Yeah, this. And the man did not have the benefit of all the lessons of all the people whose shoulders we stand on today to know that it is just a pigmentation difference. We also benefit from 205 years of debate on just that subject that occurred after Kant died. Kant may have been a sonofabitch who could not communicate a simple thought to save his life, but his mistake on a line of reasoning he had little qualification on doesn’t call into question his more complicated thoughts on subjects he followed to their logical conclusion.
For his character, or for the content of his philosophy, or for having the presumption to teach geography when he never in his life traveled twenty miles from Konigsberg?
Does Kant’s philosophy have any implications relevant to racism/racial prejudice/race relations, and, if so, are those implications in any way implied by the attitude reflected in the quote in the OP? Serious question.
Just the middle one. I’d only recently (read: last week) learned more about his biography. And it’s not the entirety of his philosophy I have the issue with; not even the majority. Just his ethics. But then, I’m a contxtual moralist, so that’s not surprising.
Incidentally, before anyone complains about me asserting that the end justifies the means, that is not what I mean. I mean that no action has any moral value outside its context; that you cannot judge whether something is right or wrong if you divorce it from its predictable, knowable, likely consequences. Tellingthe truth is not always right; killing is not always wrong. Deontology is always crap, though.
It seems to me from that extract that Kant is swallowing his opinion of Blacks whole from Hume. Certainly that makes him excessively credulous in matters of anthropology, but I see no reason to thereby doubt his philosophy.
I dunno. The Belmonts never did that well without him.
IIRC there is some pretty sly antisemitism in the KU/CJudg too. And in his Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view I think he claims that people who smoke pipes/cigars are really just bored/basically stupid, if they don’t keep to a strict schedule like the Vater himself.
Hegelian speculative thought, mediated by people like Fichte, is of a piece with Kant in his racism as well as his pernicious philosophy. Remember all that jazz about dark Africa and stuff in the greater Phenomenology?
His biography and early writings are utterly fascinating, though. Essentially, he was a failed fiction writer who came to philosophy in a state of despair. My main source for such tidbits is Jean-Luc Nancy’s Logodaedalus : La philosophie de la syncope (I think that’s what it’s called) – I don’t know if it’s been translated from French, but if so, or if you have French, it’s worth the short time it takes to read it.
There’s only one way to settle the logically irreconcilable conflict between contextual and deontological systems of ethics.
Thunderdome.
No, not really. Those opinions are similar to those of Jefferson, Lincoln, Albert Schweitzer, Voltaire & Gandhi.
Albert Schweitzer? :rolleyes:
Nitpick: AFAIK, Kant doesn’t require you to tell the truth, he just requires you not to lie. Silence on the matter of the victim’s location would be permissible, I think.
ISTR that part of Kant’s argument in “Supposed Right to Lie” involves an observation that we are typically not in a good position to know what the consequences of our actions will be. Because of this, what we have to go on is not consequences but the nature of our act in itself.
Probably not convincing, but not as boneheaded as it may seem at first.
Still you’re right, I think, that Kant would argue that the right thing to do is the right thing to do damn the consequences, even if you did know exactly what the consequences would be.
“The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling.” Gandhi would have nodded?!
Oh, white people would never do that cougheucharistcough.
Anti-abortion folks say the same thing about Margaret Sanger, despite the fact that none of her writings reveal her to be a true racist. She was against “Negroes” having more babies because of the conditions the ones they alread had were forced to live in–poverty, overcrowding, poor medical care.
It is often very wrong the judge philosophies of the past against our modern standards. The best example of this is Joe McCarthy’s Communist witchhunt.
Are you posting from an alternate world in which I wouldn’t cheat?
We stand on the shoulders of midgets.
Uh, what? That was a horrible idea then and now. It doesn’t make a difference whose standards you judge it by.
Are you posting from an alternate post-Apocalyptic Australia where Thunderdome has rules?
It depends.
A person can be a racist and still be correct about any number of other things.
If the obviously wrong claims about race are part of some larger whole, then the whole is wrong. The quoted text is so willfully ignorant that any conclusions drawn from it must be ignored. First, because the premise is wrong. Second, because the author is obviously making shit up as he couldn’t actually know those things even if they were true.
Someone dueling in favor of deontological ethics is going to be constrained by some stupid rule or other. “Play fair.” “Don’t throw sand in your opponent’s eyes.” “No ripping off people’s genitals and forcing them down the victim’s throats, as that is obviously overkill as well as sadistic.”
I, on the other hand, believe in bringing RPGs to knife-fights.