However, why can't the circumstances be a part of the law? How do the supporters of Kant decide just how generic or specific the categorical imperative is? — BlueBanana

I would say some conception of circumstances *must* be part of the formulation of the maxim.

As I recall, this is an old line of critique of Kant's categorical imperative. On its own the categorical imperative is (at best) a sort of empty formalism. We need something else to provide content to our moral judgments.

I suppose each Kantian fills in the blank his own way, drawing as much as he can manage from the rest of Kant's imaginative philosophy.

This is supposed to mean that the circumstances of the action shouldn't matter. — BlueBanana

What makes you think this?
There is nothing to say that the exact circumstances of the action are not important - far from it.
The point about the CI is that it suggests you do not make special exceptions for yourself.
If you think that killing is okay in some circumstances, then those same circumstances equally apply to yourself.
E.g. being hung for murder means that you should have to face the same penalty.

That's a new interpretation to me. According to this view, would lying to a murderer to save the victim then be considered moral because of the circumstances? Kant rejected this in Kritik der praktischen Vernunft.

That's a new interpretation to me. According to this view, would lying to a murderer to save the victim then be considered moral because of the circumstances? — BlueBanana

Depends if he thought that doing this was generally okay. For example. Killing is generally okay if you are in a state of war; or a butcher killing an animal. He is saying that soldiers fighting wars are able to ignore the rule against killing/ The CI insists that since you accept that it also means that enemy soldiers attacking Austria also enjoy that exception to the rule of killing, and may kill Austrians morally.
See how this works?

According to this view, would lying to a murderer to save the victim then be considered moral because of the circumstances? Kant rejected this in Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. — BlueBanana

And here's the text.

http://www.unc.edu/courses/2009spring/plcy/240/001/Kant.pdf

Not too long and not too hard to read.Understanding? A little more difficult.

I read Kant's argument as his claim that the duty to tell the truth is absolute (categorical), and incidentally the ground of all social contract. I find sense in this, in that if I can as a matter of right decide to lie (for any reason), then the duty to tell the truth must be equivocal instead of categorical. This lie, he argues, is a greater injury, not least because intentional, than the mere possibility of accidental injury that might result from telling the truth. Greater because the lie is an injury done, and to the society as a whole, while the truth can only possibly - maybe - cause harm, and that only individually.

This latter idea of possibility is, simply and obviously, based in the idea that the injurious act is not caused by the telling of truth, but by the subsequent presumably free act of the actor.

Still, though, it's hard to swallow. I find a flaw in Kant's reasoning. The duty to tell the truth, according to Kant's argument, presupposes not that you know the truth; indeed, Kant argues that the truth you tell may very well not be born out by fact (the victim may have gone out the back door); it needs merely be the subjective truth.

The subjective truth, as subjective and in itself, cannot possibly be a categorical ground for anything (how could it be?). What is left that is categorical? The only truth you can know, in Kant's example (and in a very large class of examples), is that you don't know.

And what's happened somewhere in here is that Kant's truth has been eviscerated, reduced from an external gold standard for judging a behaviour (did I tell the truth?) to being the mere carrier of a standard of comportment. The logic of thing, that makes it categorical, has disappeared. The trick is that because Kant did not trouble to define his truth, but instead left it to be "understood," the whole argument got away from him.

From this it appears the categorical imperative with respect to truth is in actuality a duty to be honest - sounds the same but different. What is the honest reply to the murderer at the door? One is, "I don't know." Or there are lot of others. It merely depends on the axes - considerations - that frame your answer.

And by round-about argument we've arrived at a conclusion I've always thought applied to categorical imperatives: that they are general and sought for application to specific purpose. In this respect of a fitting, finding the right CI becomes an art. At which all that we can do, is to do the best we can.

Kant's pirmary objective is to make moral laws as immutable & universal as the so-called laws of nature. Have you seen anything, anything at all, violate the law of universal gravitation? In Kant's eye an inanimate object obeying every law of nature applicable to it to the tee is perfectly moral as it has, and probably never did and never will, make an exception of itself (re the categorical imperative).

Worth noting is that miracles are, as per Hume, violations of the laws of nature i.e. the divine/god(s) have, for the most part of recorded theology, been associated with, let's just say, illegal activities such as resurrections, walking on water, so on and so forth.

God(s) is/are outlaw(s) in Kantian ethics. Loki (the god of mischief) comes to mind. We need to make (an) arrest(s), pronto!

Kant's pirmary objective is to make moral laws as immutable & universal as the so-called laws of nature. Have you seen anything, anything at all, violate the law of universal gravitation? In Kant's eye an inanimate object obeying every law of nature applicable to it to the tee is perfectly moral as it has, and probably never did and never will, make an exception of itself (re the categorical imperative).

Worth noting is that miracles are, as per Hume, violations of the laws of nature i.e. the divine/god(s) have, for the most part of recorded theology, been associated with, let's just say, illegal activities such as resurrections, walking on water, so on and so forth.

God(s) is/are outlaw(s) in Kantian ethics. Loki (the god of mischief) comes to mind. We need to make (an) arrest(s), pronto! — Agent Smith

I find the two different methods of comparing observation to laws interesting.

On the one had you have the stance that if there is a violation of what we know to be the law, then the violation is wrong. A lot of moral law theories that claim objective moral laws fall under this.

On the other hand you have the stance that if there is a violation of what we know to be the law, our knowledge of the law is wrong, and it is time to come up with a new theory. The scientific method comes under this.

At it's core is the stance of whether objects can violate natural laws? On the one side is the answer "no," hence if you see a violation of a natural law, your understanding of the natural law is wrong. The other side says "yes," and if you see a violation of natural law, then you can judge the object's behaviour wrong.

Kant's primary objective is to make moral laws as immutable & universal as the so-called laws of nature. Have you seen anything, anything at all, violate the law of universal gravitation? In Kant's eye an inanimate object obeying every law of nature applicable to it to the tee is perfectly moral as it has, and probably never did and never will, make an exception of itself (re the categorical imperative). — Agent Smith

Good point. The flip side of absolute natural laws is that they are not relative. This may seem obvious, but similar elimination of relativity from more modern Aristotelian philosophical models would be significant, and enlightened God-free religions should then leap to adopt such simple and beguiling alternative.

Can this brilliant proposal of a natural ethical universal work, or is it only acceptable to a degree in any conceivable circumstances? From a classical relativist perspective, the answer is good try but no. And that is why endless practical scenarios can be introduced to demonstrate why not.

Like Daniel Bonevac, says in a video, there are two kinds of approaches to morality:

1. The Ideal: Everything's picture-postcard perfect! The world and ethics are fully compatible, they dovetail into each other - a marriage made in heaven :wink:

2. The Non-Ideal: Bonevac uses the word "broken" - the world, as it was/is not exactly an environment conducive to morality, even if it were dialed down to the barest minimum. The question then, he says, is "how do we fix it?"

That's a new interpretation to me. According to this view, would lying to a murderer to save the victim then be considered moral because of the circumstances? Kant rejected this in Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. — BlueBanana

Murderer at the door example of Kant. Always wrong to lie even to save someone's life.