In my experience, many people hold that when trying to derive the KI in the groundwork, he just managed to confuse himself, and that the examples of its application as motivated reasoning of a rigid Prussian scholar with an empathy deficit.
The crucial failure is not that it is nonsensical to think about such abstract equilibria—it is very much not, as TDT shows. But in TDT terms, Kant’s mistake was this: He thought he could compel you to pretend that everybody else in the world was running TDT. But there is nothing that compels you to assume that, and so you can’t pull a substantial binding ethics out of thin air (or pure rationality), as Kant absurdly believed he could.
I absolutely agree that Kant’s system as represented in the Groundwork is unworkable. But you could say the same about pretty much any pre-20th-century philosopher’s major work. I think the fact that someone was even trying to think about ethics along essentially game-theoretic lines in the 18th century is pretty revolutionary and worthy of respect, even if he did get important things wrong. As far as I’m aware, no one else was even in the ballpark.
ETA: I do think a lot of philosophers scoff (correctly) at Kant’s object-level moral views, not only because of their absurdity (the horrified tone in which he describes masturbation still makes me chuckle) but because of the intellectual contortions he would go through to “prove” them using his system. While I believe he made very important contributions to meta-ethics, his framework was nowhere near precise enough to generate a workable applied ethics. So yeah, Kant’s actual ethical positions are pretty scoff-worthy, but the insight driving his moral framework is not.
In my experience, many people hold that when trying to derive the KI in the groundwork, he just managed to confuse himself, and that the examples of its application as motivated reasoning of a rigid Prussian scholar with an empathy deficit.
The crucial failure is not that it is nonsensical to think about such abstract equilibria—it is very much not, as TDT shows. But in TDT terms, Kant’s mistake was this: He thought he could compel you to pretend that everybody else in the world was running TDT. But there is nothing that compels you to assume that, and so you can’t pull a substantial binding ethics out of thin air (or pure rationality), as Kant absurdly believed he could.
I absolutely agree that Kant’s system as represented in the Groundwork is unworkable. But you could say the same about pretty much any pre-20th-century philosopher’s major work. I think the fact that someone was even trying to think about ethics along essentially game-theoretic lines in the 18th century is pretty revolutionary and worthy of respect, even if he did get important things wrong. As far as I’m aware, no one else was even in the ballpark.
ETA: I do think a lot of philosophers scoff (correctly) at Kant’s object-level moral views, not only because of their absurdity (the horrified tone in which he describes masturbation still makes me chuckle) but because of the intellectual contortions he would go through to “prove” them using his system. While I believe he made very important contributions to meta-ethics, his framework was nowhere near precise enough to generate a workable applied ethics. So yeah, Kant’s actual ethical positions are pretty scoff-worthy, but the insight driving his moral framework is not.