Metsfanmax wrote:MeDeFe wrote:Alright, I expressed myself unclearly there. Allow me to reformulate.
In his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Kant (among a lot of other things) develops a system of virtue ethics, in which the categorical imperative is the central concept.
In all there are nine different ways in which Kant expressed the categorical imperative. The following are rough translations of two others of them by me.
"Act such, that you always treat humanity, both in your own person as well as in the person of everyone else, as an end and never as a mere means."
"For reasonable beings are all subject to the law, that each should never treat themself and all others merely as means, but always also as ends of themselves."
That goes way beyond weighing consequences and is in direct opposition to utilitarian theories. They are also expressions of exactly the same idea as is expressed in "act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."
Those formulations, at least in the way you seem to be interpreting them, are very clearly
not equivalent to the formulation I proposed.
They are equivalent. If you claim any differently you only prove that you haven't even begun to understand Kant's system of ethics.
Metsfanmax wrote:Consider the scenario where you have diverging train tracks, and one path has a person tied down, and the other path has two people tied down. The switch is currently set so that the two people would be killed by the oncoming train. What would Kant propose that we do in this scenario? The only possible answers are: 1) flip the switch and save the greater number of people, or 2) do nothing, because we are not responsible for deaths that we did not cause. If you treat your formulations as applying at the individual level, so that it is wrong to treat the single person as a "means" to saving the two, then you are left with a clearly unpalatable distinction between acts and omissions. You could have been responsible for saving a greater number of lives, but you didn't because you were afraid to treat the one person as a "means to an end." That absolution of responsibility can never be justified in a serious pragmatic ethical theory, and it shows why your interpretation of his statement fails -- it offers us no real solutions to the actually hard problems that affect real lives.
Flipping the switch would cause a person to die. That is a clear violation of the categorical imperative. Therefore, we do not flip the switch.
That has nothing to do with being "afraid to treat one person as a 'means to an end'". It has everything to do with understanding just how absolute the categorical imperative is.
Metsfanmax wrote:A more reasonable interpretation of his formulations is to say that he is advocating equal consideration of interests: when making an ethical judgment, you have to consider the preferences of all individuals involved, instead of ignoring the preferences of some minority in favor of a majority. If we treat it this way, we still have a clear and easy choice in the train scenario, because we weight equally the preferences of all involved and find that since all three of them probably have similar desires to continue living, we should save the two instead of the one. One should read Kant as expressing the idea that you should never commit an act against a person without first considering how this will affect that person's preferences/desires/happiness. Reading it as an ethical dictum to never weigh human interests makes you ethically paralyzed.
Sorry, but you're interpreting Kant incorrectly. His system of ethics is all about universal rules that are to be followed absolutely because we have, by pure reasoning, determined that they are good.
Metsfanmax wrote:MeDeFe wrote:What do you mean by "even a utilitarian"? Their problem is that there is more than one way of determining what is good, and that their theory can work perfectly well without any "objective sense of what it means to be good". That leads to some interesting consequences (getting drunk can be more ethical than reading a philosophical essay, torturing one person can be ethical if it makes many others happy. That's also why I found your
previous assertion that "consequentialism is the form of ethics that makes the least number of arbitrary assumptions about the way things should work" somewhat amusing. The only way for consequentialists (like utilitarianists) to get rid of the unpalatable consequences of their premises is to introduce criteria that can only be described as "arbitrary". Of course, the criteria can be argued for and good reasons can be listed for why they should be included, but in doing so you move away from the simple theory you said it was and get swamped in exceptions to the rule.
You find it problematic that people have different interpretations of what is "good;" I do not, because a shallow utilitarian "maximize the good" standard is not what I advocate. I am advocating something more in line with preference utilitarianism or act utilitarianism. This can still give reasonable answers (yes, torturing a person can be ethical if it would save many lives) without even responding to things outside the ethical sphere (like whether it is better to get drunk than read an essay). Perhaps you are struck by the many consequentialists who shy away from the "unpalatable" consequences of their broad stances. I do not. It can be "right" to do harm to one to save the lives of many, and it is very definitely "wrong" to kill a person without some good being achieved that is at least equivalent to the death of that person (which is very serious). The fact that some people might wrongly take from this that they could torture someone in front of a cheering crowd does not change the justification of the theory, it just makes those people stupid. The principle of equal consideration of interests must surely be weighted by the seriousness of those interests if we are to get meaningful results; but when we do this, we find that it is easy to show why you cannot torture someone just to get temporary happiness for a crowd.
It's good to see you're abandoning the pretension that a consequentalist system of ethics makes the least number of arbitrary assumptions about the way things should work.
Now you just need to stop misinterpreting Kant and trying to use the categorical imperative for something it cannot be used for. I've been trying to show you that it is impossible to use Kant to argue for a consequentialist system of ethics, if you don't believe me, please go and read (or re-read) his Critiques, especially the one on pure reason, and maybe a few commentary works as well.
