chaosmosis comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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This post could also be titled "Why Kant was Stupid, Part One of One Thousand".
Even if your post remains voted down, I thought it was funny.
Voting up things purely because they're funny tends to be bad for serious discussion forums like this one. If encouraged, purely funny content has a tendency to take over and crowd out insightful content.
I like funny content, but not at the risk of insightful content.
Being funny should not be the best way to get highly upvoted, yes. And failed funny should be negative.
Using votes to move things toward what you consider their 'proper level' seems the best here. Let the funny get one or two. Insight, more.
My comment provided an insight insofar as it explicitly connected the analysis to Immanuel Kant's writing in order to criticize it.
Can you think of an example of Kant using this form of argumentation?
-Original (and in my opinion better) version of this article
I'd like to see more on that.
The categorical imperative, it's even in the name.
Can you elaborate a bit on that? Your comment also struck me as glib, but I'd be interested to hear if you have a real argument in the background.
The Categorical Imperative is all about generalizing specific experiences into moral rules based on supposed laws of rationality that really don't exist. It's like if you had to act superrationally, all the time, and that's what Kant's view of morality is, and he says that it's logically contradictory to act otherwise, which leads to doing stupid things like not defecting against naive opponents in the PD. If everyone actually did abide by the Categorical Imperative, there would be no theft and no murder, but also no artists or scientists, only boring farmers with their individuality stripped to a bare minimum. It would be awful.
He applies a variation of the Worst Argument in the World to the definition of "should" and to morality itself, as well as all actions that you're considering the morality of, basically. So, for example, he argues that anything that can be considered theft is irrational and immoral because if everyone committed all acts of theft imaginable, society would collapse, and thus the idea of property wouldn't exist, and thus we would have created a "contradiction", and thus that would violate a universal definition of the word should, and it would thus be immoral (this isn't me being dumb and misapplying his ideas, as he actually makes this line of argument somewhere or other. It's a good example of why I find him idiotic).
Relevant passage from Nietzsche's The Gay Science (Unfortunately, this is somewhat longer than I remembered. However, it's a good read, and Nietzsche's sarcastic tone here is undoubtedly amusing. And, anyone who wants a serious discussion of deontology is just asking to be inundated with walls of text anyway, so they basically deserve it [this parenthetical is somewhat tongue in cheek, as well.]):
I often feel like cheering aloud after reading that passage; it's one of my favorites.
EDIT: It seems like there's no standard way to divide the paragraphs, and the website I found the quote on had no paragraph breaks at all, so I just did it on my own by dividing it where it felt natural to me.
This doesn't sound like a case of the 'worst argument in the world'. Also, I've now twice encountered someone here who seems to be literally angry at a long dead philosopher. This is very confusing to me.
Kant rejects all specific cases of theft because he considers all general cases of theft to be "wrong" (because if all possible thefts happened it would create a "contradiction" according to his interpretation). Does that clarify what I'm saying?
I don't feel angry at Kant, but I do like mocking him.
Did he write that with paragraph breaks? If so, please restore them. If not... Dang, Nietsche had lousy style.
(Edited to reverse the conditionals so it made sense)
Please provide me with instructions as to how to insert paragraph breaks within quotes.
I like it too.