Erm. I agree with the PhD-having philosopher that you can think about the formulation that way. But my PhD-having philosophers are pretty clear that even if Kant ends up implicitly relying on this it can’t be what he is really trying to argue since it obviously precludes a priori knowledge of the CI. And if you can’t know it a priori then Kant’s entire edifice falls apart.
And below, Breakfast is wondering why one should consider possible worlds relevant to decision making and says “I know Kant has some… tangled, Kantian argument regarding this”. But of course Kant has no such argument! Because that isn’t his argument. The argument for the CI stems from Kant’s conception of freedom (that it is self-governance and that the only self-governance we could have a priori comes from the form of self-governance itself). The argument fails, I think, but it has nothing to do with counterfactuals. So when you say “Counterfactuals, straight out of Kant”, it seems a lot of people who haven’t read Kant are going to be mislead.
I know you’re just using Kant illustratively, but maybe qualify it as “some formulations of Kant”?
Erm. I agree with the PhD-having philosopher that you can think about the formulation that way. But my PhD-having philosophers are pretty clear that even if Kant ends up implicitly relying on this it can’t be what he is really trying to argue since it obviously precludes a priori knowledge of the CI. And if you can’t know it a priori then Kant’s entire edifice falls apart.
And below, Breakfast is wondering why one should consider possible worlds relevant to decision making and says “I know Kant has some… tangled, Kantian argument regarding this”. But of course Kant has no such argument! Because that isn’t his argument. The argument for the CI stems from Kant’s conception of freedom (that it is self-governance and that the only self-governance we could have a priori comes from the form of self-governance itself). The argument fails, I think, but it has nothing to do with counterfactuals. So when you say “Counterfactuals, straight out of Kant”, it seems a lot of people who haven’t read Kant are going to be mislead.
I know you’re just using Kant illustratively, but maybe qualify it as “some formulations of Kant”?