wex@ittvax.UUCP (Alan Wexelblat) (07/29/83)
I received the following excellent letter in response to my first article on Kant. The point it makes is worth adding to the discussion, so here is the (edited) letter, and my reply: While your discussion of Kant is interesting, it has a flaw, I think. What is important to [Kant's] morality is the 'greatest good' to the universe. The problem with Kant is that 99% of the time, one cannot determine all of the facts involved (Do you know the initial state of the universe?) [and] so cannot appropriately answer the questions on the test. Your example of the two people on the boat is a case in point: To have saved the loved one is certainly intuitively moral, but if the person you did not save was critical for the survival of mankind, you did not ... act in a moral fashion. Your other example, involving giving money to CARE vs. preserving books ... indicates that preserving the books may be a better choice, if it is more important to the survival of humanity, civilization, etc. than saving some children. It is not simple to determine this ahead of time, which is often why politicians are so short-sighted. Often the greatest good requires investing for the long term, but this is not always simple. Example: you have a fixed amount of money to give every year to charity. If you allocate all of it to the space program, because you feel that only through space exploration does mankind have any hope of maintaining a civilization 1000 years from now, what do you tell the starving child who knocks on your door the day after you have written the check? I think Kant had some good ideas, but his test really isn't practical, because it requires universal knowledge too, i.e. what is best in the long term. Another example: you have probably heard the prose: for lack of a nail the shoe was lost; for lack of the shoe the horse was lost; for lack of the horse the rider was lost...... This implies that if you know all of the implications of all actions of everybody, some very non-obvious actions today can have incredible long-term consequences. This implies [that] one may be morally responsible to seek out and develop these things, but unfortunately, they are not within our human comprehension. This is a long response to your article, but I feel it is worthwhile. Kant is not my favorite philosopher, because I don't think he helped anything, but neither do I think he is 'wrong'. (From: ccieng!bwm -- no name signed) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My reply (edited) was: Excellent point about Kant (and one which I simply forgot to mention)! I took the stance that the "universal viewpoint" was not just unknowable, but irrelevant (which I think is a stronger claim). You are also correct about saving the stranger, but the point is that the burden is on the stranger to show why he should be saved. The loved one need show no such thing. My claim was that Kant failed to account for these things (remember, he claimed rationality and universality for his system). Lastly, it's not a question of "right" or "wrong." I don't think you can apply those terms to ANY philosophy. The operative term (I think) is "inconsistent," or "insufficient." --Alan Wexelblat (#32 - and I'm not even trying!) decvax!ittvax!wex