Abstract
Kant believed that modern science threatens the possibility of normativity. Indeed, if everything results from laws and initial conditions then there is no place for something we ought to do. Normativity presupposes free will , and Newtonian physics , Kant believed, excludes free will. To save normativity, Kant, conforming to his critical approach, asked how there can be unchangeable laws of nature. His answer, put in current concepts, was that such laws mirror conditions of our mind’s data processing. Knowledge is possible only if the data input is processed by rules that reappear as the laws of nature. He applied this idea to morality: data output or action is possible only if it follows rules, and they are the moral laws.
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- 1.
René Descartes to Father Mesland, 9 Febr. 1645; Œuvres de Descartes, AT vol. IV, p. 173.
- 2.
Montaigne, II 18:649f/705f: “Lying is a base vice; a vice that one of the ancients portrays in the most odious colors when he says, ‘that it is to manifest a contempt of God, and withal a fear of men.’… Our intelligence being by no other way communicable to one another but by a particular word, he who falsifies that betrays public society. ’Tis the only way by which we communicate our thoughts and wills; ’tis the interpreter of the soul, and if it deceive us, we no longer know nor have further tie upon one another; if that deceive us, it breaks all our correspondence, and dissolves all the ties of government.”
References
Ratzinger, Joseph. “That Which Holds the World Together: The Pre-political Moral Foundations of a Free State”, in Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006.
Stanovich, Keith E. Rationality and the Reflective Mind, New York: Oxford UP 2011.
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Steinvorth, U. (2017). A Naturalistic Proof of the Validity of the Authenticity Command. In: Secularization. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63871-3_9
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