Do you mean if the Supreme Court leaned towards Trump their actions could backfire in the Senate runoffs? — Brett

I don't think the SC will necessarily do what the GOP wants. But if there was unambiguous support for Trump's claims from the party leadership, together with perhaps a different legal team working for the party rather than Trump personally, the chances to get at least some injunction from the SC would have been much better.

Note that such a move would likely have included local party officials, who could have lend their weight to fraud claims in the state.

The nice thing about appointments for life is that once someone is on the SC, they effectively have their own powerbase and are independent from whoever appointed them. They'd have to be pretty stupid to risk that powerbase by challenging the election results without plausible reasons.



I think you're kinda missing the bigger picture here. We cannot really know what the GOPs strategy was here. Perhaps there wasn't one. But assuming that they could have done more to support Trump's challenges but decided not to, one of the core reasons might have been the senate runoffs.

In the scenarios "wargamed" before the election, it was clear that control of the senate was crucial to sustain any extra-legal attempt to elect a candidate who didn't actually get the votes. And of course control of the senate is crucial for the GOP strategy for other reasons as well. At the same time, Trump was never a long-term investment, and the myth of the stolen election will do its work for the GOP without them outwardly having to lift a finger.

So the fact that, this time around, democracy, or what passed for democracy, has prevailed, shouldn't cause any illusions about the resilience of US institutions and the US Constitution.

The CEO does have a responsibility to his shareholders to produce as much profit as possible. — Brian Gomes

The perverse thing here is that via the logic that fulfilling your contractual obligations is moral, the CEO can put morality on it's head by simply replacing any moral imperative with the profit goal and concluding that the moral thing to do is to sacrifice the human lifes, since after all they're not shareholders.



That's the danger of a corporation. Responsibility is delegated to functionaries whose main goal is then defined as making more profit.

We could have started doing any of those things at any time, and of course plenty of people do try to do their part. However many of the issues you name are at the heart of our systems of production, and it's simply not practical to "spend the money". Lack of resources isn't the core problem here, it's that we build our system on the exploitation of the poor and the environment. We could all decide to equalise the world's standards of living, but good luck getting popular support for that in any industrialised country.

Incidentally, it's that same system that has caused space exploration to be relegated to a minor effort, even though it's both inspiring and potentially vital for survival. So I think the goals are actually compatible. Breaking out of the capitalist logic would enable us to both protect this planet and find other ways to live. Getting it started might help people have visions for the future again, something that people in the west at least seem to have forgotten to do.

I don't know; I see the continual rise of technological humanity as inevitably leading to the degradation of soils, destruction of habitats and extinction species; which which all ultimately be to our own detriment and possibly demise. — Janus

Space exploration isn't really something that requires a continual rise though. In a way, it would actually benefit from a shift away from continual growth and towards focusing our collective efforts on non-commercial interests.

How about shielding? If the question does not make sense, then you're out of your depth. — tim wood

Lazors!

this is true. The question begs itself, however unanswerable it may be, to be: is there understanding of physics that make space travel possible? — god must be atheist

We have humans traveling in space right now, so I don't really understand the argument that it's impossible. It'd take very long to get to any other solar system, but that is only a problem if you expect the people leaving to also be the people arriving.

That depends on what you refer to as causes and effects. If you're talking about events as they're understood in everyday language, then yes, a single cause could have any number of effects.

If you're talking about entire system states, then there cannot be two different states simultaneously.

If you agree that the laws of nature describe the universe, then you must agree that these laws themselves cannot create anything, they cannot inject consciousness into matter, they cannot provide matter with the ability to perceive. — leo

Your phrasing here already assumes that consciousness and the ability to perceive aren't physical, hence they need to he created by the physical. But the materialist argument is that consciousness is simply an application of the laws of nature in a specific case.

Of course logically, consciousness and the ability to perceive are what create the physical universe.

So if the laws themselves don’t do that, what does? Unconscious matter spontaneously becomes conscious, magically? That’s what you have to admit, if you assume that the universe wasn’t conscious in the past. — leo

I am not sure what the argument is for why the laws don't allow for consciousness without introducing "magic". Apart from the hard problem.

Regarding laws of humans and laws of nature : humans follow the laws of humans most of the time, from an outside point of view one could say these laws are only descriptions of how humans behave but they don’t constrain humans. If a human is observed to break a human law, one could put that observation into the list of “unexplained phenomena” that one hopes to be able to explain in the future. Or one could say these laws were only approximations and come up with more accurate laws. Isn’t that what we do with matter? — leo

If one were to observe humans long enough without any knowledge of what laws in the judicial sense are and what they say, one might arrive at a fair approximation of what the laws are, but chances are a bunch of behaviour that is legal would appear illegal and vice versa.

What makes our laws something different than mere description is that we promulgate them on the assumption of free will, and hence they contain, to us, genuine commands. This means we adopt an entirely non-physical perspective with regards to the function of these laws, since free will has no physical representation.

The difference is that we know how to break some laws of humans but we don’t know how to break laws of nature. Or maybe miracles are what happens when humans manage to break these laws. — leo

Humans have "broken" the laws of nature plenty of times. The result is a new set of laws.

This is slightly tangential, but the laws that humans make are not like the laws of nature.

The laws of nature do not "constrain the universe". They describe the (physical) universe. In a sense, the laws of nature and the universe are one and the same. What we call "laws" are really descriptions, and they only constrain our ideas about the universe (most notably our predictions) not the universe itself.

Trump will go around preparing for a "The Real Inauguration", the inauguration of the real President, but in the end nothing will come out of it and it will turn out to be a scam to get people to give money to fund his oncoming legal battles. — ssu

The real inauguration will be at the Four Seasons...

This one is easy: the observer is also a physical thing. Physical things observe other physical things, and the web of all that observation (which is also interaction, physical things acting upon other physical things) is what constitutes reality. — Pfhorrest

But whence the web? That is, we'd have to suppose that mutually observing observers just are, without any temporal process.

But this isn't true for anything else we observe, so isn't this special pleading, where the observer is some special kind of physical entity that's somehow not temporal?

What about the perceiver themselves? If everything is physical and If to be physical is to be perceived by something, how is there something to perceive and create all the physical by this perception?

What seems to be missing from your view is that - at least according to a materialistic view - what you describe as "intelligence", be it in a virus or a human, can also be described in physical terms. The action of molecules, the firing of nerves, the movement of muscles. Your definitions simply sidestep the core problem, which is how do we know what happens inside the intelligent system is not just another physical process, following the standard laws?

In your glider example, one could easily replace the human pilot with a robot that operates the gliders to land at a random, suitable point, the randomness provided by some form of random number generator.

This would also be unpredictable in practice. The question is whether both the robot and the human are fundamentally predictable, but very hard to practically predict, or whether there is something about life that's fundamentally unpredictable.

You assert the latter, but your argument doesn't actually support that conclusion.

You can never know, not even statistically, where a virus particle will end up even if you know all the forces and fields acting on it. — Sir Philo Sophia

Why not? Clearly we can predict how viruses act generally to for medical purposes. From a physical perspective, a virus is of course very complex, but why would it be unpredictable?

only changes where the matter inefficiently spends addition KE and employs intelligence to reconfigure its own matter and redirect its own KE against all the natural forces, and resist giving up its PE when PLA would otherwise dictate it. I say no inanimate matter can do that combo. Please give me your best example of inanimate matter can do that combo. thx. — Sir Philo Sophia

Obviously inanimate matter cannot employ "intelligence", whatever that means. But of course the PLA doesn't "dictate" anything. Like all physical laws, it's descriptive, not prescriptive.

sure. why does that hurt your head? what laws of physics apply to intelligence or consciousness??? — Sir Philo Sophia

All of them, when intelligence and consciousness are considered as part of a physical world.

nope. see my above. physics does not apply to contextual algorithms under self control that have the ability to gain and not spend PE when PLA would ask for it (efficiently) back. those can manipulate physics and environment to serve their needs/goals, not be completely controlled/limited by local physical dynamics, can shift physics limits to other parts of the (dead) system. locally alive using physics to beat/avoid physics in achieving its goals, which goals are greater than what PLA would have dictated otherwise. — Sir Philo Sophia

Ok, so objects made by humans are literally outside physics. Guess we're done here.

bad example. 2nd law covers that by saying the entropy had to shift to outside of the lowered entropy system. my virus example is not shifting PLA anywhere. PLA completely does not apply to predict the virus path or behavior or future potential energy. — Sir Philo Sophia

Obviously it does apply, or else PLA is simply wrong as a description of the physical world, of which viruses are a part.

sorry to break it to you, but that is what all definitions do. — Sir Philo Sophia

What all definitions do is define things in a certain context. That's why you'll generally find multiple meanings for a given word in a dictionary.

Definitions are arbitrary, and can only be judged in how well they capture the essence of a certain idea.

when the ballistic motion turned into motion that defied gravity it required excess PE — Sir Philo Sophia

Obviously changing the motion of anything requires energy. That's the basis of Newtonian mechanics. But employing energy doesn't change the laws of physics.

and free will control of exactly how and where to and when to enact and direct converting PE to KE. — Sir Philo Sophia

Why would any control be necessary? Clearly particles have been subject to the influx of energy from some source, so as to change their paths, before life was around?

Control is only necessary if you intend the eventual part to align with the desired part, which incidentally is how I would describe having a "will". But the principle of least energy only tells you what path an object will actually take, not whether that path conforms to some goal.

PLA only applies where motion/actions are dictated purely by Lagrangian dynamics as the general mathematical model. So, please explain what dynamics model can account for "turn on the missile's rocket booster and change the control surfaces to redirect air lift forces to point upward, then the missile has redirected and powered itself to exactly to go completely against the downward force of gravity"? — Sir Philo Sophia

Are you under the impression that a missile cannot be explained by physics? All of the things you named can be physically described, and each step conforms (presumably) to the known laws to a large extent. The fuel in a rocket is just another source of energy that, if activated, will naturally affect the path it takes.

The only thing that's missing from a purely materialistic take would be the internal act of choosing.

no. that only works if all the forces on object are a constant field throughout the path, such that a Lagrangian equation can be formed. no dice! violates PLA per my above. — Sir Philo Sophia

Which would imply any change of conditions would violate the PLA, but as I noted outside energy doesn't need to come from a sentient source.

sure, but does not apply to my example as I mentioned above. — Sir Philo Sophia

Again, the laws of physics don't apply?

Clearly, the goal of changing the missile's trajectory from natural ballistic to instead take the path of most action required spending KE and negentropy not accounted for by PLA as it brings new forces and dynamics to the equation governing the objects motion, for which there is no Lagrangian equation that can be formed to model. Thus, PLA violated at some point during the transformation process, from natural ballistic to controlled path of most action . I'm all ears, how otherwise... — Sir Philo Sophia

You seem to be seriously misunderstanding how descriptive models work. The PLA is a description of the world given certain parameters. It's a tool to better predict outcomes. If a situation falls outside a model, it does not violate it. It's like saying the laws of thermodynamics are wrong because a forming planet clearly lowers entropy by pressing particles into a sphere.

Think of the goal like categorizing a bin of unknown objects as one kind or another (apples or oranges) according to the most simple observable definition that works and is practical to implement. — Sir Philo Sophia

Why would I do this if I have no purpose in mind? I don't see how the result could be useful.

according to my definitions, an object can deviate from PLA if it has at least "primitive free will" and excess PE to spend, at very high cost, to avoid PLA. For example, if you balletically shoot a missile from the ground into the air it must follow the PLA path under the force field of gravity making a parabolic path back down to the ground. However, when you turn on the missile's rocket booster and change the control surfaces to redirect air lift forces to point upward, then the missile has redirected and powered itself to exactly to go completely against PLA, indeed it is taking the path of most action, going directly upward against gravity, and can continue to do so until it burns all of its PE (fuel) to achieve the least KE efficient motion possible. — Sir Philo Sophia

But by adding excess kinetic energy, you obviously change the entire flightpath and so rather than violating the PLA, you have simply moved from one path to another, both being the paths of PLA for the given input of kinetic and potential energy.

Note that for a given "path of least action", the start position, end position and the time it takes to get from one to the other are given. So if you're going to add kinetic energy from the outside, one of these variables needs to change.

This is a quote from a lecture from Feynman, available online, on the principle of least action:

In other words, the laws of Newton could be stated not in the form F=ma but in the form: the average kinetic energy less the average potential energy is as little as possible for the path of an object going from one point to another.

From this it seems clear that the principle of least action is a descriptive law of nature, a different way to express the laws of motion.

It would be useful to first know why you want to define free will. That is, for what kind of consideration is it necessary to establish whether or not something has or is acting according to free will.

In terms of your actual definitions, what do you understand a "deviation from the principle of least action" to be? The way I understand it, that principle is a law of physics, so any actual physical process will conform to it. It's not strictly possible to will an action that takes a path not in conformity with the principle of least action.

A free market is one in which all trades are uncoerced. — Pfhorrest

The question I'd ask is whether this still is a market. Common definitions of markets are very vague and generalised, but they're usually distinguished from gift economies. That is, systems of exchange where goods and services are exchanged based on non-commercial principles, according to needs and wants rather than monetary value. This would seem the quintessential form of a non-coercive economy.

In a market, where prices are set either by supply and demand, or at least some material consideration, there is always the possibility of one person being forced into a contract by circumstance, without any practical choice.

I consider certain kinds of contract, including those of rent and interest, to be coercive because rather than just agreeing to owe some capital or labor in exchange for some other capital or labor, they require you reflectively agree to agree to owe more, and not even in exchange for anything more, just in "exchange" for the other party allowing you to keep what they've already given you. It's in the same category as selling oneself into slavery: it's giving up not just a first-order liberty (by taking on an obligation) or claim (by transferring property), but a second-order immunity (from having new obligations placed on oneself, or one's property transferred away from oneself). You can't freely give up your freedom like that; and it's not even really a trade at all, which are entirely on a first-order level. — Pfhorrest

These considerations would mainly apply to compound interest though, wouldn't they? A fixed interest rate, as the Roman Interesse, is similar to the profit a trader makes on a deal. It's payment for loosing access to the good, and therefore trading opportunities.

Rent can also similarly be considered a payment for the person owning the capital to reimburse for the loss of ability to otherwise use it. This only seems a problem when it applies to your essentials for living, such as shelter, and when capital is owned for the sole purpose of renting it, at which point the above justification for rent stops working.

A market with no enforcement of contracts at all would be strictly freer, yes. Though I'm not sure it would be strictly better; I think some contracts are morally justifiable. Some narrow limitations on freedom are better than the alternative: I shouldn't be free to punch you in the face, for example, or to burn down your house (even if nobody's in it). — Pfhorrest

Well, I disagree in principle to any notion of freedom that includes the "freedom to punch someone in the face". Historically, such a conception of freedom is linked to the slave holders freedom (dominion) over slaves, and shouldn't be the basis for the relations of equals. But that is perhaps the subject for another thread.

And yeah, not only the Islamic world of the middle ages but much of it today, as well as the Catholic world of the middle ages, have/had strict bans on usury, and I think that's great, except that they had a huge gaping hole: they only cared about money-lending, not any other kind of capital-lending. Renting out housing, for example, is perfectly okay by them. So there are convoluted contracts involving a combination of money lent "interest-free", property rental, and insurance, which replicate the effects of money lending at interest, and circumvent the whole ban, making the whole thing pretty toothless. — Pfhorrest

Yes, I guess the holes come from the fact that renting out housing wasn't really something the religious movements first cared about, since they mostly originated outside of urban environments where such practices by and large didn't exist. The popular movements of the time were much more concerned with people loosing their freedom, becoming debt peons, due to interest bearing loans.

Where are the stats that people are more likely to move from middle to lower class than middle to upper middle? I feel like if this were true we'd be seeing an increasingly large lower class which I don't think we're seeing. Keep in mind the "bottom 20%" of income earners is not the bottom 20% population-wise. It's actually a significantly smaller percentage. — BitconnectCarlos

Stats for which country? That the middle class is, broadly speaking "in trouble" has been a common theme for years. Whether or not the middle class is shrinking or being "squeezed" depends on the way you calculate.

In my view the thing that makes such markets unfree is primarily the existence of rent and interest, which are only tenable institutions because of state enforcement of the contracts that create them. I think there are good deontological reasons why those kinds of contracts, as well as others, are not valid and so should not be enforced. The reaction of the market in the absence of such enforcement will then lead to significantly more egalitarian results. — Pfhorrest

But that doesn't seem related to the freedom of the market. Or, rather, since I don't really know in what sense a market could be free, the proper statement is that this seems a very specific definition of free.

What about the state not enforcing any contracts, a system where contracts are governed by trust. Such systems exist, but with some exceptions aren't usually called markets. The Islamic world of the middle ages apparently had well working markets with no state enforcement (and also strict bans on usury).

I think the mobility issue now is less that people cannot move upwards from middle class, but that you're more likely to move down than up and, once down from middle class, you're unlikely to get up again.

it's a result of state intervention to protect capital and wouldn't happen in a truly free market — Pfhorrest

What would a "truly" free market consist of, given that, historically, markets are state creations?

Sorry, I don't follow. Are there molecular intentions as contrasted with atomic ones? My guess is you're making a reference to the complexity of the moral sphere and that my take on it is too simplistic and fails to capture or address morality's breadth and depth.

Well, I agree with you that there's more to morality in particular and human personality in general but the point is, if I may be so bold as to say so, the underlying idea of altruism is rather simple - others must be more important than yourself. Whether this fails to acknowledge the intricacies of the "web of relations" or not is a different story. All I'm concerned with, at the moment, is showing how, within the framework of existing moral paradigms, true altruism isn't just possible but is alive and well, needing a mathematical perspective to be seen. — TheMadFool

Well, what I argue is that it's problematic to make the distinction between yourself and others in this way. Neither the sentence "others must be more important than yourself" nor the sentence "I am more important than others" are true.

In a community of mutually dependent beings, like humans are inclined to be, doing something for others is also always doing something for yourself. It is only in large, individualistic societies that you can come up with the notions of a "purely" self-interested or altruistic act. But even then you're imagining yourself as a being with no social relations, which probably isn't true.

Are you referring to my attempt to, in what in the eyes of many will appear not only disgusting but also in complete contradiction to the spirit of morality, reduce altruism and by extension, all of morality, to nothing more than a simple calculation, the likes of which we breeze through with the least bit of care in our daily lives? — TheMadFool

No, I am referring to the general idea of thinking about human interactions as governed by opposing, atomistic intentions such as self-interest vs. altruism. So that one might end up with an intention made up of "pure altruism", which would be equal and opposite to "pure self-intetest".

And this leads to the sense of morality you describe here:

At this point, all I can say is that quantification (in your terms "commecialisation") is baked into the very notion of good and bad (morality) for the selling point of morality is that good is better than bad and "better" is a word that is, from its definition, inherently quantitative. — TheMadFool

But perhaps morality isn't about quantifying, as in a commercial relationship, the loss and profit.

The whole idea of "absolute altruism" or "true selfishness" is somewhat strange. It seems to presuppose an atomistic view of both persons and their intentions where there are no lasting relations between either.

Your calculation actually is quite apt here, because in a sense the notion is based on a commercialised view of human intentions, where you could calculate something like a distinct "altruism value".

If we take persons to exist in a web of relations to one another, with complex intentions that take the web into account, the problem of "true" or "absolute" altruism vanishes. Because it's then obvious that such an act is merely an abstraction, with real acts always affecting relations among the web in different ways.

The question is why you'd think freedom, in a social sense, is the absence of rules. For one, the very nature of a rule is that it assumes you're free.

I see it rather as framing the foundations of commerce in social terms. — Pfhorrest

Freedom is rather central to our moral systems though, so I'd argue more than just commerce is at stake.

Such that if you are doing nothing, you are doing nothing wrong, which is as it should be. — Pfhorrest

Is it? Doing nothing is already a value judgement. You're only really doing nothing when you're not conscious. So refering to doing other things as nothing is already judging them as irrelevant to the question. But can your everyday conduct, which falls under the "nothing" here, really be ignored when talking about freedom?

The problem stems from there being such a difference between the beggar and Bezos in the first place, which my modification to the usual contractual-propertarian libertarianism is meant to address. If a society's deontic principles result in the already-rich getting richer and the already-poor getting poorer, rather than everyone trending toward the middle over time all else being equal, then something somewhere has been done wrong, and I identify that "something done wrong" as primarily the institutes of rent and interest. — Pfhorrest

But even if Jeff Bezos and the beggar were trending towards the middle, that'd still not address the imbalance in their relation to each other.

For the beggar, the ability to stop others from disposing of his property is very limited, to the point of being almost entirely theoretical. Meanwhile, for Jeff Bezos, that ability is so wide ranging that it might potentially rob others of the essentials they need to survive.

It's all well and good to conclude that both persons have the same theoretical ability to exercise their freedom of will. But this is also true regardless of the actual laws. Even slaves have freedom of will and the ability to make this freedom practical through actions, the problem is that they face very different consequences.

In practice perhaps, but not in the structure of the contract itself. A mortgage contract doesn't say that you may not enter into other kinds of contracts. It does, however, say that upon certain conditions you pre-emptively agree to owe more money than you've already agreed to owe (interest), which would be invalid under my principles. — Pfhorrest

This seems a fairly thin justification. After all, you know in advance just what interest you own, and hence you're not under some arbitrary authority of the lender. The problem is entire practical, i.e. interest reduces your financial means and thereby limits your future ability to contract. But if your monthly food costs 80% of your monthly income, your freedom is similarly circumscribed regardless of rent or interest.

In legal terms, neither rent nor interest impact your ability to contract further. They only do so in practice.

But... but, you refrained from actually giving your wording of it. — god must be atheist

Can't we just use the most common definition?

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

The usual conception of a maximally free society allows maximal liberty, except as limited by claims to property, including one’s own body (“that’s me/mine, you can’t do that unless I consent”) as well as maximal immunity except as limited by the power to contract (nobody can change your liberties or claims unless you agree to it). — Pfhorrest

This usual conception is bourgeois in origin though, and it shows in the way it frames social relations in commercial terms. That is as a system where the only positive relationship between people is a contract, and outside of this you only have purely negative relations to other members in the society, i.e. the only obligations are those to refrain from a specific set of actions.

It ignores the way humans are dependent on mutual aid from one another, and can thus treat a homeless beggar as free as Jeff Bezos.

And I also advocate a similar exception to the power to contract, saying that people are immune from contracts that would limit their ability to exercise their power to contract. This not only means that you can’t sell yourself into slavery, but also things like non-compete clauses, and broadly all contract of rent and interest, fall afoul of this exception. — Pfhorrest

But do not all ongoing relationship limit your power to contract? Or even large individual purchases? Taking up a mortgage to buy a house is a very significant limitation to my further ability to contract.

And this also puts wage labor in a problematic position, because part of a contract as a laborer is that you place yourself under the authority of another person in a limited and specific way. While the obligation is generally not enforceable in industrialised countries, it's still there.

Freedom is removal of restrction. Less restrictions, more freedoms.

Absolute freedom is the removal of all restrictions. Including the restriction of absolute freedom. — god must be atheist

I recognise this is tongue-in-cheek, but I think this isn't entirely absurd. Or rather, it hints at a real problem with defining freedom as the absence of restrictions. It would imply that you generally have the freedom to kill and enslave others, and laws against this must be justifiable as restrictions on your freedom.

My understanding of the CI is "do any action if and only if you think everyone in the world would not disbenefit from it, even if all and everyone did the same action."
Please agree with me if you find my quote acceptable, or true. If this is not acceptable, and not true, please respond with your working definition of CI written in your response here. — god must be atheist

Kant doesn't talk about benefits or disbenefits when establishing the groundwork for the CI. And it's also important to consider that the CI is not a tool to judge outward actions.

There are several layers to analysis within the CI. The question of whether a maxim includes an implicit or explicit contradiction, i.e. whether it can theoretically be universalised, and the question of whether you would want it to be universalised.

Only the second part is directly reminiscent of the golden rule, and the conceptual basis is different.

In this I regard the child as not having a choice. — Brett

In that case, you have found a contradiction. The maxim that everyone should marry who they choose, including children, includes a contradiction because it robs the children of that very choice. It cannot be universalised and hence is not moral.

Where an ideology is based and develops from a moral position it seems to me that the moral has been drawn into service of the idea. Which means it’s no longer a choice to be made by the individual but virtually a maxim to live by. If the choice is no longer made by the individual then that person is no longer free and if they are not free to choose between to alternative outcomes then they are not capable of making a moral position. — Brett

But an ideology never actually has complete control over your thoughts. Ideologies don't permanently turn people into zombies. The abstract ability to choose is still there.

If we stay with Kant, it doesn't make much of a difference whether you act in accordance with some interpretation of biblical teaching or on a principle of pure Hedonism. Neither would conform to the CI, and so neither would be moral.

It seems to me that the one thing we all have in common is reason. Reason cannot very according to culture, can it? There are no degrees of reason like skin colour for instance. — Brett

That is certainly the Kantian position.

My query is that if one should be able to marry whoever one wants, and that is a universal maxim, is it moral if it involves marriage between an adult and a child in a culture that approves of it? — Brett

That depends on what reason tells you about children and their reason. Do you include children in your notion of all subjects? If yes, then could this be made a universal law, even from the perspective of the children?

The German authorities could just arrest the King, apparently he likes Bavaria a lot. Could imprison him in Neuschwanstein until he repents, or drown him in the lake, King Ludwig style.

On a more serious note, @Paul Edwards, have you considered that not all inhabitants of Thailand think the same thing, and that there may even be a majority of people who disagree with your notion of free speech? At the very least, a large majority is likely to be adamantly against foreign occupation. So what about their rights and freedoms?

But when you say “ CI is something you do, for yourself” do you mean you choose it yourself or you do it not for yourself but for others. Does it make you a moral person because you do it for yourself? — Brett

The core idea behind the CI is to dissolve the boundary between yourself and "others" by imagining yourself to simultaneously be every other person. One might say you turn yourself into the metaphysical all-encompassing logos of old.

Instead of acting in a specific interest (yours or that of any other person), you act solely on the basis of duty to that overarching reason. But because that reason does not actually exist as a force outside of you, the duty is really only to yourself. It arises when you recognise yourself as a subject and is a direct consequence of thinking through the implications.

So it's not something you do for yourself as in a self-help philosophy. It's not something pleasurable or fulfilling, necessarily. It's just what's dictated by your reason if you consider what it means to be a subject that shares a world with other subjects.

I still want to find out if morality is different from ideology. What is ideology? What is the source of ideology? — Brett

If we start with etymology, the source of the term ideology is the term idea, which is also related to the ideal. Ideas are not things. They're abstract thoughts. A major category of thoughts.

An ideology is a collection of ideas that is weaved so tightly that it becomes an overwhelming framework for everything you think and do. This is usually a bad thing, but equality, freedom, humanity, are also ideas. So there might be a truly moral ideology, one which only leads to maxims which conform with the CI. Indeed Kant certainly wove a complex system out of ideas, so maybe the CI is, as I said earlier, itself an ideology.

But this seems perilously close to semantics, wordplay. What do you actually want to know? Why is the difference between ideology and morality important? Which real situation do you want to resolve?

However to use a categorical imperative as a means turns it into a hypothetical imperative. A categorical imperative serves ends only. The moral crime of killing is not the means to be something, it is the end in itself. — Brett

It's sounds a bit paradoxical, true. But the relation between the categorical imperative and freedom is not a means - ends relationship as with hypothetical imperatives.

A hypothetical imperative starts with a desired state of affairs - e.g. "I want to be rich" and then gives you the required steps. They are imperative only so long as you follow the goal.

But there is no concrete goal associated with freedom that you can reach in a number of steps. It's not a state of affairs. It's a way of being. And this way of being is following the imperative of reason categorically.

Except the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative is reason in action and this reason is universal. — Brett

But acting in accordance with the CI is something you do, for yourself. It's not framed as a divine mandate you have to follow. Kant invites you to use it as a means to turn yourself into a moral, and therefore a free, person. That's why I call it a personal standard. The end goal is your freedom.

Can ideology really create a moral position? — Brett

I am not sure. It depends on whether there is a "correct" ideology to follow. One might call Kant's approach the ideology of freedom. But the term has a negative, oppressive connotation.

But being moral us making the right decision, and, according to Kant, — Brett

Yes, but only you know what your maxims actually are, and you must decide for yourself what is and is not the right decision. There is no higher authority here than your own reason. And there is no-one who puts you under any obligation except yourself.

That seems reasonable, but if we apply it universally then it means an adult male can marry whoever he wants. It doesn’t say anything about age or consent. Nor does it address cultural differences, — Brett

The categorical imperative does not account for cultural differences. It's fundamentally a personal stabdard, it's supposed to help you make your own moral decisions. It doesn't apply directly to judging the conduct of others. Doing so would be notoriously difficult anyways, seeing as you'd have to guess what maxim they're operating under.

As to your other objections, appropriate limits can be worked in. Whenever you translate a maxim into a single precise statement, you're going to loose some information / need to add a lot of caveats, since in your own mind, you'll usually have a continuum of connected maxims, not a set of precise and isolated statements.

Kantianism might be an ideology but it’s not a moral. — Brett

It does include a moral system, as I think all ideologies do. I don't know what "a moral" is exactly, unless you mean the metaphorical message of fables and tales.

They may say they frame their their decision in moral terms, but is it really moral in Kant’s terms or just ideology. — Brett

I think any maxim that references a sacred text which only some people accept to be actually sacred would fail the categorical imperative, on the basis that a maxim that seeks to impose one of several religious view to the exclusion of all others is inherently contradictory.

There is an interesting issue with the CI though when it comes to views that are universal to everyone you might conceivably be in a relation with. If everyone agrees that the Bible is the true word of God, no exceptions, it'd be hard to conclude that following the Bible in all questions cannot be universalised.

I don’t know if a moral can be based on ideology. Is it still a moral decision? — Brett

Do you mean here whether the decision happens in a moral framework at all or whether it is the correct decision given a specific framework (e.g. the CI)?

If it’s a moral decision then what would the Categorical Imperative be that makes it a moral choice, and therefore the right choice? — Brett

The categorical imperative deals with maxims, not individual choices. The most obvious maxim to satisfy the categorical imperative seems to be that, between reasonable adults, one should be allowed to marry whoever one wants.

I think what I’m trying to do is work out what are we addressing social issues with, are we addressing them morally or ideologically? — Brett

Well, what is an ideology? Ideologies are usually systems of thought we name as "isms". Fascism, communism, fundamentalism. Is Kantianism an ideology?

What defines an ideology in my mind is that it dominates your thinking, your worldview. This includes your sense of morality. It seems to me that how you answer moral questions is usually the best indicator to whether you follow an ideology.

A Christian Fundamentalists who is opposed to gay marriage will obviously frame their decision in moral terms. For them it's a moral question with an obvious answer. So I think the proper question isn't between morality and ideology. It's between a morality based on ideas and one based on an ideology.

In theory then you would have to apply non-action to everything you do. Can you really see that as the moral choice when you do it sometimes and don’t other times? — Brett

Action and non-action are constructs. In reality, while you're conscious, you are always doing both. Where action and non-action come in is when we set up certain obligations or prohibitions. Then we have to decide whether you did something you shouldn't have or failed to do something you should. The focus in that case is on a certain sequence of events which should have happened, and whether what you did was action or non-action depends on whether it was your duty to further or stop that sequence.