/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13629263]

Doesn't the categorical imperative make homosexuality immoral?
Love out of lust is using someone else merely to your sexual ends and not as an end in themselves.
Further, if everyone acted on the maxim of fucking sexually attractive men, there'd be no offspring to create more men to sexually lust after, thus rendering the maxim immoral.

[Anonymous No.13629265]

morality is a massive meme

[Anonymous No.13629269]

>>13629265
I fuck your mother.

[Anonymous No.13629274]

Kant specifically said it was something too horrible to even address.

He also said that masturbation was worse than suicide, so take it how you will.

[Anonymous No.13629927]

>>13629274
based

[Anonymous No.13630170]

just letting yah kant faggots now, that I am about to beat my meat to this increidbly hot trap bois lingerie twitter pics
homo + masturbation

[Anonymous No.13630195]

If you care about such things, then yes, it would make it immoral. Kant would agree. Modern feminist theory pretty wholly dismisses Kant for morality though because they consider his morality to be only viable in the case of affluent straight white males. Namely, you can only treat everyone as ends to themselves if you by presumption are excluding women, minorities, etc.

I'm not a deontologist, and I think the feminist argument is fine considering I also think his intentions based absolutism is dumb as fuck.

Take this as you will.

[Anonymous No.13630202]

>>13630195

I also want to make it abundantly clear that I'm not a feminist either. Just trying to help the clearly closeted OP work through his cognitive dissonance on some Kingdom of Ends based anon shit.

[Anonymous No.13630215]

Jacobi

[Anonymous No.13630246]

>>13630215
what specifically?
I might have only read "idealims or realism" by jacobi, but what I got from that he does not seem like the most essential read.

[Anonymous No.13630270]

>>13630170
Share sauce faggot

[Anonymous No.13630301]

>>13629263
Morality is nothing more than a guide to self-benefit. There's no reason why you shouldn't do that which benefits you the most. Kant was a retard for not recognizing this fact and creating a secular moral system based on no good reason.

[Anonymous No.13630429]

>>13630301
Kants actual Meta Ethics before arriving to the Categorical Imperative is a thing on its own and should be adimred.
It is also what would render a position as yours infantile and short sighted

[Anonymous No.13630451]

>>13630246
no I mean Kant was gay lovers with Jacobi, that's why he dressed up like him for that painting

[Anonymous No.13630455]

>>13630429
Nice argument

[Anonymous No.13630526]

>>13630195
feminism can't conceive of the Good, only of victimisation, it cannot conceive of virtue, vir is man as in virile. effeminacy, in the classical sense of selfish pleasure seeking is the state ideology of the day, you are an unique individual you are loved, no need to feel ashamed, you are valid and I mean it, yes you. want a hug and some SSRIs and pornography? Q-why are these democratic, lgbt, liberal and feminist ideas promoted by those in power? A- because that's how you get a docile pliable mass of bugmen consumers

[Anonymous No.13630793]

>>13629263
read Kierkegaard

[Anonymous No.13630800]

>>13630526
the elite also live lives of mindless hedonism for the most part, theirs are just way better.

[Anonymous No.13631189]

>>13629263
That man in the painting is Jacobi you mo-ron. Not Kant.

[Anonymous No.13631222]

>>13630301
What about being charitable, random acts of kindness etc. All moral acts that don’t benefit me.

[Anonymous No.13631234]

It's not immoral to be a plumber even though the world would suffer if everyone was a plumber. You have an autistic understanding of the categorical imperative.

[Anonymous No.13631305]

>>13630270
i second this request

[Anonymous No.13631312]

>>13630301
this reads like a child who just discovered nihilism and doesn't understand humans are inherently social and collectivist animals

[Anonymous No.13631355]

>>13630800
Maybe it's just what they display. Or the true elites aren't displayed at all.

[Anonymous No.13631421]

>>13630195

>Modern feminist theory pretty wholly dismisses Kant for morality though because they consider his morality to be only viable in the case of affluent straight white males

jesus christ kill yourself

[Anonymous No.13631429]

>>13631312
Egoism is perfectly compatible with forming mutually altruistic social groups.

[Anonymous No.13631430]

>>13631421
>feminism bad!

[Anonymous No.13631461]

>>13629263
Gay people can love each other romantically you retard. Some of them even get married. As for your second point, there's nothing wrong with ending human reproduction.

The categorical imperative is retarded anyway

[Anonymous No.13631482]

>>13631461
please don't make sweeping claims without providing any argument in favor of them

[Anonymous No.13631505]

You are not using someone as a ''mere'' means when you have their consent, your logic would make ordering pizza would be morally wrong. This board is embarrassingly retarded

[Anonymous No.13631509]

>>13631505
Kant believes suicide is using yourself as a mere means to an end and that's a completely consentual act.

[Anonymous No.13631547]

>>13631430
t. wimin

[Anonymous No.13631939]

>>13631222
When you help others, there's a chance you'll be helped in the future. That's like saying by harming or insulting someone that you aren't harmed by it (you are)
>>13631312
I'm not a nihilist. Humans are social because being social is a great advantage. You want healthy communities and social relationships because they help individuals prosper. You dont have any concern for objects or organisms that can't help or harm you. All of your actions are ultimately based on self-benefit. Helping others is an ingrained instinct of self-benefit, just like eating is. Some morals are just that clear. You know you shouldn't start murdering people because of the negative consequences. But some morals are gray, because we can't always come to an accurate assessment of what will benefit us.

[Anonymous No.13631970]

>>13630526
Feminism cannot conceive of the good, only of victimisation
Except for, y’know, all those major feminist theorists who think that the victimhood narrative is a detriment to women’s self-reliance by reproducing patriarchal culture, such as Woolf, Butler, Cixous and so on. The kind of feminism that corporations are pushing is a far cry from what many theorists have to say on the topic.

[Anonymous No.13632827]

>>13629263
But you are satisfying your partner at the same time (assuming it's consensual), so you are both treating each other as ends

[Anonymous No.13634579]

>>13631305
>>13630270
guys its been almost 24 hours and I am not in the right mood currently to provide links.

[Anonymous No.13634758]

>>13629263
Kind of but it depends (it's also been a while since I read the groundwork so I'm a little rusty)

Kant's 2nd formulation of the categorical imperative states that you shouldn't use someone merely as a means, not that you shouldn't use them as an means at all. If that were the case, it would make most of human interaction impossible, since we constantly use others as means to achieve our personal satisfaction. When I pay someone for some service, I'm paying them for a good that satisfies my desire, and thus using them as a means. But I'm not using them merely as a means to satisfy my desire, because I respect their rational agency (by participating in a contract that we both understand and assent to). This is obviously different from a case where we get some kind of service from a slave, since the slave might understand his position but he can hardly assent to it while remaining rational). Kant himself was a liberal of a sort, and his position can be pretty consistent even with modern liberal perspectives.

The 1st categorical imperative is a little trickier, and probably does make exclusive homosexuality immoral, but one can perfectly well imagine bisexuality as a universal law of nature, without engendering contradiction ("I will act to satisfy sexual desire regardless of the object of that desire, within the bounds of the 2nd categorical imperative, I.e only with rational assenting agents" imo doesn't contradict the imperative.)

Of course, Kant himself wouldn't agree, and would say both formulations of the imperative are violated by homosexuality. But it's a pretty well-agreed fact that the bare categorical imperatives aren't capable of doing the moral legwork Kant wants them to do. They permit far more than his strict Pietist morality allows him to admit. He'd find what most modern Kantians have done with his thought morally abhorrent.

So yeah tl;dr--it really turns on how you interpret the imperatives and whether you take Kant's examples of how they should be used as seriously as he wants you too, which imo is pointless because he makes a lot of weird claims in the Groundwork, I.e that the formulations of the imperatives are all identical (I.e that they all forbid and permit exactly the same things) which is incoherent to me. I think if you're going to use Kant's moral philosophy (and I'm not a Kantian so I don't) you're more consistent using it loosely and liberally rather than as strictly as Kant wants you to

[Anonymous No.13634765]

>>13634758
Also Kant can't think that not producing offspring violates the 1st formulation because he himself was celibate

[Anonymous No.13634767]

>>13629263
homosexuality is immoral and also top tier cumbrain

[Anonymous No.13634787]

>>13634767
Agree but not what the thread is asking bro

[Anonymous No.13634837]

Where do I start with Cunt?

[Anonymous No.13634881]

>>13629263
If you apply the categorical imperative to homosexuality, it doesn't mean that everyone would become homosexual, but that everyone would not have sex with the gender he's not attracted to, and that would be a pretty great thing.

[Anonymous No.13634910]

>>13631970
Feminism is transcendentalism, wanting to be a free liberated individual, free from all constraints biological or sexual.womanhood is immanence, masculinity is transcendence this much is implicit in feminist ideology. Technology and the death of god and the nihilistic course of western liberalism made it innevitable its part of something much bigger, so i dont mean to come off as too hard on the broads. But these women are no nietzsche at best they are aspiring middle managers,shrill figures of postmenopausal authority, or else bovine self obsessed consumers. Having deserted Man, God and her natural role as mother and wife Woman is left alone in the wilderness. Soon, approaches her biological expiration date In desperation she turns to quack health cures, witchy astrology, self diagnosed fybromalgia and lyme, lots and lots of cats.

[Anonymous No.13634921]

>>13634758
The only problem I have with this is that Kant believes people have duties to themselves, like developing their talents and not commiting suicide. So it kinda rules out the idea the contracts make things good. I imagine he'd also be against making contracts that prevented one party from developing their talents, like say, indulging someone's vices by loaning them cash. So it doesn't seem that simple.
Of course as you say you're going beyond what Kant believed, so
Can I get a good list of post-Kant Kantians to read btw?

[Anonymous No.13634956]

>>13629263
That’s great take this man totally out of context and apply him conveniently where your personal assault will only flourish. Unless you’re an 18th-century Prussian I don’t want to hear it. I am not also going to teach you how to read, or make sense of philosophical text when you are so eager to spell your vitriol over things you don’t understand. You’re asking me I’m telling you.

[Anonymous No.13634960]

>>13629263
In this age of Trump the categorical imperative makes homosexuality specially moral as it is synonymous with a stand against bigotry.

[Anonymous No.13635014]

>>13634837
Prolly best not to "start" with him. You need a lot of background to really get a good grip of the critiques.

You could probably read the Groundwork without much prep and get a lot out of it, and it'd be a good way to cut your teeth on difficult philosophy, but you'd definitely finish it with a warped idea of what his position really is. I'd still recommend doing this though. It's good to read difficult works, even if you only half-understand them, just to familiarise yourself with how it is to read difficult philosophy

If you want to read the rest of his work/really understand the groundwork you need quite a lot of prep.

You need the context of early modern philosophy. At least read the Stanford encyclopaedia pages for Descartes, Spinoza and Berkeley. You should probably read Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding in full, which isn't too bad cuz it's fairly short and not too difficult as long you read some online resources alongside (Stanford enclyclopedia is always my recommendation), as well as Hume's Enquiry, which is also not that long (don't bother reading his longer Treatise; Kant himself didn't read it) and quite nicely written

The most important influence for Kant however is Leibniz-Wolffianism. This is his immediate philosophical background and sets his vocabulary and means of expressing his ideas. His terminology becomes so much clearer if you get a good understanding of this tradition.

Start with Leibniz. Read his Stanford page. Then read the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence. Then Leibniz's Monadology

You don't need to be a Leibniz scholar, but if you can explain what a monad is, and what his views on space and time are then it makes Kant a lot easier

To cement your knowledge of Leibniz, I'd quickly read through Alexander Baumgarten's Metaphysics (as in, read through it, ignoring whatever you don't understand, just to get the gist of it). This is the metaphysics textbook Kant used when teaching and he basically modelled the Critique of Pure Reason as a response to/critique of Baumgarten's textbook. Dry as fuck, unpleasant to read, and mostly important just to get used to the weird way the rationalists have of talking about things (the main obstacle to understanding Kant imo)

After that, the last thing before actually reading Kant, get a copy of Frederick Beiser's "German Idealism: the struggle against subjectivism". By far the best book about this period in philosophy. It's long but you only need to read the Kant section. You'll probably continue with it though cuz it's a weirdly gripping read once you get invested in the problems these guys were dealing with.

Then you can read the first Critique and it'll be (for the most part) pretty comprehensible.

I'm a great believer in just jumping into texts and hoping for the best, especially in philosophy. But Kant and Hegel are kind of the big exceptions to that. You'll just make yourself miserable if you try to read them without their context.

[Anonymous No.13635021]

>>13629263
Isn't the categorical imperative just a rearrangement of the deckchairs on the fast-sinking ship of continental philosophy? The answer? Yes

[Anonymous No.13635105]

>>13634921
You're definitely right that when Kant says we ought to treat humanity as an end in itself and not use others merely as a means, that isn't reducible to just a kind of contract theory. But I think it's important that Kant sees the essential feature of humanity as being rational agency. So to value humanity in others and ourselves is in both cases to respect our own and others rational agency. I still think purely hedonistic sexual encounters don't necessarily violate that as it's formulated in its bare form, because I can use someone as a means of getting sexual pleasure without necessarily violating either my own or another's rational agency. I also think masturbation could pass this test tho, which Kant explicitly denies.

I think one problem is, that Kant uses examples of how to use the imperatives, that aren't necessarily entailed by the way he expresses the imperatives without any specific context, as bare laws. Like I say, i just don't think they do the legwork he wants them to do.

As for book recs I'm probably not the person to ask lmao. I love Kant, but I do think his project is just fundamentally misguided. When I talk about how modern Kantians use (or abuse) his philosophy, I'm mostly going off of actual Kantians I've met studying philosophy in an analytic department. Which is very different from people who are interested in Kant in a more historical/exegetical way. The analytic Kantians I know tend to just use the categorical imperative divorced from its context to justify bog standard liberalism. Which involves a lot of sitting around feeling smug about how you're a better Kantian than Kant himself and is ultimately very boring.

If you want good modern commentators on Kant I can definitely recommend Henry Allison and Frederick Beiser (esp. Beiser, imo the best scholar of that period.)

I've heard some good things about Ernst Cassirer as an interesting neo-Kantian but I know literally nothing about him or his whole scene so I can't really recommend him lol

[Anonymous No.13635108]

>>13635021
Silly frog bugger

[Anonymous No.13635126]

>>13630195
Based feminists