Here are some thoughts occasioned by, if not immediately relevant to, a
discussion Walter and I seem to be having about Kant,
universalizability, and the Coming World Crisis. I had written:
RP: [T]o ø an x is never the same, I'd have thought, as an x's being
ø-able. (The intention to climb a tree isn't the same as—or 'equivalent
to'—a tree's being climbable.) So I'm puzzled as to how 'a case of the
former [could be] a case of the latter' in any sense, 'moral,' or
'philosophical.'
WALTER replied: There are two possible replies here. The first is
simpler than the second. On the first, I grant RP the conceptual point
and reformulate my claim more clearly to read: the universalizability of
a maxim is not determined or defined by the intention to act or will on
a maxim one deems to be universalizable. Intention has no epistemic
authority in establishing the universalizability of a maxim. Although an
intention is a structural feature of a well-formed maxim. …
… If, however, a maxim is universalizable, it is universally applicABLE
to all rational agents. People who have been instrumental in
inaugurating transcendental movements make the latter
philosophical/moral claim: all persons OUGHT to abide by precepts or
commands x, y, and z. They are clearly not making the empirical claim of
universality since they would be out of a job, so to speak. )
RP: Perhaps our entire discussion on this point is a muddle, accounted
for by the metaphysical world’s increasing and irreversible entropy. I
think that in the beginning I wanted to distinguish between two things
that often are confused: (1) that someone intends a statement (judgment,
proposition, rule, command) to apply ‘universally,’ i.e., always and
everywhere, and (2) that some rule or maxim can be universalizable,
i.e., formulated without contradiction, and seen as reciprocally
binding. Take the last first. It seems trivially true of all genuine
judgments that given similar circumstances one should expect similar
judgments. This may not always be true in the physical world (one
person’s blue green may be another’s turquoise) but it ought to be true
in worlds in which we can idealize conditions, e.g. logic, mathematics,
and supposedly morality.
This has a bit to do with consistency. One cannot offer the same grounds
in the same circumstances for different judgments. If Molly crosses the
finish line before Tom, then, ceteris paribus, Molly wins, not Tom. If
Tom crosses the finish line first, in another race, then, ceteris
paribus, Tom wins, not Molly. If one of the pans of a balance scale in
good working order goes down and the other goes up then whatever’s in
the pan that goes down weighs more than what’s in the other. These are
such simple cases that it hardly seems they could illuminate anything,
but I think one could show that more complex cases differ only in their
complexity. (None of this rules out our being just lost from time to time.)
Kant wants out of the application of the Categorical Imperative to
maxims, at least this kind of consistency, but he wants more, I think,
a kind of super-consistency
What this is is hard to articulate, and that’s because, I think, Kant
himself isn’t clear about it. There are, it seems to me, two kinds of
untoward results one might discover upon applying the Categorical
Imperative to a maxim. One, as in the case of trying (in thought) to
will that making lying promises be made a universal law, results in
incoherence: in making lying promises, one does more than deceive others
(bad in itself), one destroys the very concept one is using to formulate
one’s maxim. It is as if one thought one might will that the creation of
four-sided triangles become a universal practice. A promise is what one
ought to keep and trying to universalize the not-keeping of what one
ought to keep makes no sense. I leave it to others to say what kind of
sense it does not make.
But the second kind of untoward result has no such built in incoherence.
If I pick a flower from an alpine meadow, I hardly disturb the universe
or the meadow. But if everyone did that, the flowers would soon be gone,
and that would be a bad thing. It would be a bad thing rhough only if
one had independent grounds for believing it would be; that is, there’s
no incoherence involved in the notion of everyone’s picking a wild
flower from a certain meadow. So the relevant maxim could be
universalized just in case one did not care for the preservation of
meadows, and the wrongness of everyone’s doing that must be brought in
from elsewhere. And so in similar cases. There are other sorts of
examples which seem to me instances of wrongdoing (badness, etc.) which
are cases of wrongdoing independently of whether they have been tested
in light of the Categorical Imperative, but that is a subject for
another time.
On to other matters.
WALTER: And conversely. If a maxim is not universalizable, then the intention to universalize it is an intention that seeks an impossibility.
Thanks to Walter.
Robert Paul Reed College
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