Thumbs up, thumbs down

Possibly the only thing on which I am closer to the Republicans than the Democrats is abortion.

And that is because support for the alleged right of women to kill their unborn children, which ought to be denied the shelter of the privacy right given it in Roe, is the absolute core of modern feminism, and because feminists are so strong within the Democratic Party they have made it a litmus test issue for Democratic candidates.

In my view - except for the first couple of weeks of pregnancy, before actual organs begin to develop, during which it is intrinsically unobjectionable, though perhaps it still would be best for it to be illegal - abortion is the killing of an unborn child and ought to be illegal, just as is infanticide.

In fact, woman should have legally enforceable duties of care for their unborn children, just as parents have such duties regarding their children who have already been born.

But what women want is the right to commit murder, and without any interference from anyone, not even the fathers of their children, not even the parents of pregnant minors.

And they want that more than anything else on their feminist todo list, many of the items on which are there only to defend or entrench that right.

It occurs to me that Immanuel Kant somewhere wrote that prohibitions of cruelty to animals were necessary, though animals have no rights and no moral standing in themselves, in order to prevent humans being even more vicious and brutal toward each other than they are.

Surely someone must see how this applies to the question whether abortion ought to be prohibited, even if it is believed or anyway alleged that unborn children are not children or have no rights.

Though it has been argued by some utilitarian ethicists - perhaps previously employed at Buchenwald and widely admired by liberals -  that killing a mature ape or adult chimpanzee is morally much worse than even killing a human infant, and much, much worse than abortion.

Trump Administration to Tie Health Facilities’ Funding to Abortion Restrictions

But this is horrible, malicious, ugly, misogynist Nativism.

Trump Administration Wants to Shut Door on Abused Women

Unaccountable opinions

Kant thought he needed faith in God to allow himself faith in immortality.

Why?

I don't see it. 

And why immortality?

Aquinas thought for humans to be eternally happy would require a miraculous change of human nature.

I don't recall whether Kant thought the same.

Kantian ethics

"Treat everyone as an end in himself, never as a means solely."

Looking at the formula of universal law, and perhaps under the influence of R. M. Hare, some philosophers have professed to see Kant's ethics as founded in utilitarianism, albeit of the rule variety.

Looking at the formula of ends, I see his ethics as closer to the those of Hobbesian contract theory.

Of course, he says his inspiration is in Rousseau.

Free men are not sacrificed to the interests of others.

Not even when the others are the majority.

But are you more likely to be a winner or the loser if one is killed for body parts to save many?

So, really?

"The Transcendental Ego Can never die."

A professor said that in a graduate seminar on Husserl, in an offhand criticism of Heidegger, at Duquesne University, some time around 1976, or so.

Though I suppose it might as well have been a Kant seminar.

But it wasn't.

A few years later, I had a graduate seminar on Kant at Pitt with Wilfie Sellars.

Of course, his was rather a different view.

I never had the least idea he was an alcoholic.

Apparently, he died of the effects, somehow.

Everybody dies of something.

I knew his disciple, Hoagland, drank a hell of a lot.

But not him.

Analytic and synthetic

All right, it seems reasonable to grant that "All bodies are extended" is analytic.

He says also impenetrability and figure belong to this concept.

But why not also "All bodies are heavy"?

Why restrict ourselves to vision?

Reading the first critique.

Seeing and seeing as

Figure and ground.

A duck or a rabbit.

Kant shorn of transcendental idealism is a worthier successor to Hume than the logical positivists who insisted physical object statements were equivalent to sense data statements.

They omitted what he, following Aristotle and like those in his and the Scholastic traditions, emphasized, the critical role of imagination in working up sensa into a world of phenomena, of objects of experience together occupying or situated in both three dimensional space and time.

This is something different from judgment or belief, though intimately related to both.

And this whole world of appearances is merely mine.

And I have no truck with real others, unless a noumenal world that includes noumenal others appears through them.

Reading the first critique.

PS. That doesn't mean he is better than Hume and the empiricists at understanding regularities in nature and expectations that the future will resemble the past.

How did this happen?

Immanuel Kant, Critique of pure reason, preface to the 2nd edition, Norman Kemp Smith, translator and editor, St Martin's Press, 1965.

Kant says the great mass of men are "ever to be held by us in the greatest esteem."

He says this in context of discussing mass opinion on matters of religion and morals.

Who is "us"?

We who are not of the masses, of course.

Whence began such flattery of the masses in places the illiterate, and even the literate, rabble would never be?

Why was or is it felt to be necessary?

Fanfare for the common man.

Whitman on democracy and the people.

Sandburg.

But absolutely not Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill or Karl Marx.

Much less Ortega y Gasset.

So Kant read Fielding?

Book 15, Chapter 1.

That virtue in this life is not rewarded with happiness is the premise for one of reason's noblest arguments for belief in immortality, says Fielding.

Reading Tom Jones, published in 1749.

Well before Kant's second critique, 1788.

Perhaps the idea was something of a commonplace among the educated of the time.

A Kantian meditation

The phenomenal world is a world only because what comprises it is already posited as trans-phenomenal.

The bedroom I leave when I go to the kitchen for another beer is part of a phenomenal world only because I regard it as still there during my absence.

Its posited trans-phenomenal existence is essential to its character as part of a world of phenomena.

But this is different from the trans-phenomenal being posited behind the phenomena.

The former is integral to the world of our naive realism, even if only "in brackets," even if only "as if."

The latter is a ghostly remainder of the Lockean, empirical idealism, originally of primary and secondary qualities, that figures intrinsically in the story we tell ourselves about ourselves as inhabitants of this same phenomenal world, projected into invisibility as things in themselves, once we see through naive realism - but not very far.

Moral imperatives

Nietzsche, Kant, and many others before and since have spoken of morality as a matter of precepts, laws, commands, imperatives, or rules.

For some philosophers this is not a mere common manner of speaking, as common as moral declarations such as "stealing is wrong" or "parents and their children have duties toward one another."

Instead, in their view, declarations that something or other is right, wrong, or whatever are secondary, mere reports of the more fundamental moral phenomenon that such things are forbidden by moral rules.

Hence the view, for instance, that “murder is wrong” means the same thing as “murder is forbidden,” and that the latter asserts the existence of an authoritative, moral prohibition equivalent to the rule, “Do not murder.”

But which, then, are the moral rules?

Which are the ones that are authoritative?

Why, the ones it is wrong to disobey, of course.

And so we are back again with a morality founded, not in commands or rules, but in illusory declarations of what is right, wrong, or a duty.

Illusory, I say, in the way I have described in other posts labeled "amoralism."