Knowability
Feb. 6th, 2011 01:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mhuzzellI haven't been getting out much, but last weekend I did manage to go to a party, and got talking to a woman I met there, mostly about Kant. We argued with vehemence and gesticulation: she was of the opinion that all of Kant's theories were BULLSHIT because he said that even space and time were merely constructs of the human mind and thus not actually real. I found this to be both a serious oversimplification and gross misunderstanding, although because she was one of the hosts I did not use those words. My own over-simplistic understanding of Kant's metaphysics is that the business about space and time being constructs of the human mind is mostly an epistemological point: that the "true nature" of the universe is ultimately unknowable because, although we perceive things spatiotemporally, we cannot know that our perceptions are accurate. This does not rule out the possibility that our perceptions are in fact accurate regarding the extension of objects in space and time; it simply means we cannot know for sure. (Or rather, more subtly but also more accurately: that we cannot understand our perceptions except through scema, such as space and time, which we introduce ourselves; but again this does not ultimately mean that they are somehow "inaccurate".)
I've also been watching lots of Star Trek lately, which, like most sci-fi, has a tendency to play out weird ethical thought experiments. Viz.:
(Drawing is from Hourly Comics Day, which I did not complete with enough pizzazz to share any but this.)
There are questions, of course, about the extent to which Kant's metaphysics were important to his ethical theories, but I maintain that in the most important ways they are effectively separate. Kantian ethics can be effectively summed up in his Categorical Imperative, which is to "Act as if the maxim of your actions were a universal law" or various other effectively similar formulations. It is commonly dismissed for the somewhat ironic reason that it is often impossible to know the consequences of one's actions. And of course for the impossibility of correctly formulating "maxims" by which one purports to act.
Meanwhile, at work, I have a copy of Rawls' A Theory of Justice reserved for myself, so that if I ever get around to reading it all the way through, I can disagree with it more intelligently. In a nutshell, though, Rawls provides the last possibly defensible gasp for Social Contract Theory, via a thought experiment in which one is meant to defend the state which one would find most palatable even if one did not know which position one would hold within it. We are meant to hedge our bets, of course, because we want it to turn out that, even if we were the lowliest of the low, the society we "chose" when we were in the "original position" (from which one sets the parameters of the society) would not be so bad. It is a fine thought experiment, except for the conclusion that the obvious choice of society would be a liberal state. When I run the experiment in my own head, the society I imagine is an anarcho-socialist one.
I've also been watching lots of Star Trek lately, which, like most sci-fi, has a tendency to play out weird ethical thought experiments. Viz.:
(Drawing is from Hourly Comics Day, which I did not complete with enough pizzazz to share any but this.)
There are questions, of course, about the extent to which Kant's metaphysics were important to his ethical theories, but I maintain that in the most important ways they are effectively separate. Kantian ethics can be effectively summed up in his Categorical Imperative, which is to "Act as if the maxim of your actions were a universal law" or various other effectively similar formulations. It is commonly dismissed for the somewhat ironic reason that it is often impossible to know the consequences of one's actions. And of course for the impossibility of correctly formulating "maxims" by which one purports to act.
Meanwhile, at work, I have a copy of Rawls' A Theory of Justice reserved for myself, so that if I ever get around to reading it all the way through, I can disagree with it more intelligently. In a nutshell, though, Rawls provides the last possibly defensible gasp for Social Contract Theory, via a thought experiment in which one is meant to defend the state which one would find most palatable even if one did not know which position one would hold within it. We are meant to hedge our bets, of course, because we want it to turn out that, even if we were the lowliest of the low, the society we "chose" when we were in the "original position" (from which one sets the parameters of the society) would not be so bad. It is a fine thought experiment, except for the conclusion that the obvious choice of society would be a liberal state. When I run the experiment in my own head, the society I imagine is an anarcho-socialist one.
