Kant's Formula of Humanity

we've been talking about khat and laying out the first version of the categorical imperative that he gets act only on that Maxim you can at the same time will as a universal universal law that is to say any moral judgment really has to be universalized you have to do the same thing in all like cases now what exactly makes a case like another case is complicated but at least we can say this first principle the formula the universal law is based on the idea that any moral judgment does have to be fully general fully universal so I can't say aha stealing is wrong for you but it's okay for me I can't say murder is wrong for you but okay for me etc I've got to say this across the board and I can differentiate maybe different kinds of killing or different kinds of taking but those are gonna have to be differentiated on the basis of things we think matter okay pertaining to whether or not we could actually formulate a principle that we could apply to everyone and every similar case now before we go on to the other formulas maybe it's worth reflecting a minute on the fact that this does have some real implications not only for us as individuals but for organizations so if we think for a moment about what this means for an organization for a group of people what does it imply what's gonna follow from this yeah okay good you're going to have to have universal principles for for dealing with people you can't deal with different people differently so for example suppose you're talking about your employees what would this imply in a company let's say that's right pay everybody all in the same job the same for example or have a criteria that apply to everybody maybe you don't want to apply or you know treat everyone in the same job the same but on the other hand you would have to find ways of differentiating like maybe you create a career path so that people even though they're doing the same work get paid gradually more as they're there more years etc whatever you do it has to be something you apply across the board you can't say ah this job is worth more for you less for this person okay unless there's a real differentiation that you want to recognize me you're willing to apply across the board now when you start thinking of things this way you realize yeah you have to have policies that apply quite generally you have to give people equal treatment in a sense you have to guarantee them well the equal protection of the laws is the 14th amendment has it you have to have rules that are universal and remember this is motivated by the thought that the law is universal that has to apply to everybody in a given category now that's gonna imply that some categorizations are legitimate ones and others aren't so in particular to say well I do recognize that things matter according to category there's the category of Dan Boneh back and then the category heard the Ellis's right that's gonna be illegitimate it's like yeah that's not a thing you can't draw that distinction between me and everybody else but what are some other distinctions basically the the task we face then is saying look certain kinds of distinctions are relevant distinction and certain other kinds of distinctions are irrelevant so we start thinking then how do we know right now caught doesn't throw up his hands and say oh I don't know he says well can we universalize it right this me as opposed to everybody else thing could i universalize that can i say things were okay for me but not for you you're gonna say well things were okay for me but not for you right and so it's quite clear that we immediately had encountered some kind of contradiction there but he thinks other kinds of things are gonna turn out to be irrelevant so one thing that'll be a relative is i think that you might say has to do with specific persons we can't single out one individual person and just say me or Dan Boneh or whatever that's something that is not gonna fly here and that does have some important consequences right the king cannot say i louis xiv have special rules applying to me now maybe you can say ah the king has special rules might've but it has to be for any king it had can't be just for him other things that would be irrelevant yeah okay good so we might have racial classifications for example as things that would appear at any rate to be irrelevant now i say would appear to be irrelevant why do i say that well because there are circumstances that even in very strict interpretations of the law would actually count as legitimate uses of this right for example your movie director and you're making a movie about Malcolm X and some Irish guy applies you have you can think wait no I don't want some Irish white guy playing Malcolm X and conversely you could have a movie you're making about Winston Churchill and a black actor applies and you think well no Churchill was this white guy and so there are things that under the law recognizes bona fide bona fide wellif occasions and sometimes race is actually one of those but now in almost all of the contexts it's not true right let's say the BAM needs a new saxophone player you can't say well the saxophone player has to be white or has to be black or has to be any other particular thing though you could if you were again doing a movie about Charlie Parker and his band in the 1940s say I want people who reflect the races that the people really were in that movie and so on but on the other hand if you were just doing a sort of recording I mean you can't employ such discriminations and the same thing is true across a very wide area of course there are controversial areas things like affirmative action and other things where becomes unclear maybe if people fight about whether race could be a legitimate category there what are some other things that we at least take presumptively to be irrelevant oh sorry yeah okay good you get out of a class we tend to think that's irrelevant right I mean suppose we're interviewing for a professor's position at UT can we say well where did you grow up did you go to a public high school or a private high school so I didn't use a decision on that basis now it's not illegitimate for us to ask you might come up in conversation but that can't be a criterion that would be illegitimate and there are all sorts of other contexts where to you know to find out so what were your parents like what they do etc do come from old money or new money or no money no that's that's not good that's not cool right and we shouldn't treat people differently on that basis what are some other things that would appear to be irrelevant yeah okay disability now in general that's something we can't count as legitimate again there could be bona fide occupational qualifications so let's say we are hiring somebody to be a pilot we don't have to give equal consideration to a blind person or a sound engineer we don't have to employ one with a serious hearing disability because it's really relevant to the job but if it's not relevant to the job in that way or if we can accommodate this then we have by the way I did have a sound engineer for a while who was basically deaf it's a problem it's a real problem anyway yes well okay good we can start listening all on the right I mean yeah yeah exactly so all of those things what is that all about right I mean dah dah dah dah dah those things are taken to be presumptively irrelevant so the thought is look we we need a special story if we're to explain why this is relevant to our classification and maybe in some cases we can give that special a story but ordinarily we think these are out of bounds that's why under the law these are given strict scrutiny which is to say it's not like they could never actually be legitimate but the presumption is they are not and you have to show a compelling interest to override that presumption that they were irrelevant on the other hand in our organization we might think lots of things are relevant let's go back to that question about pay and think about pay scales presumably these things are irrelevant we can't say oh well sure you get paid more because you're up a certain race or sure you get paid more because you're male or because you come from Germany or you know whatever it is however we can give certain kinds of answers so what are some things that would be relevant to that yeah good experience would be relevant we can say but you're just starting out that person's been doing this job for 10 years since highly experienced or what are some other things we could education yeah often people get a higher salary for having an additional degree other things yeah agree ability yeah some people are easy to get along with and add to the group right other people are really difficult and that can have a huge impact on the group and you might think look this person they do their job well but they're a pain in the butt they have levels now is that a legitimate thing in some jobs you might think it's really not in other jobs it might be crucial it depends on how much group dynamics matter yeah ah okay good sometimes people have a specialization which just commands a premium there aren't too many people who do that right and so that specialization is something that says well look this person they don't they aren't just the generalist who does ba bla bla bla bla bla they really excel with this particular thing that we need yeah performance yeah how well are they doing somebody can tell you hey these two people are doing the same job yeah but that one does have a lot better my daughter was shocked to find out that in her job classification there were actually like 300 people who do the general kind of things she does in her organization and she does something like three or four percent of the work of the entire group so she does the equivalent of 30 to 40 people doesn't mean she gets paid any more because it's a state agency but nevertheless tell like wow okay but that's the kind of thing you could recognize with salary differences other things yeah okay good communication skills there are people who not in fact I've known faculty members who are like this part of their contribution is actually in helping and educating everybody else having that person in your department just helps everybody else do a better job they talk they're easy to talk to they help you solve problems and it's not just true at universities it can be true in any organization that's the person everybody goes to when they have a question about something and those kinds of communication skills and interpersonal skills and building up everybody else and helping them do their job is a really positive thing on the other hand if everybody finds somebody difficult to work with or difficult to communicate with or if they're constantly throwing roadblocks in your way it may harder to do your job even if they're doing okay and what they do they may be in effect negatively impacting a lot of other people anything else yeah ah okay yes loyalty the reason I snicker is that that sort of cuts both ways because you a lot of places have what they consider a longevity pay or a loyalty bonus or something like that where you've been there a certain number of years you get a special bonus for having been around to give you an incentive to stay there on the other hand that a lot of organizations there's sort of a loyalty tax you don't really keep up with the marketplace until you get another job offer and then all of a sudden the people who come in new fresh who are actually being paid market salaries and they're way above everybody else so the less easy it is to move around the more that kind of penalty for loyalty actually takes place in universities that's a real problem the people who have been here a long time are often radically underpaid compared to the people who have come in more recently and it's because of that it's like hey yeah you're here you're probably gonna stay here so you know who cares we'll give the money to that person we upon the hire from its and it's up just in the universities that happens in a lot of organization so you could you would think wait that's perverse right isn't a good thing to be around a long time but often it turns out not to be yeah okay yeah yeah value generated some people might just be in a position where they do the job just as well as this person over here but this person because of the nature of their job is generating a lot more money than this person okay and that's just because that position like it's more crucial to the company maybe or maybe they just do it in a way that actually produces a lot more revenue for the company they they actually are doing things the way they do it actually generates income so the way that operates in a university for example especially in the sciences is some people get a lot of grants other people may be just as good at just their science but what they do doesn't generate a lot of grants and that person who brings in a lot of money through grants is going to be rewarded for that even if this other scientist is every bit as good as a scientist other things yeah a criminal record holla yeah of course it's not just a criminal record you might say any kind of past mm-hmm you know like getting fired from an earlier job for whatever reason can end up having an effect why does that kind of stain you might say on the record persist it's because people think it adds to the risk of hiring you um and so you have a criminal record or but say you 10 years ago were fired for a certain position not entirely clear why but you know it wasn't just because the company was having to lay off people and you think hmm there's some story there I don't even know what it is not criminal in that kind of case but still you say mmm the risk seems higher in this case so yeah there is again a debate about they said to which these kinds of things ought the count and how long they had a count it would be weird to think that oh gosh you know you got arrested once for possession of marijuana back when you were 17 and now you're applying for some job at age 55 and they say oh he's a big risk man yes but on the other hand you know in certain if you find out you yeah you have this criminal record of you know child molestation and you're applied for a job in a daycare center you might think yeah that's kind of bad and so anyway there can be degrees of riskiness that you think that creates in this particular job other kinds of things that might you might agree are relevant yeah ah good yeah just hours worked if somebody says why don't we get paid as much as that person so when you were only twenty hours a week that person's 40 hours a week that's an obvious explanation yeah oh yeah okay appearance now some aspects of this people think are legitimate and others illegitimate right there's a fight about the boundaries but surely there is some relevance to this now we tend to think look actually there's research that shows that tall people tend to earn more than short people that good-looking people earn more than ugly people etcetera and most of us think yeah that's kind of unfortunate on the other hand there might be certain there is there is a guy who is hate made his face look like a tiger he's had extensive plastic surgery and has you know and you would think yeah I don't know how I feel about that now if this guy's a computer programmer who's sitting over there in some cubicle and doesn't interact with anybody you might think I don't care if his face makes more tiger that's cool but suppose he's applying for a job as a public relations pursue that you might think yeah you know unless unless our mascot is a tiger and we think it's cool alright we're the Cincinnati Bengals then maybe we say yeah higher than but otherwise we sort of say yeah I think this is a problem right I don't know what would your reaction be to me is a professor if my face looked like the face of a tiger there's this Japanese company now that actually has started making replicas of your pets head that they made into a mask and you can put them on so that you can look just like your cat or dog and you know if you don't think I don't you don't have to send them the literal pets head every Jew said in the photographs so you could actually put on this basket then you know go up to your cat Otis and say like look just like Otis well suppose I just got obsessed with this and came in every day looking like a different cat no that would be disturbing right you might I could imagine the university saying look stop and if I refuse to stop it it would get me in trouble or conversely what if I dressed terribly inappropriately and I don't know exactly what the boundaries of that are for a professor when I was young most professors wore suits and ties now at least at our university where it's hot most be able to do that but on the other hand though boundaries the way we dress I don't come in and gym shorts and sweaty t-shirts although I've seen professors do that one of my colleagues I team taught with one term used to wear flip-flops and students were deeply offended but flip-flops I'd be most of his negative student comments were about his Footwear it's just like wait what maybe oh yeah oh so certain I mean nobody in the department cared but but the students were upset about this you know weird about his feet I think it was simply walk on a stage it was one of these big classes and a lot of people were looking directly at foot level so they were just they became obsessed with the flip-flops stop I don't know anyway whatever that presumably there are boundaries for almost any job about what the what an acceptable appearances and if you deviate from that people do think it's relevant within those bounds you know people think it's okay and shouldn't count and sometimes the boundaries are kind of unclear and people fight about them with dress codes and so on yeah they say yeah yeah that's um that's yeah that's pretty disturbing right could that be a bona fide occupational qualification that's a good point right um yeah I that's that's an interesting question I don't have a view about that I mean the Midwestern thing makes me feel very uncomfortable but if somebody else said look this is a Jamaican cafe we want to hire Jamaicans we don't want to hire a bunch of white guys going around saying hey mom I kind of get that and so I yeah I think that's an interesting and yeah right oh yeah I know right yeah yeah yeah I don't know I I think there are as I mean even with race which at least in the United States is the paradigm of something presumptively irrelevant as we saw there are some cases where people find it acceptable but it's a very narrow class but even though I'm the bounds of that there is a lot of controversy so yeah the kind of case you're mentioning seems disturbing and seems notice they're much more disturbing in some contexts than others so what are the boundaries of all of that I don't know and of course here we're talking about it within the organization presumably if I'm somebody interacting with an organization I can legitimately say you know gosh I i'd like this restaurant because it seems authentic because it's a Mexican restaurant that everybody who works there is Mexican and speaks Spanish and that doesn't seem like well you're discriminate you know if I'm on the outside so well on the other hand if it's inside and that place says we'll hire only Mexicans that seems more dubious so it's a anyway yeah I think it's hard to sort this out yeah well that's a good point class and income level and so on we tend to think should be irrelevant for most purposes but when you're applying for a loan we don't think it's irrelevant well class maybe is but the amount of money you have how much collateral you have you know how big a risk you are seems relevant you that's true you won't they won't even talk cuz you're gonna be around quantities of monies their danger of embezzlement is too high and so so you're right there are places where we say look it's partly things like a criminal record but partly something like or I mean suppose we are in an organization where we interact with the wealthy maybe you're trying to be a realist agent at South Beach or something and you're specializing in the market of 1 million dollar-plus homes and you're gonna be interacting with people who are very wealthy and often upper-class people let's say you're applying for this job in the Hamptons and you speak with a strong accent right you are from a lower class background here in the United States this isn't nearly as big a thing but it's a very big thing in Britain for example I don't even hear it smoke if it is I come from a part of the country where people have a very strong accent and so suppose somebody actually has that accent fact it's consistently voted is the ugliest English accident anywhere in the world where do people actually test this sort of thing which luckily is rare but you know if I still speaking the way I did when I went grew up and the way my grandparents did and so on where to be in that situation it would be very strange right it would be bad that instead of saying you know meeting one of these wealthy people in saying how do you do I said Huygens doing that would not be good or imagine somebody who's from Brooklyn you know and hey you guys that would that would be a problem maybe now maybe the person pulls this off with such a plum but it seems charming rather than you know jarring to some a certain person but nevertheless you might think oh no no you must be able to interact with a certain clientele at a certain level and that requires at least being able to fake be give a certain class okay well anyway enough on this it's a complicated question it's gonna depend what our organization is what we're doing not only what ends up here and what ends up there but what the boundaries look like now all of this is based on the thought that a person of goodwill is motivated objectively by the law right in the law is universal but there is another path to thinking about what a person of goodwill is and I think it's much more intuitive so here's the way it goes we're looking for something that applies to all rational beings as such as rational beings we're not looking for anything that depends on any subjective considerations any particular goals or values you have any means that you choose to select to achieve those goals we want something that's going to apply to anyone now is there anything that all rational beings value yeah agency that's right their own rational agency you care about various ends whatever they are and they can vary even happiness can vary some people put happiness at the top of it list is Aristotle or the utilitarians do other people say no for me it's not about happiness it's about service to others or it's about communion with God or it's about seeking justice or it's about something else so in any case whatever it is people pursue different ends but they all value their ability to attain their what do we call that ability to choose means to attain ends rationality so rational nature cut says exists as an end in itself every rational be necessarily values rational agency so if that's true rational beings law rational beings all value rationality and you're absolutely right that means they value choice they value agency they value the ability in other words to choose means reasonably graphically to attain ends so now we don't actually have to say and we don't have to give in to Hegel's complaint that actually this is all kind of empty all the work here is being done by what we put in this category and what we put in that category because the law just tells us act universally but on the basis of what right and you might think putting things down here or in here that's already now I think he's wrong about this but he would say all that's something else that's not coming from this idea of law as universal but Khan says well there's something else anyway it's not just that the law is universal it's that every rational being values rationality okay you can't say well yeah of course I want things the way anybody wants things but I don't care whether I ever get what would that mean I don't value my own ability to get back that's absurd right it's like saying yeah I like good food but I I have no interest in actually obtaining or sure I greatly value education but I don't care whether I get it or not what would that be like right of course you value your ability to get what you want whatever that is now if that's true concepts that tells us something important because that says we have something we all share and it allows us to put in and then now not happiness not something like that but instead we can say and he calls this version of the categorical imperative the formula humanity basically every rational being has to treat every other rational being as an end not as a means own so he says treat humanity as an end in itself never merely as a means no that merely is really important because we use each other all the time you're using me right now to learn about calm I'm using you to get paid okay and so and we do that all the time right I mean you go to the store you buy something you're using that checkout person as a means to get what you want and they're using you as a means to get a paycheck and so forth so the economy depends on using people this means hence Marx's complaint that it's fundamentally unjust but leave that aside cogs would say well no no I'm not saying that that kind of thing is fundamentally interest using people merely as a means that's the unjust part so for example what we're doing now is a voluntary exchange right it would be different if I went out to the street with a pistol and held up various people and said you want to learn about caught don't write is it no really well yes you do yes you do come in here sit down cuz okay stay there you'll be shot if you leave then I'm denying your rational agency I'm not giving you a choice right but if I respect your ability to choose then it's fine you can take the course you could not take the course that's cool you can come to UT you can come not go to UT that's fine and so as long as both parties are interacting voluntarily as agents things are fine now really to understand then what the boundaries are here we need to know when I would be using you merely as a means so think intuitively for a moment what are some cases where you could say feels like that person's being used not in a perfectly fine you two'll voluntary way but in some other way where would say they're being used just as a means they're not being respected in fact a positive way of putting this into safe respect people don't use them yeah oh okay good yeah some guy asks you out and you think I don't like this guy but but he's offered to take me to this really nice restaurant and I've really been wanting to go so sure right that yeah that seems like just using somebody other examples yeah good lying to somebody okay you don't you wouldn't want to do this but I'd lie to you to convince you to do it that example of lying seems to suggest yeah I'm a manipulating you're right I'm using you merely as a means yet by one I'm not treating you as an end in yourself who gets to make your own free rational choice other examples yeah oh good suppose I came in and didn't teach you but got paid for teaching you okay now how could that happen well I might come in and just do other things good I actually had a professor who one term came into I was the assistant so I sort of had to take over teaching this class teaching him the actual content because he was he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown and he was reading this autobiography of Jonathan Slocumb the person the first person to circumnavigate the globe alone and he just came into the logic class and talked told stories from this ah Slocum is now after Tierra del Fuego here's what happened when he interacted with the native since what like these people been come into my discussion section and they're like we have logic homework and what we know about is what happened the Tierra del Fuego and so I had to sort of teach the class and yeah that would be an example where in this case it wasn't that the see that he was trying to use the students I think he really was in trouble mentally in that term he became convinced that he was going to take the sailboat that he took out on Lake Erie and actually sailed Hawaii and try to circumnavigate the globe alone but he was got start by sailing to Hawaii from Pittsburgh you know say look I don't know you're gonna do this I mean this was before GPS and all of that right and so you know and here was his an explanation well it's easy right you just you just get in the river and I mean at all it's all sort of downstream so you just go down the down the Allegheny in and down the Ohio and down the Mississippi and then you're in the Gulf of Mexico but look it's not too hard to figure out where South is and so you just go down south and through the Panama Canal how you do that in a sailboat I don't know but anyway then the other professor who's talking to you said well how do you get to Hawaii and oh that's easy you just bring a little transistor radio and if you've sailed toward the Setting Sun until it brings in some of these Honolulu rock stations and then you just sail Soviet louder and louder well anyway I said he was given a year off so in any event yeah that kind of thing or is bad or the scandal at the University of North Carolina another example a professor was on record as having taught 70 some classes over a period of two years wait he taught 70 classes in to you how is that possible and then you find out well wait most of them never actually had any meeting time and like who was signed up in all these classes a whole bunch of people who actually never turned in any work and who were those people they were athletes and anyway it was a big scandal hum but in any event that kind of thing can happen it does feel like people being used who's using whom is sometimes a Glee right that these datavac case but nevertheless it feels like yeah something something's going badly wrong no oh out of all these cases together and think what's what do they have in common we get something like John Stuart Mill's account of agency and mill is the one who really spells this out in detail but I think caught and other people quite a bit earlier already had this concept what is it to be a rational agent of an action what's required well think about the negative thing one one case here we had was wait you're being forced into something right you're being coerced into it so we have to say look you're doing this freely you're making a real choice here secondly think of it the lying case the deception case in that situation you might say wait you don't know what you you're doing so you have to be informed you have to actually know what you're doing now there are other sorts of things too after all you might think well yeah coercing me that's surely using me merely as a means not lying to be deceiving me that that is using me merely as a means but what about the case of the professor who doesn't teach part of the reason I I went through the story in a little bit detail is to say well he wasn't really forcing students into anything right and but on the other hand were they informed they weren't deceived exactly except they took the class to learn logic and then weren't being taught logic and so you might think wait a minute there's a sense in which this doesn't require active deception it's just that key information is not being provided to you there you're under the false impression maybe there's a situation where you naturally assume something's gonna happen and then it doesn't happen you go into the restaurant you sit down and nobody ever comes to wait on you you might think well I'm not exactly nobody said we'll come wait on you in a minute men lied but you think I had a reasonable expectation that somebody was could actually like take my order and if you sit if you sit there for an hour and no one does you might think yeah actually if you don't pay any money I don't see how you're being used as means either but there's something bizarre about that so what other conditions are part of agency yeah okay good good there are circumstances in which you give up your ability to freely or informally choose things so what are some circumstances where you actually give up some degree of agency yeah [Applause] right okay good you might say just being in society involves giving up a certain amount of freedom to choose actually laws are imposed upon you you're under a general political authority and that being under that authority if it's legitimate seems to involve well whether it's legitimate or not involves denying your agency we tend to think if you do it voluntarily as with this idea of social contract then it becomes okay and really you might say well it's a general problem but contracts every time you enter into a contract you're giving up some freedom right you get married and you're promising fidelity to a certain person you're promising other things you're giving up a certain amount of freedom but it's true when you enter into a contract for employment or you offer to work for somebody as a plumber to fix some problem or you for that matter hire the plumber in those cases you're giving up a certain amount of freedom you're contractually binding yourself to do something now this is why some philosophers from Thomas Hobbes on have thought about the question of voluntary slavery it's an odd thing it's not like we've had B jhin's of people in the past to become voluntary slaves however it's because they're interested in finding the boundaries of your ability to give up your own freedom and to give up your own own agency and mostly they've said look you can't give it up so completely that you actually sell yourself into slavery however if that's illegitimate what are the bounds of this can you just never give it up that seems wrong you don't want to say all contracts are illegitimate so what are the boundaries and one way of doing this is to say well actually Mill confronts this question at the end of on Liberty says look all contracts do involve some sacrifice of Liberty but we think it's fine as long as you enter into the contract voluntarily and as long as you can get out of it so he thinks of it this way what's wrong with voluntary slavery is that you're eliminating the liberty and the rational nature of your future self as long as you leave your future self an out it's okay so he thinks contracts have to be written so that they are not unbreakable so that there is a way of actually getting out of the contract Lee there may be a penalty for that might be like okay yeah you can get all the contract but you're gonna have to pay the following penalty okay that's all right but it can't be an unbreakable contract anyway yeah [Music] Oh AB well absolutely so it might be that you think all of this is going to produce a certain outcome and it doesn't right so it's not exist one case where you're really deceived but another case you're just wrong so you go into it thinking you're about to give get this outcome out of it and it turns out that's not the case like you agreed to let the doctor bleed you back in 1600 thinking that would get rid of the bad humors and instead it kills you you weren't intending to bring about your own death but you pretty seriously did compromise your future rationality and so what do we say about cases like that you didn't in fact know what you're doing so we can think yeah it's not just a question of knowing it's a question rather you know having someone tell you it's partly a question of knowing we can't say you freely chose to die in that case and there are a couple of other things we could say just to finish off quickly one is we can say the act has to be voluntary another way of putting this is it really does have to do the outcome of a choice we don't want coercion but we also don't want to count the consequences of your sneeze as relevant or of your sudden projectile vomiting or whatever it is my daughter was conducting the Georgetown honors choir last night and they had a crisis because a student whether it was because of the heat of the stage lights or nerves or whatever in the back row suddenly threw up all over the place okay so if you look at my little video of one of the songs there's this strange gap right in the middle you kidding why aren't there any students in the middle the answer is because that area had to be evacuated screw to this a sudden Bobbit crisis well that's you know if you go to that student say um that was some way to exercise your rational nature no it was not a voluntary choice she wasn't coerced she it's not that she didn't know what she was doing it's that yeah it was involuntary and similarly somebody has to be confident to choose we don't tend to think that children for example have full rational nature and deserve the same degree of respect as adults all right next week we're gonna talk about consequentialism but before we leave Conte entirely will reflect on the implications of this and Kant's other frameworks for organizations and then see why you might think that's not enough and we need something further that consequentialism gives us

Channel: Daniel Bonevac

Views: 3,791

Rating: 4.8846154 out of 5

Keywords: Immanuel Kant, Categorical Imperative, Rationality, Equality

Id: L1Z5zvy1VWA

Length: 47min 19sec (2839 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2019