not keeping it. Again, concerns about blame, not about ability, dictate how we understand obligation.
>but because we don’t want to unfairly blame her for not keeping it.
Yet being "fair" means including what a person *could have* done in a situation - it involves the concept of "can," - the defenders of the "ought implies can" principle can say. People think about what options were possible for a person, what avenues of possible actions were open for the person to choose from, when we judge whether that person has acted immorally, choosing a blameworthy course of behavior.
I haven't read the thread yet, but it seems to me that the article hasn't done anything to refute the principle that the foundation of human ethical reasoning is the principle that "ought implies can."
>>7718141
Not that fag, but I'm pretty sure Kant responded to the "lying to murderers" problem later in life and he gave some kind of (poor) solution to the problem that didn't imply throwing his ethics altogether to the trash.
>>7718128
Sorry you latched onto a throwaway shittily constructed blogpost but if you care to discuss it you need more context as to why I was mad at these morons.
See, I wouldn't care if they said 'Altruism is a spook, my property.' But they said 'oh no altruism is very important to me and an objective good, but I don't have to DO anything because it's the thought that counts'
It's them trying to justify their selfish inaction as virtuous altruism, denying that sins of omission exist. Basically a bunch of slacktivists who want to redefine 'doing fuck all' as 'altruism,' not an actual argument at all.
They are arguing against altruism, but they've fucked themselves into thinking they support it. Hence my foul tempered blogposting.
>>7718177
my point is they haven't read Kant. like so obviously, if it's a joke, it's a fantastic joke which will have everyone who read Kant and the article think
>heh, kantians pretending to be as dumb as hume and dumber than frege who was wrong too anyway
if it's not done as a joke, they've mistaken kant for a different ethical realist. it's the equivalent of thinking IJ's the book where he rapes his sister phoebe.
kantian metaphysics >>>>> a literal turd >> kantian ethics
>>7718208
Oh, well. Yeah, they're just faggots and there's no need to discuss anything else about their intellectual stance.
>>7717986
>>implying the article even mentions Hume
he specifically points out that they don't dweeb
>>7718237
As facetious as this is it rings of truth.
You could really tell that Kant was doing what he loved in his metaphysics, I've never felt anything quite like those first few "eureka" moments in reading the Critique.
>>7717842
>Let's do an empirical test on a rational problem
Ayy
L M A O
M
A
O
>>7717880
They're helping you feel superior bud.
the new york times is such a corrupt piece of shit, they probably only published that because some zionist dnc operative calculated that it would help the clinton campaign and discredit sanders somehow...ny times is fucking trash, i'm switching to wsj, i don't care if rupert murdoch owns it, if i'm going to have to read wall street propaganda let me get it straight without a layer of phony liberal bullshit on top
Sad to see the NY times isn't above using clickbait
>>7718177
> so little sense in so many words
Not totally - what this anon says at >>7717969 and >>7718141 is pretty solid. Not sure how much of Kant this anon has read, but the above posts point out a real vagueness (maybe arising from ignorance) in the article's treatment of Kant's system of moral evaluations.
kant knows your friend is a lying bitch who stole your job in both cases
Check 'em
>>7718004
I think they are arguing for conventional relativism, saying that because a bunch of normies say so it must be true.
I think that it sets itself up for a pro-government ideal argumentative basis, meaning that they'll reference this argument for popular relativism then interview a bunch of people about whether they thought that we "ought" to go and liberate the Iraqis because we could. In essence this article can be used to justify any action of the US as moral and probably will be because the mass media is just an extension of the US propaganda machine.
>>7717842
Worthless article.
>>7717932
>Disagreeing with Kant has nothing to do with social justice and people have been doing it for 200 fucking years now.
Do not forget
>>7718799
I think America's flown past relativism into pure virtue ethics at this point. It's a slightly more lazy and secular version of the Calvinist elect.
>>7718799
>they'll reference this argument for popular relativism then interview a bunch of people about whether they thought that we "ought" to go and liberate the Iraqis because we could.
But the article didn't say anything in support of the principle "can implies ought," did it?
>>7717842
>interviewing people is considered collecting data
i want quantitative psychology to end
>>7717842
>At the very least, philosophers can no longer treat this principle as obviously true.
on the other hand, it could imply that the people interviewed and these so-called scientists are uneducated about how philosophy works? i'm not really sure by what methodology the "belief" of a majority of people has any impingement upon a metaphysical, let alone any philosophical argument.
>>7717986
>implying Kant and Hume were rivals
When it come to the question of whether moral feelings and judgments have a rational basis, they were largely opposed, no?
>>7717842
This is just an opinion poll.
