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Michael Schur

How to Be Perfect

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  • Ro Delgadillo Martinezhas quotedlast year
    This may all seem like semantics—or worse, a loophole—but since intentions are all that matter to Kant, if we pull this off we can maybe eat our cake (saving more lives) and have it too (not disappointing Immanuel Kant
  • Ro Delgadillo Martinezhas quotedlast year
    We can reasonably argue that we would have pulled that lever if no one were on the other track, so if the result of following our maxim is “one guy gets smooshed,” well, that sucks, but it was not our intention.
    Philippa Foot was actually addressing this exact point in her original paper—it has to do with the doctrine of double effect, a philosophical idea that goes all the way back to Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century
  • Ro Delgadillo Martinezhas quotedlast year
    practical imperative. It adds a rule to Kant’s philosophy that isn’t nearly as difficult to follow:
    Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.
    In other words: don’t use people to get what you want
  • Ro Delgadillo Martinezhas quotedlast year
    Friedrich Nietzsche, who found Kant overly moralistic and schoolmarmish:
    Some moralists want to vent their power and creative whims on humanity; some others, perhaps including Kant, suggest with their morality: “What deserves respect in me is that I can obey—and you ought not to be different from me.”
    Or, to paraphrase, “Ugh. Get over yourself, Kant
  • Ro Delgadillo Martinezhas quotedlast year
    Sometimes, behaving ethically can be a “trust your gut” type of exercise, and Kant is here to tell us our guts are stupid and we shouldn’t listen to them. This is a frequent criticism of Kantian theory: trying to obey it is a purely intellectual exercise, and it’s really goddamn hard
  • Ro Delgadillo Martinezhas quotedlast year
    So, if Kant had written a fun little poem to explain his philosophy, like Bentham did, it would look like this:
    Act only out of duty to follow a universal maxim
    Derive these maxims using your pure reason
    Happiness is irrelevant
    End of poem
    Not quite as catchy.
  • Ro Delgadillo Martinezhas quotedlast year
    Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law
  • Ro Delgadillo Martinezhas quotedlast year
    Following the right rules = acting morally. Not following them = failing to act morally. End of story. No leeway, no loopholes, no excuses
  • Ro Delgadillo Martinezhas quotedlast year
    believed that we should discern rules for moral behavior using only our ability for pure reasoning, and then act out of an unflinching duty to follow those rules. Some situation presents itself, we tease out the specific “maxim” we have to follow, we follow it, and we’re done
  • Ro Delgadillo Martinezhas quotedlast year
    Deontology is the study of duties or obligations
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