This is a totally fair criticism, but also I don’t think it matters for my purposes.
My not entirely secret agenda here is to say something in response to people taking a closer look at deontology after some folks getting scared by SBF’s naive utilitarianism. Most of them are going to be performing the same surface-level interpretation of Kant that I am here, so that’s the thing I want to address.
I’m very sympathetic to your point of view, though. I often feel the same way about people’s readings of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre among others.
Ah, makes more sense now. I’m generally not a fan of that approach though, and here’s why.
My comment was that your conclusion about the categorical imperative vis-a-vis its aims was off because the characterization of its aims wasn’t quite right. But you’re saying it’s okay, we’re still learning something here because you meant to do the not-quite-right characterization because most people will do that, and this is the conclusion they will reach from that. But you never tell me up front that’s what you’re doing, nor do you caution that the characterization is not-quite-right (you said your purpose was to “make the case that the categorical imperative tries to pull a fast one” not that “laypeople will end up making the case...”). So I’m left thinking you genuinely believe the case you laid out, and my efforts go into addressing the flaws in that. Little did I know you were trying to describe a manner of not-quite-right thinking people will do, a description which we should be interested in not because of its truth value but because of its inaccuracy (which you never pointed out).
I’ve seen this before in another domain: someone wanted to argue that doing X in modeling would be a bad call. So they did Y, then did X, got bad results and said voila, X is bad. But they did Y too (which in this particular case was a priori known to be not the right thing to do and did most of the damage—if they did Y and not X, they’d get good results, and if they had just not done Y, they’d get good results without X and adequate results with X)! When I pointed out that X really wasn’t that bad by itself, they said, well, Y is pretty standard practice so we’d expect people to probably improperly do that in this particular case anyway. You gotta tell me that beforehand! Otherwise it looks like a flaw in your commenting on the true state of the world as opposed to a feature of your analysis of the typical approach. But it also changes the message: the problem isn’t with X but Y, the problem isn’t with the categorical imperative but analyzing it superficially. Of course, that message is also the main point of my comment.
This is a totally fair criticism, but also I don’t think it matters for my purposes.
My not entirely secret agenda here is to say something in response to people taking a closer look at deontology after some folks getting scared by SBF’s naive utilitarianism. Most of them are going to be performing the same surface-level interpretation of Kant that I am here, so that’s the thing I want to address.
I’m very sympathetic to your point of view, though. I often feel the same way about people’s readings of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre among others.
Ah, makes more sense now. I’m generally not a fan of that approach though, and here’s why.
My comment was that your conclusion about the categorical imperative vis-a-vis its aims was off because the characterization of its aims wasn’t quite right. But you’re saying it’s okay, we’re still learning something here because you meant to do the not-quite-right characterization because most people will do that, and this is the conclusion they will reach from that. But you never tell me up front that’s what you’re doing, nor do you caution that the characterization is not-quite-right (you said your purpose was to “make the case that the categorical imperative tries to pull a fast one” not that “laypeople will end up making the case...”). So I’m left thinking you genuinely believe the case you laid out, and my efforts go into addressing the flaws in that. Little did I know you were trying to describe a manner of not-quite-right thinking people will do, a description which we should be interested in not because of its truth value but because of its inaccuracy (which you never pointed out).
I’ve seen this before in another domain: someone wanted to argue that doing X in modeling would be a bad call. So they did Y, then did X, got bad results and said voila, X is bad. But they did Y too (which in this particular case was a priori known to be not the right thing to do and did most of the damage—if they did Y and not X, they’d get good results, and if they had just not done Y, they’d get good results without X and adequate results with X)! When I pointed out that X really wasn’t that bad by itself, they said, well, Y is pretty standard practice so we’d expect people to probably improperly do that in this particular case anyway. You gotta tell me that beforehand! Otherwise it looks like a flaw in your commenting on the true state of the world as opposed to a feature of your analysis of the typical approach. But it also changes the message: the problem isn’t with X but Y, the problem isn’t with the categorical imperative but analyzing it superficially. Of course, that message is also the main point of my comment.