The categorical imperative states that moral actions must be universal and evaluated by themselves...

The categorical imperative states that moral actions must be universal and evaluated by themselves, not by the outcome of those actions. Kant seems to state that morals determined using the CI are objective, but how is one supposed to decide whether or not an action should be universal? Is that not based on a subjective evaluation? And how could you decide if an action itself is moral when the mechanism by which it is evaluated depends on its outcome? If one wills that stealing is not universal, is that conclusion not based on either an emotional rejection of stealing at large or the impact that universal stealing would have on society?

Also, how does Kant assert that we have free will because of the existence of the noumenal world. Nothing within the phenomenal world give us free will because our brains are governed by the laws of physics and are either determined or probabilistic. How could something in the noumenal world cause a free action? If the mechanism by which we are free lies in the noumenal world, and therefore outside of the mind, could one really be free?

>If one wills that stealing is not universal,
That's not how it works. You act as if your will would be a universal maxim - if everyone stole then society wouldn't function. Hence it's immoral.

>Nothing within the phenomenal world gives us free will ...
The phenomenal world isn't a different world, it is the same world. The point is that things like cause and effect and time are categories WE give to things, hence they are only real qua experience. That everything must have a cause is something about how we must experience things, not something about the world as it actually is.

>That's not how it works
What I meant to say was that one wills that not stealing is universal

> if everyone stole then society wouldn't function
How can morals be objective if the immorality of stealing is based on the subjective evaluation that society functioning is a desirable thing (which is also the outcome of the stealing)

The point is that if it's bad in the general case then it's bad in all cases. You don't will something to be universal, that doesn't make any sense.

In regard society, society is a part of the categorical imperative under the formulation to treat each person as an end in themselves rather than a means to an end. If you steal from someone it implies you are using them as a means to an end, so long as it was not consentual

It's the worst form of ethics by far.

This pic reminds me of the Amerimutt meme.

I get the universality of morals, but how can Kant claim that's its objective?

>if the immorality of stealing is based on the subjective evaluation that society functioning is a desirable thing (which is also the outcome of the stealing)
It isn't. Stealing is wrong because if we try to universalize the maxim, then:
1) For there to be stealing, there also has to be the concept of property, i.e. something that belongs to an individual/a group.
2) But there can't be a concept of property, because everyone takes everything they want, so there can't even be "stealing"
And therefore we get a contradiction.

This is a tricky point in Kant's ethics. I would suggest reading Alenka Zupnacic (she is a teammate of Zizek), her book Ethics of the real: kant, lacan deals with this problem.

Basically, Kant's revolution in ethics is that he presents an ethical theory that rejects any presuposition of a priori notion of "Good" (acting for any abstract principle) or any emprical or egoistic motives. Because empirical choice of object or notions of what is morally good and bad are subjective, and you cannot base ethics on something subjective, something that differs for everyone (in kantian terms; you cannot base your act on pathological elements). Instead of some kind of "Good", Kant says you should act because of your duty (something is telling me that I cannot act otherwise). Only if you act in accordance with your duty you act ethically. Of course your duty can tell you to act in such a way that can be deadly or harmful for you (e.g. helping someone who is getting robbed). What Alenka Zupnacic adds is precicely that if you reject any presuposition of Good and act in accordance with your duty, it can be that the ethical act may require you to kill someone or lie to someone and etc (because those things are not bad in themselves, society makes them out as such). Basically, Kant was too 'moral' to go that way and started proposing things that you should do (treat people as ends, dont lie). In other words; he started making a list of a priori things that you should do.

You are simply wrong. The nature of the universe is fundamentally dynamics between energy, waves, and information. Through this humanity was formed and we came into being. Deontology is the alignment of oneself with nature so as to necessarily incline the spirit toward preferable states of being. Acting through duty is beyond practical and romantic, it is following instruction ordained the nature of all things.

I keep trying to turn this line of reasoning on its head to argue something ridiculous but I can't. Is this really airtight?

Kant was probably the smartest person to ever exist and a huge autist, so yeah, it's pretty airtight. Trying to poke hole's in Kant's philosophy is like trying to find plot holes in the Tolkien legendarium. People will still be trying hundreds of years from now and will have gotten no further than today.

What about cases where there is no contradiction, like masturbating to child porn?

Not really. There doesn't have to be a concept of property, there only has to be property wherein the exchange of it is just or voluntary. If property is based on the maxim that whoever can take it owns it, than there is no contradiction in stealing.

How do you define an action?

> La creatura de philosophe et critique

Kant at face value has been pretty much discredited, most of his scholarship attempts to "salvage" his ideas

If you want to exist "in accordance with the laws of the universe", literally all you have to do is exist. Literally every ethical theory is a "natural" one in virtue of humans being part of the universe

>discredited,
opinion immediately discounted

because things that can't be universalised OBJECTIVELY can't be universalised. If you were to universalise slavery, the concept of hierarchy would break down making making it impossible for everyone to be slaves. This is not subjective and thus the imperative we derive from it (slavery is bad) wouldn't be a matter of subjectivity either. As the same conclusion is reached by all participants, Slavery is an objective wrong, as are all other things proven to be universalisable.

Was he influential? Yes. Did he significantly advance the debate? Yes. If you take him seriously in 2018 are you a dumbass? Yes.

No serious Kantians accept Kant's philosophy as written. If you're not familiar with this you are probably an untrained autodidact who doesnt engage with the scholarship and takes him at face value because you think big old books are authoritative and dont have the skills to actually evaluate them.

that's a whole lot of words to say 'i blindly follow what the academy tells me to think'

Have you even read COPR? His metaphysics have been invalidated by modern physics, and his ethics rest on his metaphysics

>1) For there to be a goverment, there also has to be the concept of obedience.
>2) But there can't be a concept of obedience, if people don't obey the goverment there can't be a goverment.
Therefor humans have to be obedient to the goverment for the goverment to be functional
Kantian ethics died after the Nuremberg trials for a reason

Yeah and modern physics doesn't disprove its metaphyiscs at all. You can't use physics to disprove metaphysics, the former can only be understood once you have the latter.

>physics has anything to say about metaphysics
If I wasn't on my work computer I'd post a brainlet meme

>in accordance with the laws of the universe
Of course doing nothing, doing anything, and everything in between is all within natural law, but the patterns and cycles that follow from the premises of natural law are the emergent phenomena which constitute our being. Rhythm and states of non-contradiction are when humanity is at its best, therefore we should subject ourselves to a system of ethics which afford such being and for me that is anarcho-Kantianism.

...

>You can't use physics to disprove metaphysics

You own yourself.

More like Quantum field theory, psychology, and neuroscience covers pretty much everything you'd need to know about the physical aspects of being. Existentialism covers the rest so that if you were to stroll down such a path you would be compelled to a deontological system as a matter of necessary consequence, i.e. obligated to do what's right.

Seriously though, if you're not a brainlet you'd know that Kant was right and that we are the synthesization of all things at a particular point and if you don't sing along you're a huge faggot because you're ruining the fun for everyone else.

As to the first question, I think this user has it right . The categorical imperative doesn't depend on subjective preferences about the "world we would like to live in." Rather it makes use of the idea that we are rational beings, and therefore it is unethical for us to will something universally that leads to a contradiction.

In response to the second question, Kant doesn't actually claim knowledge that there is a noumenal realm. To have knowledge requires marrying an intuition with the understanding, and we can never have an intuition of the noumenal realm. Therefore, we will never KNOW that it exists or that we're a part of it. However, he thinks that free will is a necessary assumption in order to have ethics at all, and he can only explain this by positing that there is in a fact a noumenal realm, and that we can view ourselves both as a part of the phenomenal realm (and thereby determine) or the noumenal realm (and thereby free). This assumption is pretty explict in the Grounding and the Critique of Practical Reason. I'm not so sure WHY he thinks this assumption is necessary though.

I don't like this. It seems like a lot of the scholarship trying to disprove Kant's metaphysics has rested on trying to prove that time and space aren't a priori forms of intuition (i.e. that we can imagine sensing something that isn't subject to space and time), but many of these counterexamples seem to either have problems of their own or not sufficiently disprove Kant's point.

I haven't read Kant yet, but I ask the same questions that you do.
For example, if some person was suicidal or nihilistic and didn't mind dying, following the categorical imperative it wouldn't be immoral for him to kill somebody, because he doesn't mind dying himself. Categoric Imperative should be objective, yet because it begins from a subjective perspective (don't do what you wouldn't want done to you), it doesn't look like a good form of ethics to me. I do like Kant's transcedental idealism though.
Maybe I'm getting things wrong, since I haven't read his works yet, can someone explain to me?