I’ll strike that—I didn’t mean that he was obsessed with a particular story about heaven, the way Martin Luther was. I meant, more abstractly, that he saw the central question as when to give people credit for their actions.
[Kant] was not even interested in the question, “What is the right thing to do?”
he saw the central question as when to give people credit for their actions.
You don’t think the two are related? I think that a pretty good case can be made that:
You should give people credit for their actions when they do the right thing.
If your own intuitions aren’t sufficiently convincing at instructing you regarding “What is the right thing to do?”, you can get a ‘second opinion’ by observing what kinds of things people receive credit for.
The first question is related to the second question in ethical systems in which you get credit for doing the right things. They should still be two separate questions.
In some types of Christianity, they aren’t related, because there is no “right thing to do”, there is only what God tells you to do. This is described as “the right thing to do”, but it’s what I called a macro rather than a primitive: There is no new ontological category of “right things”; you just need to learn what things God says to do.
I’ll strike that—I didn’t mean that he was obsessed with a particular story about heaven, the way Martin Luther was. I meant, more abstractly, that he saw the central question as when to give people credit for their actions.
You don’t think the two are related? I think that a pretty good case can be made that:
You should give people credit for their actions when they do the right thing.
If your own intuitions aren’t sufficiently convincing at instructing you regarding “What is the right thing to do?”, you can get a ‘second opinion’ by observing what kinds of things people receive credit for.
The first question is related to the second question in ethical systems in which you get credit for doing the right things. They should still be two separate questions.
In some types of Christianity, they aren’t related, because there is no “right thing to do”, there is only what God tells you to do. This is described as “the right thing to do”, but it’s what I called a macro rather than a primitive: There is no new ontological category of “right things”; you just need to learn what things God says to do.