I feel like people who make such blanket value statements like "I don't cheat people" or "I don't lie" aren't being honest with themselves, or are putting too much faith in the stability of the society they live in.
The easiest retort is Anne Frank. You're hiding her in your attic and a Nazi asks if you're hiding enemies of the state. There you go, a time when you'll definitely lie and cheat!
Someone might answer, "well, fine. I don't cheat or lie unless I'm in extraordinary circumstances." That's fine, they've let go of dogmatism then, now the interesting conversation starts of where the line is, what constitutes extraordinary circumstances. That's a very interesting conversation I believe.
> There you go, a time when you'll definitely lie and cheat!
I don't think this is the win you think it is. Kantians and se deontologists will absolutely say that no, you cannot lie and cheat even in that scenario. You have a moral duty to not lie but also a moral duty to resist tyranny. You cannot sacrifice one to achieve the other, you must choose only options that fulfill both duties.
> You have a moral duty to not lie but also a moral duty to resist tyranny. You cannot sacrifice one to achieve the other, you must choose only options that fulfill both duties.
The universe doesn't respect that viewpoint. There is no mechanism in reality or life that prevents hard tradeoffs from having to be made.
> The universe doesn't respect that viewpoint. There is no mechanism in reality or life that prevents hard tradeoffs from having to be made.
What the universe does or doesn't respect has no bearing on what is or is not right / good.
Are you role playing in a fictional world? Where you can make up whatever ideals you want, and make them happen. Then I am for nobody ever suffering injustice.
That would be good and right, indeed.
Or, making actual choices in reality? Where there are limits to what we can do, but making hard choices well has positive impact.
I am speaking to the latter.
> Or, making actual choices in reality? Where there are limits to what we can do, but making hard choices well has positive impact.
Impact is irrelevant in Kantian ethics, deontological ethics [1] and virtue ethics [2]. A choice is good and right because it the nature of the choice itself in deontology, or because of how it defines one character in virtue ethics, not because of what effects it may or may not have on the world.
Every novice approaching ethics naively assumes a framework of consequentialism [3], where every choice is judged by its consequences, but this framework is deeply problematic and we have literal proofs that not all ethic theories can be reformulated in terms of consequences [4].
The original post I replied to also naively assumed a consequentialist framing, and I replied that this framing is not universal and so his conclusion does not follow. You can continue to double down on "it's obvious that consequences matter for ethical choices", but that doesn't make it true, and thus, it does not support the original argument.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/
[3] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/
[4] https://philarchive.org/rec/BROCT
> Impact is irrelevant in Kantian ethics
From an arm chair perspective, this is a wonderful shortcut isn't it! Roughly, treat everyone how we would want to be treated - or some other limited formulation, with no horizon of thought about downstream impact past that.
Presumably, inflexible pacifism would get a sympathetic response from Kantians.
A kind of intellectual purity, at the relative cost to others' lives.
Interesting as an idea. Not so great for actual humans.
What exactly is the imagined benefit, that outweighs the well being of others and ourselves? A circular form of philosophical purity? A view that is better because it deems itself better?
EDIT: Just saw this:
> Not unless you can present some proof of this. Your implicit assumption that we should care about outcomes over principles has its own set of moral failures, like the repugnant conclusion.
Well, most people start by caring about other people and themselves. Not as an assumption but as a real status.
Doing so has a particularly interesting and meaningful consequence. By prioritizing better results for human beings, positive impact can better produce more positive impact. Creating a positive spiral where benefits of the ethics of prioritizing impact compound, and compound.
So for those that care about our fellow beings, and nontrivial non-limiting implications of choices, there is solid ground for ethics. Nothing arbitrary or foundationally circular.
Need to make up assumptions.
In contrast, what is the assumption or principle that values principles over people. What is the actual point? How is that deemed better than prioritizing a better world. How is that better or richer than ethics that achieve a higher bar, by continually re-incorporating, navigating and producing an ever more complex enabling future?
I gave you all of the links you need to read if you want to know more. Suffice it to say that all you're describing is what you care about, which is about as logically compelling an argument about what is good as telling me what deity you believe in. Your random foray into philosophy is not going to solve 3,000 years of ethical debates in a simple quip.
You seem to be completely at sea here, for all your knowledge.
Caring about oneself and others' welfare is a direct result of being creatures that must make choices to survive. The compounding positive sums of increasing cooperative behavior are not arbitrary. They pay for themselves, many many times over.
Thus, practical virtue appears naturally, and persists, and grows, regardless of what you want to call it, or alternatives that anyone comes up with.
If you are going to argue about/against that practical impact, at least acknowledge practical virtue has a very special status.
Or you are arguing from (real or posed) ignorance.
The burden us on you, if you want to claim this practical progression should be superseded.
Without that, an appeal to impractical principles over practical good, is very much in the vein of "telling me what deity you believe in".
What "good" is "good" that doesn't reciprocally maximize "good" going forward.
So far your comments lack any grounding beyond itself. Perverse "purity". That relegates virtue to an hermetic aesthetic or OCD tick.
Philosophy has spent 3000 years trying to organize humans well and has apparently failed to solve that problem.
Reframing that reality as "actually it doesn't matter what the consequence is as long as we followed our values to the letter!" is convenient, but in modern terminology, a cope.
I read your links and was already aware of deontology anyway but it was a nice refresher. Yup, you're right, we're describing what we care about! And in doing so we represent the majority of human thinking - maybe not the human thinking that gets written down, but nonetheless.
Why should people care to convince dusty academics what is right and wrong using logical systems and proofs when the dusty academic has lost the ethical debate immediately in the eyes of most when he admits that according to his ethical system, lying to prevent Anne Frank is wrong? This is instinctively wrong to most people, so, why should we care? Rigid logic is worthless when people are looking for something else, and rigid logic alone isn't enough to build a society.
I feel like you got to deontology and stopped. I've never actually met someone who studies ethics who got to deontology and didn't later end up with emergency exit modes, such as the Anne frank scenario. Using ethics to live a virtuous life is well and good, but Nazis don't do that, and you won't convince them using deontology to not round people up. You don't have to go all the way the other way and make "ends justify the means" arguments. Just allow yourself the flexibility to say "in an emergency, of course it's ok to lie," which may not seem logically sound, but society isn't logically nor is it possible to make it purely logical enough to be a valid ground for Kantian ethics to result in actual virtuous people - because the man that gives up Anne Frank telling the truth is not virtuous, he is a selfish monster, sacrificing a human life for his own sense of virtue and preservation of ethical purity, a disgusting trade off.
Have you ever met in real life a person who wouldn't lie to the axe murderer, because of their Kantian values?
If a Kantian can be put into a situation where their morals would require them to say the word that gives up Anne Frank, we can safely say it's a bad moral system.
> If a Kantian can be put into a situation where their morals would require them to say the word that gives up Anne Frank, we can safely say it's a bad moral system.
Not unless you can present some proof of this. Your implicit assumption that we should care about outcomes over principles has its own set of moral failures, like the repugnant conclusion.
Yes yes I'm sure smarter people than me have done lots of interesting logical things to philosophy over the last thousand years.
And I maintain my simple point: if your ethical system doesn't allow the flexibility to not give up Anne Frank, it's a bad ethical system. Unless you believe giving up Anne Frank isn't wrong? Then you're a bad person and shouldn't be considered in conversations about ethics!
Design it in a way to have good outcomes if you're worried about repugnant conclusions. Personally I believe putting it on paper is a fool's errand - vibes based ethics seems to work as good as one can get from an ethical system.
To cheat someone implies there is some obligation owed which is reneged upon, even if that's just the minute obligation owed from one member of a society to another.
In your hypothetical situation, I owe no such obligation to the Nazis who as you'll remember were an occupying force. I entered into no social compact with them.