Oh, now I think I begin to understand what you mean when you say Kant is backwards. If I'm reading you clearly, I think that's not true, and Kant is going in the right direction. I think you are going backwards.
We might look at human ethics in order to learn something about humans, but it won't be easy to learn anything about morality that way. If morality is real, and there genuinely is something out there to call "should," it should exist independently of us.
Analogously, we can look at God as a social or psychological phenomenon by asking questions like "What does religion look like," "How do people experience meaning in their lives," "What are key areas shared by religions," and so on. But this would tell us little about what God is, and whether God even exists.
I must be mixing my frames too readily. This is why I feel more punctuation might be better BTW. quotes and parentheses might not be enough.…
Kant's (begins in a place) which is an outcome of evolutionary processes but is not aware of it as such (this describes all of us at some point and many cultures) (He is probably the worst example for this discussion but here we go). Where "Kant starts with" on his terms is beyond my expertise.
What we get in common from our evolutionary past is an urge or drive or instinct to world, one of the products of this living engagement is to should or moralise. I would argue Kant takes these secondary or derivative products assumes them as primary.
I argue it is backwards (un-informed) in terms (or frames)of what our evolutionary history provides. There is no system here per se. My position here is very similar I discovered in about December 2022 to neo-Pyrrhonist positions.
And that there isn't much to this provisioning except we benefit in survival by shoulding (socially) in and about our worlds, compared to populations who do not do "shoulding", much the way hunger gets us fed as individuals, but in regards to our social niche constructions and umwelts thereof. Hunger makes a good sauce but besides informing preferences (or taste) provides no recipes, recipes are an outcome. Kant starts with a menu of recipes...
I do not argue that this backward in terms of the way we should do it, that a) would be moralising just the same so, b) do not argue about what a good system would/should look like with a more correct better 'system'.
i do argue we should be aware of what we do, in the worldly hope that we would world better. We should world better. How? Not so sure yet. But I feel I now know why we should (all puns intended) and this comes from reading ideas about the palaeolithic egalitarian revolution in various Homo sp (if not all great apes to some degree).
If the self is a delusion then so is the world, we carry on regardless dong the both of them.
I was raised catholic but this was more lapsed identitarian-Irish rebels in Australia (I've a relative who was part of the Rockite Rebellionin 1820 and transported as a convict to NSW, I am descended from a younger brother of his), and my recent posts on Catholicism are a surprise to me, but then this obedience thing was a surprise when I learned that Fideism is a heresy from the POV of Catholics & Orthodox christianity. It blew my tiny brain. The dominance of evangelical devoteeist forms of Christianity (both as a joke and as a political force) in the public sphere (nearly typed MSM) hid this from me. Fideism is as bad as worshipping satan, apparently...
The closest we get to platonic forms is when we read Neal Stephenson's Anathem.
Deontological positions have great difficulty taking evolution on board. Kant (and I have not tried reading him -in translation- for 30+ years)(so I am rusty) takes an outcome of evolutionary processes ( a process he was not aware of, to be fair) which in this case is a socially negotiated thing called morality and then proceeds to put it first and built duties and categorical imperatives from it, which is exactly backward but is as good as worldbuilding as anything we do uninformed by evolutionary processes (which don't care about morality as much as we do but 'we has' invented anyways). I mean as a way to counteract the Catholic/Orthodox churchs' obedience-based faith meme Kant had his uses in helping remove those feudalising philosophies from centre-stage both theologically, and theocractically (these categorical imperatives are democractic in that they remove the need for the church to tell you what to do in being moral) but they are a fantasy (platonic forms in the moral sphere??).
How can we talk about anything if we do not talk about evolution? (e.g. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/) And how it don't care but we do? I call that care worlding or worldbuilding when slightly more intentional, or attended to. It's an umwelt thing, as real as our sense of our bodies, (i.e. not very) but we do it anyways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt
I've never read Kant properly, in translation or otherwise. I have a sharp disproof of Kantian ethics, but being scrupulous, it's only truly a disproof of what I've read, and what my professors taught me, *about* the way Kantian ethics works.
And I hope that I won't irritate you by showing you this, but I'm really trying to understand you, and this is what I translated your comment as:
> Kant starts with an outcome of evolutionary processes, a socially negotiated thing called morality. He put it first, and then built duties and categorical imperatives from it. This is exactly backward.
So, what would a good system look like, if it began with duties and imperatives and ended with morality? Are you sure that would be better? Why?
> Socially speaking, Kant did have his uses in helping remove those feudalising philosophies from centre-stage. After all, these categorical imperatives are democratic in that they remove the need for the church to tell you what to do.
Were you raised Catholic, or did you have Catholic friends? Your antipathy towards Catholicism reminds me of my antipathy toward America.
> But philosophically speaking, they are still a fantasy, an analogue of Platonic forms in the moral sphere.
I think I agree with you here. But what if the moral sphere really were a realm of Platonic forms? Do we know that it isn't? How do we know that?
"Are morality and respect for the sacred the same thing?" Yes as they are both outcomes of the world-building urge, but no as they are each an outcomes of the worldbuilding urge in closely aligned but differing spheres of operation. The world-building urge is as integral to us as our homeostatic "urges" or dirves or instincts or cultivations of the self in trying to deal with what not self (even before there is a me to worry about all of it). Jörge Rüpke calls part of this process __I think_ "appropriation" (currently reading Rüpke, Jörg. On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome. Townsend Lectures/Cornell Studies in Classical Philology. Ithaca ; London: Cornell University Press, 2016. ) ISBN 978-1-5017-0470-3 [But this is much in contrast with previous explanations in which the collective (emergently or just traditionally inherited) is given much kudos].
My daughter and her friend have just baked a cake. Anyone for cake?
https://philpapers.org/rec/MAYMPF
May, Joshua. “Moral Progress for Better Apes,” 2023. is a review of a title I feel I have to get hold of now,
Kumar, V., & Campbell, R. (2022). A Better Ape: The Evolution of the Moral Mind and How it Made Us Human. Oxford University Press.
Oh, now I think I begin to understand what you mean when you say Kant is backwards. If I'm reading you clearly, I think that's not true, and Kant is going in the right direction. I think you are going backwards.
We might look at human ethics in order to learn something about humans, but it won't be easy to learn anything about morality that way. If morality is real, and there genuinely is something out there to call "should," it should exist independently of us.
Analogously, we can look at God as a social or psychological phenomenon by asking questions like "What does religion look like," "How do people experience meaning in their lives," "What are key areas shared by religions," and so on. But this would tell us little about what God is, and whether God even exists.
we 'should' regardless of there being something out there, that is how we make it so,
"it should exist independently of us"
To me this looks like you are shoulding stuff/things into the world, this is perfectly human thing to do BTW, I can see you are not a robot :)
I've discovered today a podcast interview with the author Kumar in that book "Moral Progress for Better Apes" and they are not a teleological as the title appears (publishers!), but perhaps too sure of their progressive progress as the review articulates, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-063-victor-kumar-on-moral-progress/id956404060?i=1000526066317
I am less sure but feel my POV makes it more possible than theirs??
I must be mixing my frames too readily. This is why I feel more punctuation might be better BTW. quotes and parentheses might not be enough.…
Kant's (begins in a place) which is an outcome of evolutionary processes but is not aware of it as such (this describes all of us at some point and many cultures) (He is probably the worst example for this discussion but here we go). Where "Kant starts with" on his terms is beyond my expertise.
What we get in common from our evolutionary past is an urge or drive or instinct to world, one of the products of this living engagement is to should or moralise. I would argue Kant takes these secondary or derivative products assumes them as primary.
I argue it is backwards (un-informed) in terms (or frames)of what our evolutionary history provides. There is no system here per se. My position here is very similar I discovered in about December 2022 to neo-Pyrrhonist positions.
And that there isn't much to this provisioning except we benefit in survival by shoulding (socially) in and about our worlds, compared to populations who do not do "shoulding", much the way hunger gets us fed as individuals, but in regards to our social niche constructions and umwelts thereof. Hunger makes a good sauce but besides informing preferences (or taste) provides no recipes, recipes are an outcome. Kant starts with a menu of recipes...
I do not argue that this backward in terms of the way we should do it, that a) would be moralising just the same so, b) do not argue about what a good system would/should look like with a more correct better 'system'.
i do argue we should be aware of what we do, in the worldly hope that we would world better. We should world better. How? Not so sure yet. But I feel I now know why we should (all puns intended) and this comes from reading ideas about the palaeolithic egalitarian revolution in various Homo sp (if not all great apes to some degree).
If the self is a delusion then so is the world, we carry on regardless dong the both of them.
I was raised catholic but this was more lapsed identitarian-Irish rebels in Australia (I've a relative who was part of the Rockite Rebellionin 1820 and transported as a convict to NSW, I am descended from a younger brother of his), and my recent posts on Catholicism are a surprise to me, but then this obedience thing was a surprise when I learned that Fideism is a heresy from the POV of Catholics & Orthodox christianity. It blew my tiny brain. The dominance of evangelical devoteeist forms of Christianity (both as a joke and as a political force) in the public sphere (nearly typed MSM) hid this from me. Fideism is as bad as worshipping satan, apparently...
The closest we get to platonic forms is when we read Neal Stephenson's Anathem.
Deontological positions have great difficulty taking evolution on board. Kant (and I have not tried reading him -in translation- for 30+ years)(so I am rusty) takes an outcome of evolutionary processes ( a process he was not aware of, to be fair) which in this case is a socially negotiated thing called morality and then proceeds to put it first and built duties and categorical imperatives from it, which is exactly backward but is as good as worldbuilding as anything we do uninformed by evolutionary processes (which don't care about morality as much as we do but 'we has' invented anyways). I mean as a way to counteract the Catholic/Orthodox churchs' obedience-based faith meme Kant had his uses in helping remove those feudalising philosophies from centre-stage both theologically, and theocractically (these categorical imperatives are democractic in that they remove the need for the church to tell you what to do in being moral) but they are a fantasy (platonic forms in the moral sphere??).
How can we talk about anything if we do not talk about evolution? (e.g. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/) And how it don't care but we do? I call that care worlding or worldbuilding when slightly more intentional, or attended to. It's an umwelt thing, as real as our sense of our bodies, (i.e. not very) but we do it anyways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt
I've never read Kant properly, in translation or otherwise. I have a sharp disproof of Kantian ethics, but being scrupulous, it's only truly a disproof of what I've read, and what my professors taught me, *about* the way Kantian ethics works.
And I hope that I won't irritate you by showing you this, but I'm really trying to understand you, and this is what I translated your comment as:
> Kant starts with an outcome of evolutionary processes, a socially negotiated thing called morality. He put it first, and then built duties and categorical imperatives from it. This is exactly backward.
So, what would a good system look like, if it began with duties and imperatives and ended with morality? Are you sure that would be better? Why?
> Socially speaking, Kant did have his uses in helping remove those feudalising philosophies from centre-stage. After all, these categorical imperatives are democratic in that they remove the need for the church to tell you what to do.
Were you raised Catholic, or did you have Catholic friends? Your antipathy towards Catholicism reminds me of my antipathy toward America.
> But philosophically speaking, they are still a fantasy, an analogue of Platonic forms in the moral sphere.
I think I agree with you here. But what if the moral sphere really were a realm of Platonic forms? Do we know that it isn't? How do we know that?
"Are morality and respect for the sacred the same thing?" Yes as they are both outcomes of the world-building urge, but no as they are each an outcomes of the worldbuilding urge in closely aligned but differing spheres of operation. The world-building urge is as integral to us as our homeostatic "urges" or dirves or instincts or cultivations of the self in trying to deal with what not self (even before there is a me to worry about all of it). Jörge Rüpke calls part of this process __I think_ "appropriation" (currently reading Rüpke, Jörg. On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome. Townsend Lectures/Cornell Studies in Classical Philology. Ithaca ; London: Cornell University Press, 2016. ) ISBN 978-1-5017-0470-3 [But this is much in contrast with previous explanations in which the collective (emergently or just traditionally inherited) is given much kudos].
My daughter and her friend have just baked a cake. Anyone for cake?
Kant is not good, I'd put him lower even.
> My daughter and her friend have just baked a cake. Anyone for cake?
What kind is it?
> Kant is not good, I'd put him lower even.
Why?