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Comment by daymanstep | Hacker News Reader

> Kant goes one level further. He says, basically: "before you do something, ask yourself: if everyone else in the world did what you're about to do as a matter of course, will it make the world better or worse? If it makes the world worse, then don't do it".

This is not the Categorical Imperative. What you're describing is more like Rule Utilitarianism. Kantian ethics is deontological, not consequentialist.

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Hence my qualification at the start. My problem with deontological ethics is that the justification of it abruptly hits an impenetrable wall, i.e. the rule or the duty, unless you appeal to some benefit or prevention of harm to rational beings. Even in the Metaphysics of Morals, the whole concept of duty would be arbitrary if not in reference to rational beings. But happy to be corrected.

> Even in the Metaphysics of Morals, the whole concept of duty would be arbitrary if not in reference to rational beings.

In what sense? There's a sense in which there's no moral law without rational agents, but Kant himself is explicit about the "good will" being entirely independent of intended or obtained ends. In other words, no rational agent needs to benefit (or be harmed) in Kant's system for individuals to be morally blameworthy or praiseworthy.

(See GMS 4:394 for the "jewel" analogy, which is most popularly cited as evidence for Kant's position on this.)

I understand that this is the common (and perhaps the prevailing) interpretation, but my question has always been: once you subtract action potential and expected ends, what remains of the concept of "good"? We cannot simply end the inquiry by saying "good will" because it still doesn't clarify what it is that one wills. Disclaimer: not a Kantian scholar.

It's been twenty years since I read Kant, but it differs from utilitarianism in that it has no concern for utility of others, rather it's "if I could pick rules for everybody to follow, those are the rules I should follow. Ergo if I never want anybody to lie to me, then it is always immoral for me to lie -- anything else would be a contradiction, since it assumes two rational agents coming to different conclusions.

A good point, but (a) this merely sounds like a modification of the golden rule: do unto all others, without exception, as you would have done unto you, and (b) the rule isn't an end in itself because the end lies behind the "should" (e.g. why should someone not lie to me).

It's not about what you actually want in this case, but what you could want. It's impossible to want people to betray your trust, because if you wanted it then it wouldn't be betraying your trust.

So that type of lying is strictly forbidden. You do not want to be deceived. But if include in "lies" such things as reading fiction aloud, then that can be permissible as you can want that: you aren't really deceived or betrayed.

Yes, Kant's version is strictly about logic: Is it possible to want everyone to follow the proposed rule without making the rule nonsense?

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