Hume does say that cause and effect is not observable. We can only observe events following each other, not the causal connection. However, we are in the habit of noticing a pattern and therefore we assume that things will be repeated in the same fashion every time. This assumption is unfounded, but it is useful. (We don’t jump off cliffs believing we can fly next time we try.)

I would guess Hume also found Newton useful because his “laws” stipulated a pattern that could be used for developing practical invention, without there being any ultimate truth to those laws. He didn’t ultimately believe in gravity, but probably found the belief useful for practical purposes, so he could safely praise Newton.

Still, his theory is disturbing because whatever he says, of course we all believe in gravity and we really think one ball causes the other to roll even though that is not strictly observable. Luckily, Kant saves our obvious belief with a nice twist. He agrees with Hume that causation is not observable, but he places it in us as a pre-existing, pre-programmed category and thereby secures its reality. Causation really exists, not in itself, but as a necessity in us.

Certainly, good action and good intention are very different. A good action can occur by accident and be performed by a villain - it just requires a good result. It is also true that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

We don’t know the ultimate outcome of our actions and the idea that “the ends justify the means” have frequently led to an end-result that was vastly different from anything that was initially imagined.

We should not try to predict what is unpredictable, but often we can quite easily predict the immediate outcome of our action, and then it would naïve and even immoral to deny one’s responsibility by sticking to some preconceived rule. The infamous example about the murderer who asks for the whereabouts of your friend is a case in point, but examples don’t need to be that farfetched. If your child is very hungry (but not necessarily dying from hunger) and you don’t have money available at the moment, it may be a moral thing to do to steal a piece of bread. Here there’s no gap between intention and outcome. There is no doubt that the outcome will be what you intended: When the child eats bread, it will for sure not be hungry anymore.

Sometimes the gap is greater, I admit, but for practical purposes, if it’s overwhelmingly likely that the next result in the causal chain can be predicted, it may be safe to consider intention and outcome to be almost identical. Then the action has moral worth.

If the outcome is very unpredictable it would certainly be immoral to act only on good intention. For example, killing a lot of people to start a revolution that in your dreams will lead to a glorious society. I agree that the torture example is debatable. We can construct scenarios where the likelihood of the wished-for result to come true will vary.

Don’t ask me where I want to draw the line for how much risk is acceptable. Even if you could hardly accept any risk at all, there are enough conceivable cases where the risk would be virtually zero, and that’s enough to prove the point: It may be moral to act on good intentions even when they don’t conform to moral rules.

I still don’t know why you insist on calling the man who follows rules a moral man. I want to contest the notion that morality is about rules.

Your own examples illustrate that perfectly. There can be no rule against torture for the very reason you mention. Torture might conceivably be defensible if it could save a lot of lives. A rule has the form “never do x!”, but we seem to agree that it’s not possible to say “never torture!” If we allow for exceptions to the rule, it is strictly speaking not a rule anymore. It may be a rule of thumb, a general guidance that makes ethical decisions easier because it would be inconvenient to go through a detailed weighing of alternatives every time we act. But the ultimate judgment whether something is right or wrong, doesn’t rest on rules - just like in the torture example.

Your moral man, who follows rules, does something immoral if he in your example indirectly causes the death of a lot of people.

Define crazy risk. And why take any risk? Why does the "crazy" matter if the risk itself is acceptable? — tim wood

You should act so that the outcome of the action is LIKELY to produce a good result (more good than bad). "Not likely" means that the risk is too high.

Quotes from Kant’s “Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals”:
“Nothing (…) can be called good, without qualification, except a good will”
“the notion of duty, which includes that of a good will”
“he tears himself out of this dead insensibility, and performs the action without any inclination to it, but simply from duty, then first has his action its genuine moral worth”
From which this follows:
moral worth = action simply from duty = good will = good.
That is, the ultimately good man acts simply from duty and he doesn’t enjoy his good action

The virtue of this man is achieving balance between extremes, including extremes of virtue! In any case, certainly he would not choose to make 100 enemies happy at the expense of even two of his compatriots - or do you think he would? — tim wood

The virtuous man achieves balance between extremes, not too much and not too little, as in courage being the balance between cowardice and foolhardiness. Since virtue IS the balance, there can be no exaggerated extreme of virtue itself.
I didn’t say Aristotle is a utilitarian (although he’s certainly not a deontologist). Whatever he would choose in that example would be what he thought would be the most virtuous thing to do.

There’s no real reason to distinguish between the good man and the moral man. The meaning of moral (or ethical) is whatever is good human conduct. A good man is moral, and whenever he acts well, he acts morally.

Your definition of a moral man seems to be “someone who follows moral rules” or “a follower of rule or duty ethics”. In my opinion such a person is neither good nor moral. When blindly following rules, a lot of the time one knowingly ends up hurting people and doing more bad than good, and that must necessarily be the opposite of good conduct.

In utilitarian ethics there are no rules and no abstract “you should”. A successful follower of this system would be a moral man, in my opinion.

But if you insist on making a distinction between the good and the moral man, one could maybe say the good man doesn’t necessarily have to think about morality in a systematic way. He could be naturally good (and virtuous) without needing to explain what he does.

Another possible distinction could be to equate a good man with a virtuous man and demand he should have his emotions attached to his good conduct, whereas a moral man simply does the right thing. But this distinction also seems somewhat forced.

Your response is helpful to me — Valentinus

Thank you. I'm happy to hear that.

In that case you are "acting contrary to your own perception of the good"; but, maybe you mean to include that among "shortcomings", and there's no real disagreement here. — Pfhorrest

That's right. I call that a shortcoming.

There is no greater principle of the good other than what you might want to put into. This is not to say that the good is relative or that you can’t be wrong about it, it just means that whenever you make an honest assessment about you think you should do, you are at the same time deciding what you think is good. If you say: I should rather take care of my family than some random starving children in Africa, that means you think taking care of your family would be good and sacrificing them for the benefit of strangers would be bad. It’s not like you think it’s a bad thing to do, but you are doing it anyway out of some vicious urge that you have.

If you recognize that you are not as good as you could have been, that only implies that you realize you have shortcomings not that you act contrary to your own perception of the good.

There is no tightrope to walk. The good man never has to sacrifice good for safety, because a reasonable amount of safety would naturally be included in the good. It would be bad to take crazy risks.

There’s an irreconcilable difference between the Kantian notion of a good man and the one who emerges from Aristotelian virtue ethics. Since for Kant only the will can be good in itself, anything that subtracts from the purity of the will makes the person less good. The pure will wants to do something only because it is good and not for any other reason. If a person not only wants to act righteously out of duty but also enjoys doing it, his will is not pure, and he is not necessarily a good man. If someone hates doing what is right and almost feels sick when doing it, but still does it, that person, for Kant, is the ultimately good man.

I find this idea repulsive. Someone who hates mankind could then be good. The person who acts entirely without passion, obeying some self-made law like a pre-programmed machine would be good.

The Aristotelian good man enjoys doing what is good, and he has trained himself to feel pleasure when seeing other people pleased. The more he loves mankind, the more he feels the urge to act righteously and make people happy.

Doesn’t this also agree with our common sense?
A good mother does everything for her child because she loves the child, right?

Given the chance, does goodness require he do? — tim wood

Yes, having a disposition for something means that when the relevant circumstance occurs, the thing will occur. If you are disposed to catching a cold you are very likely to do so when the weather changes. The stronger the disposition, the more likely it will occur given the circumstances. A very good man will be very likely to do good when given the chance and an absolutely good man will do it with absolute certainty.

that good appears likely to be always conditioned on what they decide is good, which decisions tend to relativism — tim wood

No, good as in “a good man” is in no way relative. What a good plumber is, is not relative to what you happen to expect from a plumber. If you expect your plumber to treat your leg injury you are simply wrong in your perception of what his tasks may be. Likewise, a good man is not what you just happen to find good about a man. “Good” always means: that which makes a thing work the way it is supposed to.


There’s a difference between a good act and a good person. A good act I define in the utilitarian fashion as whatever produces more happiness than unhappiness. A bad man may very well, more or less by chance, perform good acts and a good man may be unlucky, but it is their vice or virtue, their disposition, that defines them as persons.

Something is good whenever it performs its function well, when it does well compared to what might reasonably be expected of it. I find my computer good because it can do what I need it to do. It can’t hammer nails well, but that’s not a part of its functions, so it doesn’t make it any worse.

A good plumber is good at fixing the pipes. A good bus driver drives the bus safely and punctually. The word “good” has a definite meaning in each case.

So when asked what a good person is, we have to consider the function of a human being as such; something that would make any person good regardless of his chosen profession.

Now the task we all have in common as human beings is our dealing with our fellow creatures. We can do that well or badly depending on our disposition to make other people satisfied and contribute to their happiness. But just as the best plumber is not necessarily the one who fixes the most pipes, but the one who has the ability to do it, a good person is not necessarily the one who brings the most happiness. (A political leader is in a better position to do good or bad, but that doesn’t make him good or bad.) A good person is the one who is disposed to make other people happier whether or not he has the chance to do so. That is what the ancient Greeks called virtue.

If a coherent set of ideas has an element of revelation in it, it can be classified as a religion, if not it is a philosophy.

We could also count a definite system of worship as a requirement, but that may be considered a part of the revelation in the present. People get in contact with the divinity to achieve enlightenment as opposed to reaching for it through thought alone. (Of course, Buddhism doesn’t speak of a divinity in the strict sense, but it deals with some sort of universal power and that amounts to the same.)

All other distinguishing features of a religion that we may think of, an established canon, a perception of holiness, a priesthood etc. only underscore this point. It is all meant to reveal what is beyond.

Philosophies are hatched by human philosophers alone and make no claim to divine origin of their thoughts. That is not to say that a philosopher can’t refer to divine inspiration and take some of their axioms from religion. Their distinguishing features are still pure thought.

Sometimes a religion can lead into philosophy as in the case the case of Christian church fathers, Muslim Sufis and of course also Buddhist philosophy. It may also go the other way as in Pythagoreanism and Taoism. But the distinction, revelation versus pure thought, still keeps them apart.

I wonder who you have heard making that claim. I can’t imagine anyone seriously saying that what is inescapable is good. You can’t escape from prison, so prison is good? You are destined to be slave, so slavery is good? Life is misery, so misery is good??

What you often notice in people, though, is an incapacity to imagine things being different from what they are. It hardly makes sense to complain if a different condition is not even imaginable. You don’t complain of the grass being green even if it’s not your favorite color. You don’t object to having to eat beans every day if that’s the only food you know to exist.

It is indeed often the case that people like what they have just because they can’t envision anything else. This is far from being a philosophical position, though. The essence of philosophy is exactly to be willing to examine everything and not take anything for granted. We should never assume that something is good just because it appears to be an inescapable reality.

The common saying that “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, is probably true, but that doesn’t mean that that thing itself is good. It’s just to say that nothing is so bad that there’s no good in it.

Reality wouldn’t need a qualification, would it? It is simply what is, what exists out there independent of any human mind. Of course, the moment we try to know it, we attempt to get it into our mind and then it’s not independent anymore. In other words, we don’t know if it is the truth, or we don’t know if we know what we think we know.

I don’t see how the two kinds of reality that you suggest can be THE reality. They are rather interpretations of reality that may or may not correspond to the “real” reality.

What you call “progressive reality” sounds like – the interpretation of reality that we get through direct observation of nature, and “observational reality” sounds like – the interpretation of reality that we get through more or less reliable information from other people.

if truth is a native of our ideology — True Point

Is it? Do you put truth inside our ideology as in inside our mindset? Nothing is the truth just because it’s in our mind, is it?

But let’s suppose it is. Are you asking why we rely on second hand information when other people’s “truths” are just interpretations whereas our own truths are the real thing since they are actually in our mind?

Much as I subjectively agree with you, green being my favorite color, I have a hard time defending it objectively. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, however.

Some people seem to think that certain opinions, like the choice of color is entirely subjective and therefore it can’t be discussed. They get angry if you dare to suggest that their cherished individual choice may have psychological reasons that originate outside of themselves. Often another color, a different piece of music or even another taste for food might have been an objectively better choice if we had not been biased through our habits.

Since we are used to seeing one color in a particular context, we are unfortunately not able to look at it objectively anymore. Maybe is obsessed with the Red Scare whereas nostalgically remembers his comrades.

To find the objectively best color the site dictator would have to clarify to himself what the purpose of this site might be. Is it just to make the poor members feel good, or is to provoke them to write interesting comments? At least the red color has incited us to contribute to this thread, but that may be a rather unfortunate outcome…

Good. It seems like you agree with me that legal rights and moral rights are different. I’m sorry for harping on this since it’s no longer a matter of what advice to give Stanley in this concrete case – I’m also inclined to advise him to withhold the money. However, I still react to the language you are using when you call it a “moral right”. Please forgive me if you think it is irrelevant, but I think it is important.

I think Stanley has grasped something essential when recognizing that it is a dilemma and racking his brain over what to do. His brothers may have been quick to play the “moral right” card and thereby removing all doubt from their mind. It’s a common device for the ethically lazy to arrogantly state that they have a right and in this way escape from tiresome pondering.

I’d prefer that we never used the expression “a moral right”, at least not for specific situations. A right is inherently a legal term and denotes benefits that the law happens to grant us. It only considers what the law has already defined as relevant and therefore it’s possible to reach a final conclusion. But what moral law or laws do you invoke in this case? There aren’t any. The best we can do, and that’s exactly what you are doing, is to weigh the circumstances and use the limited information we have, to reach a sufficiently accurate conclusion, not an absolute one. There will always be doubt because there are no absolute moral rights.

Stanley said he made bad investments, he doesn't respect Stanley, and he withholds affection if Stanley doesn't do what he asks.
That's why I said the money is Stanley's, morally and legally. — Hanover

Could you please clarify. Do you agree that a moral and a legal right are two different things? Someone can have the moral right to something but not the legal and vice versa. Right?

In this case there’s no debate about the legal issue, the money legally belongs to Stanley, but I don’t understand how you can state in such a matter of fact way that “It's Stanley's money. All his. No one has any moral (..) right to it but Stanley.” You may be right in the end, but for such an absolute statement we would need to take a whole range of issues into consideration. The facts that are already given may suffice to give Stanley a clear advice, but that’s not the same as saying that he has an unambiguous moral right to the money.

I also have some money. It’s legally mine, no doubt about that. But in this world, how can I make an absolute moral claim to it. There are people starving, but I just bought a new iphone etc. I may not have done something terrible and certainly nothing different from most people around me, but I can’t say that I’m a hundred percent on moral safe ground. I don’t want to state in absolute terms that I have a moral right to my money since I partly got it through circumstances that were not in my control – like being born in a rich part of the world.

Now Stanley got his money through even less controllable circumstances, and he has a brother close by, so we don’t have to remind him of starving children in Africa. Maybe I would also advise him to keep his money, but I certainly wouldn’t say absolutely that he has a moral right to it. Few of us have.

It's Stanley's money. All his. No one has any moral or legal right to it but Stanley — Hanover

Legally it is Stanley’s money. No one has the legal right to it but him. From a legal standpoint the case is very simple and clear-cut. But that was not the question here. From the fact that something is legally unambiguous, we can make no moral conclusion. What does it mean to have a moral right to something?

Let’s change the premises of the story a little and see what happens. Let’s say Stanley’s brother was seriously ill and needed the money for medical treatment or else he would die? Does Stanley still have the moral right to the money? The legal issue is still as unambiguous. Legally the money still belongs to Stanley only. It’s all his and no judge could force him to pay for his brother’s hospitalization. But morally? I hope most people would agree that Stanley would be doing something extremely bad if he didn’t save his brother’s life.

So what has changed in this revised example? Only that the brother’s need has become much greater. Now we could debate how great his needs should be for him to have a moral right to the money, but then we admit it’s not a matter of principle anymore but of degree. Moral rights cannot be determined by simple formal facts the way we decide on legal rights.

The key question you should ask yourself is this: Is your money actually going to help him? — Tzeentch

Tzeentch is right. The question is whether the money will actually be useful for him. If he’s a spendthrift who’s likely to squander it, there is no such thing as a brotherly duty on your part to help him ruin himself.

On the other hand, there is no duty to stick to strict economic principles. You are not a bank and business principles are not your ethical guide.

When inheritance is distributed the heirs commonly get an equal share. The reason for that is simplification and convenience. But since none of the heirs had really deserved anything in the first place, it’s not really a matter of justice. When real justice prevails the person with the greatest need gets the greatest share. Maybe your grandfather would have wanted to give more to your brother since he was most in need?

But again, it’s a matter of real need. If he’s likely to waste the money, he doesn’t need it.

Too often when we try to solve ethical dilemmas, we fall into the trap of thinking in formal principles. We imagine ourselves to be a financial institution, a government, a court of law or a computer. We are not. We are human beings making human decisions and therefore we must treat every case as something unique and individual.

The question to ask is always: How can we, in this particular case, be likely to reach the most beneficial outcome for everybody?

The original question didn’t deal with the morality of marijuana as such, so it could in principle be asked about any product. If product x, apple pie or baby powder or whatever, is produced and distributed in a somewhat unethical fashion, is ethical to buy and consume it?

Well, we rarely know exactly where a product comes from and even those we feel safe about may have a murky source unknown to us. In the world of business and money making, it’s a safe bet to assume that few procedures are 100 percent clean. Should we therefore doubt everything and stop buying or should we only abstain from the obvious cases?

I would say that this is not the responsibility of the individual consumer. A single consumer would not make a difference anyway. The common objection is of course that if everyone follows your example such campaigns may be successful. It’s just that there’s not the slightest reason to believe that your private boycott would have any effect on other people’s behavior. Unless you are a celebrity no one cares what you do. You would just be fighting windmills, and in the process you would be making it uncomfortable for yourself.

By all means, if you have a direct choice between a quantum of marijuana (or any other product) that is ethically produced and one that isn’t, choose the “ethical” one, otherwise, don’t strain yourself.

By almost all standards Trump is unsuited to be president, except by one, and that’s the only one that counts: He is the lawful president. The calls for impeachment that keep popping up every time he does something improper, which is pretty much all the time, are attempts to deny that fact. True, the president can indeed be removed from office by the same law that put him there, but to avoid serious damage to the credibility of the constitution and the legitimacy of the American form of democracy, only very serious and obvious crimes should be committed before that happens. Nixon was a burglar and so far Trump has not been accused of anything that could come even close to that.

Unfortunately the constitution is vague when stating the sufficient reasons for impeachment, but it does say “high crimes”, whatever that is. Well, trying to persuade the Ukrainian president to give information about a political opponent is a pretty indecent thing to do, but to call it a “high crime” would be vastly exaggerated.

The constitution of the United States is the one stable thing amidst the messy Trumpism of today. The opposition should focus on Trump’s outrageous policies instead of trying to catch him by bending the law.

Language is moving thoughts from one head to another.

Well, ideally that’s what it is, or that’s what we try to do every time we open our mouth. (Thoughts include factual information, ideas and feelings.) Unfortunately, a language is a very imperfect thing and our ability to use it is limited, so our thoughts are often very inaccurately transmitted. Still, since we lack telepathic abilities, we make the best of it.

It is said that we do things with language. Sure, we praise, we beg, we inaugurate events, but that is also essentially transformation of thoughts. Even when the words have been formed in advance, as they are when we recite a poem or perform a ceremony, we are essentially repeating thoughts. We don’t hammer nails with language…

Language is communication and nothing more. Words don’t have magic meaning and any one of them is as good as any other as long as it succeeds in communicating the speaker’s meaning.

Language is not identity, at least it shouldn’t be. We may put on a hat to signalize who we think we are, but if we use language for that purpose, we obscure its effectiveness. Moving thoughts from one head to another is difficult enough as it is.

The Brexit chaos in the UK is largely caused by an unfortunate new electoral practice. In the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy there used to high level of harmony between prime minister and parliament simply because the PM was elected by that parliament. If the MPs went against the cabinet, it meant that they would have to choose a new one and that would be their responsibility. Therefore the majority party would usually support their prime minister unless they had an alternative ready.

Now that the party leaders, and thereby the PM, is elected by party members instead, parliament is not responsible for the actual government policy and they can vote against anything the cabinet proposes without having to come up with an alternative plan.

I mean “legitimate” as in “according to a standard”. According to the standard of what we call an opinion the sentence “Homosexuals are inferior human beings” is an actual opinion whereas the sentence “Homosexuals are effing bastards” is not. The latter sentence is meaningless, it doesn’t express any real opinion about anything. It is empty abuse and as such there is no need to protect it as an instant of freedom of speech. The first sentence is a legitimate opinion inasmuch as it is an actual opinion. However much I disagree with it and find it disgusting I must consent that a person should have the right to voice such a view.

Where did this occur? I’m always interested to see which coddled population requires a Nancy-state to tell them what they can and cannot say or read. — NOS4A2

It happened in Germany.

The problem with so called hate speech as opposed to other modes of speech is that it is not easily defined. When does an expression of opinion become an expression of hate? Of course it can be both at the same time and we do want to protect the expression of any opinion. Sometimes it may look like pure hatred, but even then the speaker could probably make the claim that there is some legitimate opinion at the bottom.

Also, most utterances about anything would usually articulate some sort of like and dislike and where do we draw the line between dislike and hatred? Maybe it’s obvious any many cases, but in many other cases it isn’t. Anyway, a law that cannot clearly define what constitutes a crime, is a poor law.

Take the recent case of someone who said online that all homosexuals belong in the gas chamber. That person was convicted of hate speech. Now as much as I disagree with everything that person expressed, there are more ways than one to interpret what was said. It probably wasn’t a direct incitement to commit any specific crime. It was probably said in a context where homosexuality was judged as sinful or against nature and even though I find such attitudes despicable I must consent that it is a legitimate opinion that should be protected by the freedom of speech.

True, we do get the sense that there’s strong hatred underlying this remark, but it may conceivably be cool-headed calculation, and that’s an argument one can always make in court. We can never know for sure that there is hate involved because we cannot determine anyone’s true feelings, at least not in the formality of a court.

It is not a very sober statement. It is reckless and rude, but that is a quite different problem. Uncivil behavior is prevalent on the internet, isn’t it, but should it be banned? That would hardly be possible. The best we can do is to create awareness of it and encourage each other to behave with consideration.

Satisfaction probably means a less extensive form of happiness. If you have happiness, you also have satisfaction or satisfaction may lead to happiness. In either case happiness is the highest good.


A sense of completion is probably also an ingredient of happiness.
The concrete expression of happiness differs from person to person, but in general terms it may be the same. One person gets a sense of self-fulfillment from his stamp collection and another one gets it from playing football. We can still say that their happiness has the same content, namely self-fulfillment.

A good government would take into account the specific needs of its specific people and that would be reflected in the laws. However, the laws and policies of a state may not depend on any particular system of government. A system of government regulates the decision making process, not the decisions themselves. Now, you may make the argument that democracy is always more likely to produce the right tailor made laws, or if monarchy is your favorite you may attribute that ability to a monarchy. What an individually unique people needs is individually unique laws, the system of government, for example democracy, is just a tool. Maybe any system of government could fit a given country if only its policy was good.

Only one thing can ever be a goal in itself: Happiness. (Aristotle says so, and I agree.) Whatever other goals we have, we ultimately pursue them for the sake of happiness. Certain other goods may seem like goals in themselves, for example health, friendship and freedom, but even those are subordinated to happiness even though it may not seem obvious at first sight.
Then there are other goals that probably no one thinks are goods in themselves. Most people are aware that they want money in order to be able to buy things.
Now, traditionally any system of government has always been assessed according to what it might be able to achieve and the question “Why do we need a government at all?” is one it is valid to ask. Even a democrat must answer that question and when doing that he will realize that if the purpose of government is to achieve something. Then democracy, which is one particular system of government, must also be there to achieve something other than itself.
What would you prefer? To live in a democracy and be unhappy or to live in a dictatorship and be happy? Both are certainly possible. Maybe a democracy is more likely to make you happy, but that’s a different argument.

We can be never be completely sure about anything. Therefore, whenever we make a statement, any statement, what we are actually saying is “I believe that…” “That is a dog” actually means “I believe that that is a dog.” If I really believe it’s a dog, I’m not lying, if I don’t believe it, I’m lying.

The meaning of “telling the truth” is ambiguous. It may mean “saying what is objectively true”. In that case we never know for sure when we are telling the truth. It may also simply mean the opposite of telling a lie. This is a linguistic problem that cannot be solved.

Our legal system is certainly Kantian, or rather Kantian ethics is modeled after the legal system. The laws of a country are intended to be so constructed that society in general should work as well as possible. In individual cases, however, the law may fail to give a person what he really deserves. It couldn’t be otherwise since a law that tried to cover all individual contingencies would be no law at all, but it also means that the law is not really moral. It says that like cases should be treated alike, but no two cases are really alike. Kantian ethics ignores this and permits individual horrible things to happen (like causing a murder by telling the truth) as long as society in general is better off if everyone follows the rules. It allows us to cause injury with open eyes and it’s therefore an immoral system.