Okay, fair enough. You’ve indulged me quite a ways with the whole UCMA thing, and we finished our discussion of EY’s sequence argument, so thanks for the discussion. I’ve spent some years studying Kant’s ethical theory though, so (largely for my own enjoyment) I’d like to address some of your criticisms of the CI in case curiosity provokes you to read on. If not, again, thanks.
I don’t really want to go into extreme detail on the issues with Kantian erhics; I’m relatively familiar with it after a friend of mine wrote a high school thesis on Kant, but it’s full of elementary mistakes.
This conclusion should set off alarm bells: if I told you I’d found a bunch of elementary mistakes in the sequences, having never read them but having discussed them with an acquaintance, you would bid me caution.
First, I don’t follow it, and have no incentive to do so.
The issue of incentive is one that Kant really struggles with, and much of his writings on ethics following the publication of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (where the CI is introduced) is concerned with this problem. So while on the one hand, you’re correct to think that this is a problem for Kant, it’s also a problem he spent a lot of time thinking about himself. I just can’t do it any justice here, but very roughly Kant thinks that in order to rationally pursue happiness, you have to pursue happiness in such a way that you are deserving of it, and only by being morally good can you deserve happiness. This sounds very unconvincing as read, but Kant’s view on this is both sophisticated and shifting. I don’t know that he felt he ever had a great solution, and he died writing a book on the importance of our sense of aesthetics and its relation to morality.
It basically says “always cooperate on the prisoner’s dilemma,”
The CI is not a decision theory, nor is a decision theory a moral theory. It’s important not to confuse the two. If you gave Kant the prisoner’s dilemma, he would tell you to always defect, because you should always be honest. You would be annoyed, because he’s mucking around with irrelevant features of the set up, and he would point out to you that the CI is a moral theory and that the details of the setup matters. The CI says nothing consistant or interesting about the prisoner’s dilemma, nor should it.
I could, easily, prefer that a) I maximize paperclips but b) all other agents maximize magnets.
You could, and that’s how preferences work. So there could be no universal hypothetical imperative. But the categorical imperative doesn’t involve reference to preferences. If you take yourself to have a reason to X, which makes no reference to preferences (terminal or otherwise), you at the same time take any arbitrary reasoner to have a reason to X. Suppose, for comparison, that a set of minds in mind-space happened to (against whatever odds) have exactly the same evidence as you for a proposition. You couldn’t coherently believe that you had reason to believe the proposition, but that they did not. Reasons don’t differentiate between reasoners that way.
You may think imperatives always make reference to preferences, but this is an argument you’d have to have with Kant. It’s not a priori obvious or anything, so it’s not enough to state it and say ‘Kant is wrong’.
I should break the CI since what I want to do and what I want others to do are different.
The CI is not the claim that everyone should do what you want to do. The CI is the demand (essentially) that you act on reasons. The structure of reasons (like the fact that reasons don’t discriminate between reasoners) gives you the whole ‘universal’ bit.
Okay, fair enough. You’ve indulged me quite a ways with the whole UCMA thing, and we finished our discussion of EY’s sequence argument, so thanks for the discussion. I’ve spent some years studying Kant’s ethical theory though, so (largely for my own enjoyment) I’d like to address some of your criticisms of the CI in case curiosity provokes you to read on. If not, again, thanks.
This conclusion should set off alarm bells: if I told you I’d found a bunch of elementary mistakes in the sequences, having never read them but having discussed them with an acquaintance, you would bid me caution.
The issue of incentive is one that Kant really struggles with, and much of his writings on ethics following the publication of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (where the CI is introduced) is concerned with this problem. So while on the one hand, you’re correct to think that this is a problem for Kant, it’s also a problem he spent a lot of time thinking about himself. I just can’t do it any justice here, but very roughly Kant thinks that in order to rationally pursue happiness, you have to pursue happiness in such a way that you are deserving of it, and only by being morally good can you deserve happiness. This sounds very unconvincing as read, but Kant’s view on this is both sophisticated and shifting. I don’t know that he felt he ever had a great solution, and he died writing a book on the importance of our sense of aesthetics and its relation to morality.
The CI is not a decision theory, nor is a decision theory a moral theory. It’s important not to confuse the two. If you gave Kant the prisoner’s dilemma, he would tell you to always defect, because you should always be honest. You would be annoyed, because he’s mucking around with irrelevant features of the set up, and he would point out to you that the CI is a moral theory and that the details of the setup matters. The CI says nothing consistant or interesting about the prisoner’s dilemma, nor should it.
You could, and that’s how preferences work. So there could be no universal hypothetical imperative. But the categorical imperative doesn’t involve reference to preferences. If you take yourself to have a reason to X, which makes no reference to preferences (terminal or otherwise), you at the same time take any arbitrary reasoner to have a reason to X. Suppose, for comparison, that a set of minds in mind-space happened to (against whatever odds) have exactly the same evidence as you for a proposition. You couldn’t coherently believe that you had reason to believe the proposition, but that they did not. Reasons don’t differentiate between reasoners that way.
You may think imperatives always make reference to preferences, but this is an argument you’d have to have with Kant. It’s not a priori obvious or anything, so it’s not enough to state it and say ‘Kant is wrong’.
The CI is not the claim that everyone should do what you want to do. The CI is the demand (essentially) that you act on reasons. The structure of reasons (like the fact that reasons don’t discriminate between reasoners) gives you the whole ‘universal’ bit.