Ethics Question: Categoricalness

[Surlethe]

I believe this is a principle known as the Kantian Categorical Imperative: if an action, when performed by everybody, leads to a poor result society-wide, that action should be considered immoral by any person. For example, there is an ethical imperative to vote because if nobody voted, democracies would collapse.

I used this recently in the seventeen kids thread to point out that if everybody had seventeen kids, then society would be screwed; so it follows that nobody should have that many kids. But does it really follow? Applying the same imperative to exclusively gay sex, it seems that having sex only with the same gender is also unethical because if everybody did so, no children would be born.

This last result seems absurd, so I wonder if there is some sort of rule about preference: it is not the case that a majority of people (enough to be harmful to society as a whole) would prefer to have gay sex, and so there is no need to apply the categorical imperative; by the same token, a majority of people would prefer not to go to the trouble of voting, and so the application of Kant's principle there leads to the expected and desired result. But if this is the case, then is it possible to apply the argument to the family with seventeen kids, since only a very small percentage of the US population wants a family that large?

What are your thoughts on this whole line of argument? Your comments?

[Rye]

Well, I don't think it means "if everyone did this" instead of the natural amount of variation in the world, but if everyone in your position did the same thing, would it be good or bad? Could you judge someone harshly for having gay sex in a society such as yours? Probably not, no, it's not giong to have any serious impact on the birth economy.

As with most ethical issues, these things are often situation dependent. You live ina fully furnished modern home; do you get water for your neighbours, too? Of course not. What about the guy in Africa who traditionally gets water for him and his neighbours? Well he should (and you should in his place), because he's in a different predicament.

[Darth Holbytlan]

As I recall, the real Categorical Imperative isn't so much about how you act directly but about what ethical system you use to make judgements. So the issue isn't "What happens if everyone did this?" but "What happens if everyone reasoned about ethics this way?". The CI is meant as a meta-ethical principle for judging systems of ethics.

It's also not so much that the result is bad if everyone followed it but that the system would be self-defeating. So if your ethical system values democracy, but leads its followers not to vote, then it doesn't correspond to the CI.

Plainly stated, the idea is that ethical systems are inherently universal, so if you follow one that would undermine itself if everyone followed it, you're being logically inconsistent.

[Darth Raptor]

What are your thoughts on this whole line of argument? Your comments?

I'm not well-versed on formal philosophy, but unless you're misinterpreting the Categorical Imperative (as seems likely from the above posts), it's clearly bunk. An even better example than gay sex would be an individual and his/her choice of profession. By using this line of reasoning, chosing profession X is unethical because if everyone had that career, civilization would collapse. I suppose the only "ethical" career would be that of some kind of self-sufficient, hunter-gatherer mountain man, yes?

It's a pretty weak argument if I can easily spot the flaws.

[Eris]

I'm not well-versed on formal philosophy, but unless you're misinterpreting the Categorical Imperative (as seems likely from the above posts), it's clearly bunk. An even better example than gay sex would be an individual and his/her choice of profession. By using this line of reasoning, chosing profession X is unethical because if everyone had that career, civilization would collapse. I suppose the only "ethical" career would be that of some kind of self-sufficient, hunter-gatherer mountain man, yes?

It's a pretty weak argument if I can easily spot the flaws.

He is misinterpreting it, and in a way which is a fairly common mistake. I am no Kant scholar, but from what I understand it is not the case that an action is immoral if the world in which everyone took that course of action would be undesirable, such as the examples brought up. It's if everyone pursuing that course of action leads to a contradiction.

The classic example is lying. If everyone took up as a maxim that they would lie whenever it served there own purposes, lying would become pointless because everyone would know that everyone was lying. That's something of a simplification, but that's the general jist of the principle. This reflects the actual first formulation: I ought act only on those maxims which I could will to be universal law. Any maxim which when made universal since it would lead to a contradiction is therefore forbidden.

It is, however, a mistake to attribute too much to this. While this is the first formulation of the categorical imperative, there are two others, and it's the second which Kant himself uses and relies on in his actual treatise on morality itself, rather than just metaethics. That's the principle of humanity, or: I ought always treat other people as ends in themselves, and never as means only.

If you're going to talk about Kantian ethics, that's the real heart of it.

[Szass Tam]

You're taking the idea of a maxim too narrowly. I also haven't read a ton of Kant, but in your examples, the couple with 17 children wouldn't be acting on the maxim "Have 17 children," but rather the maxim would be "Have as many or as few children as you desire and can take care of." This would be the same for gay people. Their maxim wouldn't be "Fuck members of your gender exclusively," but rather, "Enjoy your sexuality as you wish as long as no harm is done." It's easy to see how those maxims could well be Universal Law. They are sort of the principles behind the actions, rather than the actions themselves.

If you're thinking about killing a man named Joe for no particular reason, and you were to analyze it via Kantian thought and decide against killing Joe, "Don't kill men named Joe," wouldn't be the maxim on which you acted, but rather, "Don't kill," would be the maxim you would use.

[Surlethe]

I think I see where I went wrong in my understanding of the categorical imperative. I'll have to think about it a bit more.

Regardless of what it's called, does the same logic hold for voting and the huge-ass family? Or is there some subtlety in there that I can't quite see?

[SirNitram]

I think I see where I went wrong in my understanding of the categorical imperative. I'll have to think about it a bit more.

Regardless of what it's called, does the same logic hold for voting and the huge-ass family? Or is there some subtlety in there that I can't quite see?

I'm unfamiliar with Kant's moral philosophy(Because his duality was too stupid for me to endure), so I will simply point out it appears to be a Slippery Slope Fallacy. There's no logical link between one person doing something and everyone doing it.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I believe this is a principle known as the Kantian Categorical Imperative: if an action, when performed by everybody, leads to a poor result society-wide, that action should be considered immoral by any person. For example, there is an ethical imperative to vote because if nobody voted, democracies would collapse.

I used this recently in the seventeen kids thread to point out that if everybody had seventeen kids, then society would be screwed; so it follows that nobody should have that many kids. But does it really follow? Applying the same imperative to exclusively gay sex, it seems that having sex only with the same gender is also unethical because if everybody did so, no children would be born.

This last result seems absurd, so I wonder if there is some sort of rule about preference: it is not the case that a majority of people (enough to be harmful to society as a whole) would prefer to have gay sex, and so there is no need to apply the categorical imperative; by the same token, a majority of people would prefer not to go to the trouble of voting, and so the application of Kant's principle there leads to the expected and desired result. But if this is the case, then is it possible to apply the argument to the family with seventeen kids, since only a very small percentage of the US population wants a family that large?

What are your thoughts on this whole line of argument? Your comments?

My thoughts on the line of argument rests on ripping apart Kants premises. I simply reject the categorical imperitive because it rests upon the faulty premises that the human mind is a rationally autonomous self-conscious entity with full freedom of action and self determination.

In other words. I reject the concept of free will in the sense that we commonly think of it. Free will requires that our minds be ultimately causal agents that are capable of initiating a causal chain without being caused by external forces to do so. We do not have this capability. For example. By Kant's logic a person feels sadness purely because they wish to feel sadness, not because some external force caused them to feel sadness.

Of course the best counterexamples would be to point out how evolution has basically programmed our minds to respond to stimuli in different ways. But I wont go into that unless someone defends free will

[Eris]

I think I see where I went wrong in my understanding of the categorical imperative. I'll have to think about it a bit more.

Regardless of what it's called, does the same logic hold for voting and the huge-ass family? Or is there some subtlety in there that I can't quite see?

To elaborate a bit more, since I was exceedingly tired when I made my last post, there are actually two ways in which a principle can fail a test through the first formulation, and each leads to a different kind of moral duty.

Firstly it can fail in conception, that is, it fails in the manner I more or less described. It simply cannot be the case that it could be conceived of as governing the world as a natural law. Making promises you don't intend to keep fails in conception and thus becomes a perfect duty. That is, there is a general prohibition on not making promises you don't intend to keep. Take the maxim, I will always borrow money under false pretenses with no intent to return it whenever I want to. The practice of borrowing money presupposes that the people who borrow will pay it back; if no one ever did, the lenders would never lend it to begin with and the entire practice would become meaningless. We therefore have a perfect duty to not borrow money with the intent not to repay it.

Voting actually might come under this, since democracy presupposes that people do in fact vote. If we have a hypothetical world in which no one ever votes, there simply cannot be democracy. This one is somewhat tricky, since you've got the hidden premise that we ought to support democracy in there, which means you'll have to have some auxiliary claims about democracy being a just system of governance, but assuming that democracy ought to be instated, it follows we have a perfect duty to vote, and anyone who doesn't vote can be condemned for not doing so.

The second way is a failure of the will. In this case it could not be possible to consistently will a particular maxim become universal law. I'm much less clear on this one, but from what I understand it's not the case as in the previous failure that we cannot conceive of such a world due to internal contraction, but rather that we cannot all will such a maxim. For instance, benevolence. There is no internal contradiction that everyone be selfish in a world, not in the manner of say everyone making false promises or no one voting in a democracy. However, it is not possible that everyone could will this (and he has a very specific idea of what willing something is which I'll just sort of wave my hands at for the moment), because "many situations might arise in which the man needs love and sympathy from others, and in which, by such a law of nature generated by his own will, he would rob himself of all hope of the help he wants."

I think what Kant means is that we cannot will it to be universal law, since we are aware that doing so would be self-defeating since, in this case, we would be depriving ourselves of the very help we might need by acting selfishly. Remember, in this hypothetical to determine morality we really are depriving ourselves as well, since we're willing this maxim into a universal law, or basically turning our principle of action into a natural law with the same applicability as gravity. Somewhat more confusing, but I think you can tease out his main point.

These failures of the will produce imperfect duty. In the case described, we have the imperfect duty to be benevolent. We don't always have to be generous, and we don't always have to not be selfish, but we must establish as a general end of action that we help others and improve the lot of our fellow persons. Another he talks about is self-improvement; we have a general duty to take it as our end to better ourselves, and although we aren't banned from not doing so, failure to do so at least some of the time is condemnable. This is, incidentally, how you pull positive duties as well as negative prohibitions out of the categorical imperative. Perfect duties give you the "You shall not kill" and so on, while imperfect duties give you the "You shall strive to be improve the condition of the people around you" and so on.

And this general decision making principle, moving back to your actual question, would apply to having large families or having gay sex or voting, or for that matter any possible maxim, or principle of action, you can formulate. However, as Szass Tam points out, it's not always clear what maxim you're really acting upon, and Kant as far as I know never built a hard and fast rule for how to formulate them.

My intuition is that if we have some background assumptions about democracy, you've got a perfect duty to vote. The family maxim "I will have as many children as I can" is not prohibited, but does fail the test of will, and consequently we have an imperfect duty to have families we can reasonably support.

Gay sex, however, is going to be a funny one, since while I don't think it fails any of the tests, and is consequently morally permissible. Kant might have disagreed, although if he did he was guilty of misapplying his own principle (which he did a few times). But the example I want to bring up is his belief that masturbation is immoral. There's a section of his writing somewhere in which he condemns it as breaking the second formulation because it is treating one's self as a mere means and not as and end, and is the source of more than a few jokes nowadays since it's pretty silly. (The standard retort is to point out that it very much is treating one's self as a means to its own end.) He also had some funny views on lying if you got really into it, but all these details are just side points, since they don't bear on the validity of the general principle, just that Kant himself didn't always use it properly.

Hope all that helps a bit.

[Eris]

I'm unfamiliar with Kant's moral philosophy(Because his duality was too stupid for me to endure), so I will simply point out it appears to be a Slippery Slope Fallacy. There's no logical link between one person doing something and everyone doing it.

It is most decidedly not based on a slippery slope fallacy. Kant never meant to imply that any of this would actually happen, and in fact he denies that the actual results of our actions are what give them their moral worth, but rather their motivations. (The person who has wicked intents but by accident bring about happiness to others is still going to be wicked according to Kant.)

The categorical imperative is therefore a test for your motivations, or you maxims. The purpose then for the test is to see whether your principles are actions are ones which are making an exception of yourself, which is very loosely what could be said to be sort of the general idea behind Kant's moral philosophy. Given that you have to in the thought experiment ascribe the status of natural law to your motivations, you actually can't ever see these situations instantiated, but that's not the point. The point is to see whether or not such a maxim is internally consistent when applied as a universal law, and could actually be adopted in general. Again, this isn't a test for actions, but for principles of action or motivation. The logical link lies between my own maxim and that maxim if it were willed to be universal (natural) law, not between my actions and everyone's actions.

[Eris]

My thoughts on the line of argument rests on ripping apart Kants premises. I simply reject the categorical imperitive because it rests upon the faulty premises that the human mind is a rationally autonomous self-conscious entity with full freedom of action and self determination.

Kant would disagree with you, naturally. However, he doesn't need to; you can still have a Kantian ethical system in absence of free will, which I'll get to in a moment. As an aside, if you think that the lack of free will is damning to Kant, it does follow that morality in general ought be rejected. I'll go on in further detail later, but simply enough if Kant requires free will, then so does everyone else. He doesn't, although it is a further metaphysical claim he could (and does) make, it is not at all necessary to have a moral philosophy.

In other words. I reject the concept of free will in the sense that we commonly think of it. Free will requires that our minds be ultimately causal agents that are capable of initiating a causal chain without being caused by external forces to do so. We do not have this capability. For example. By Kant's logic a person feels sadness purely because they wish to feel sadness, not because some external force caused them to feel sadness.

Would you please provide a citation for your argument for this rather bizarre claim? Kant talks a bit about the sentiments and emotion, but I never found a bit about where he claims that all our psychological states are within our causal control. He actually spends a section in the early parts of the Groundwork talking about the perfectly virtuous person who is nevertheless miserable due to circumstances beyond their control.

Of course the best counterexamples would be to point out how evolution has basically programmed our minds to respond to stimuli in different ways. But I wont go into that unless someone defends free will

Well, I won't defend free-will, since I think it's orthogonal to the discussion, since I think your claim that Kantian ethics fail in absence of free-will is ill-founded. They may require a little fixing up, but it's not the devastating criticism you seem to think it is.

Let us assume for the moment that determinism holds. That is, that our actions are entirely determined by external forces, and we have no internal free will of any kind. Now, under this assumption, let us think about a rational agent; let's call him Harry.

So, Harry has read some Kant and found it pretty persuasive and consequently sets out to live his life in a Kantian manner. (No internal decisions so far - he was just biologically wired in such a way by his previous externally fueled experience such that he was the kind of person who would become a Kantian when exposed to Kant.)

Harry is a strong willed person (that is, he's predisposed to follow through on his mental (biochemical) decisions) and he does a pretty good job assessing his maxims and determining which are good ones, and following through with keeping to them. He doesn't lie or cheat, and does his best to develop his own talents and to improve the lives of the people around him. He lives always in accordance with his principles, and when he dies the people in the world are better off for his having been there.

How can we not consider him to be a good moral person? He lived his life in such a way that his motivations were good, and his actions reflected them. He had no internal control over the way he behaved, but we can still say that he was a good person, in the same way we can say of a well-performing computer that it is a good computer. It's not that the computer is somehow a freely willed agent which we consequently praise for being somehow a cause of its goodness; we instead praise it for fulfilling its purpose well.

Humans work in the same way, with the exception that since we don't have a designer implanted purpose by which to judge the value of our motivations and actions. Kant's categorical imperative is simply a standard of valuation for our actions by which we can say that people are good or bad. Harry was a good person because he could be judged against certain standards of action and motivation with or without free will.

Simply put, not only is free will as we commonly think of it necessary to morality, but it's not necessary at all in any sense. We can be morally judged without having any internal spontaneous control over our actions so long as we have a moral standard. We don't have this strong sense of moral responsibility since we don't have full control over our actions, but that does not stop us from still saying that the world is a better, more desirable place as a result of moral behaviour, and that we should consequently accord ourselves to those standards, and judging people by those standards. That we don't determine ex nihilo whether we measure up is orthogonal to the issue.

[Rye]

My thoughts on the line of argument rests on ripping apart Kants premises. I simply reject the categorical imperitive because it rests upon the faulty premises that the human mind is a rationally autonomous self-conscious entity with full freedom of action and self determination.

In other words. I reject the concept of free will in the sense that we commonly think of it. Free will requires that our minds be ultimately causal agents that are capable of initiating a causal chain without being caused by external forces to do so. We do not have this capability. For example. By Kant's logic a person feels sadness purely because they wish to feel sadness, not because some external force caused them to feel sadness.

Of course the best counterexamples would be to point out how evolution has basically programmed our minds to respond to stimuli in different ways. But I wont go into that unless someone defends free will

Eris has pretty much already said what I was going to, but free will isn't required for Kant's categorical imperative. Ethical motivations, the appearence of reasoning leading to motivation/action and abstract reasoning are all that are required for it, and they do exist, whether they're the result of predetermined mechanisms or not.

[Adrian Laguna]

In other words. I reject the concept of free will in the sense that we commonly think of it. Free will requires that our minds be ultimately causal agents that are capable of initiating a causal chain without being caused by external forces to do so. We do not have this capability. For example. By Kant's logic a person feels sadness purely because they wish to feel sadness, not because some external force caused them to feel sadness.

I do not believe that the mind is incapable of being an ultimate causal agent given enough self-discipline and training.

[Starglider]

The optimum amount of people voting is 100% of those eligable (assuming the average voter competence does not decrease significantly as more people vote - not really a safe assumption). It's a binary action, so everyone should vote. The optimum number of children is somewhere close to 2. The strength of the moral imperitive to have more or less children is proportional to the difference between the current fertility rate of society as a whole and the desired optimum. AFAIK there is no optimum amount of gay sex, because it is not morally relevant to people other than the participants - it is only indirectly related to childbirth rate.

I don't bother arguing about the concept of free will any more. It is patently obvious that the more mystical concepts of free will do not exist - in fact they are generally meaningless dualist bullshit regardless of the specifics of the physical basis of the universe. However this is irrelevant for all practical purposes. Free will is a sensible and useful abstraction for most human purposes, but in general AI one often runs into situations where you have to discard it as too vague and misleading to be of any use as a categorisation of cognitive processes.

[drachefly]

I do not believe that the mind is incapable of being an ultimate causal agent given enough self-discipline and training.

So the universe is purely mechanistic except when you try really hard?

[Darth Wong]

I think the easiest way to describe it is to say that a rule is moral if everyone could obey it and the outcome would be good for society, and immoral if everyone obeyed it and the outcome was bad for society. So it's not immoral to be a plumber, but "be a plumber" would be a bad moral rule. Similarly, it's not immoral to be homosexual, but "be homosexual" would be a bad moral rule.

As for the connection between homosexual sex and reproduction, I estimate that I've probably had sex with my wife at least 4000 times. In all of those 4000 times, we've had two children. Therefore, at least 99.95% of our sex has been non-reproductive, purely recreational sex. I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of sex is recreational, and hence it doesn't matter what kind of sex you have most of the time