Students and hate (NWS, and contains Philosophy)
Every so often I'm reminded why Philosophy has the negative reputation that it does.
Last semester it was the Philosophy of Art class. This semester (he says, a whole week into the semester) it's a student...
I'm all for people trying new stuff, questioning the stuff that's being presented, and generally testing out ideas. I am against people just deciding to be assholes.
Case in point: 19th Century Philosophy, prof is going on about Kant to provide background to the topics we'll be discussing in detail later. He sketches over the first 'Rule' that Kant uses to determine if something is not moral:
"Always act according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant#The_first_formulation)
Now, I'm not a big fan of Kant. His rules lead to universals like simply "don't lie", and Kant means *ever*. His rules are not sensitive to circumstance, and he's ok with that. In fact, one of his core ideas is that *if* your morality is circumstance-sensitive, then you don't have morality.
I understand his point. I disagree. But I can see his thinking.
A common 'loophole' that assholes like to point out in this rule is that if you make it super-specific, then of course you can will it, eg: "It is ok to lie/kill/steal if you are a 30yo Irish guy named Brian if you have exactly $3.14 in your pocket and you live in Vancouver".
Yes, this is universal across *a* category. *The* category that Kant wants things universalised across is 'humanity'. Anything lower than that is Strawmanning Kant.
I tried mentioning this to the guy who appeared to have the difficulty in class. I was hoping to help the guy out. Turns out that his difficulty is 'being an asshole'.
He wants to criticise Kant's morality on the basis that it's not circumstance-sensitive. I pointed out that Kant doesn't want it to be, and criticising Kant's morality for this is like criticising Evolutionary Biology for not being sensitive to Quantum Mechanics. DNA being not 'sub-atomic'. (physicists in the audience: please don't hurt me if QM does work above the sub-atomic)
His reponse? "Why would you differentiate between the molecular level and the sub-atomic?"
Walked away. The guy's head was firmly entrenched in his own ass, and I don't need this crap.