Kant
Jannie is right. Kant says a lot of stuff without supporting it. I had to read Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals this month. Kant is really inarticulate. No wonder there's so much controversy surrounding different interpretations of his philosophy--he really didn't explain his philosophy well. He makes some good points, but there are a lot of things that only need to be said once that he says over and over again, and his points are also spaced out sometimes by blocks of just BS, the way high school length-regulated essays sometimes are. And he makes enough unsupported statements to significantly lower my evaluation of his philosophy. His core idea that we should only do what we would be happy with everyone else doing is good, although in really rare cases I think even that idea goes wrong--which is the topic of an essay I have to write. The essay is due in 2 days, and I haven't started yet. Typical me. This time, though, I'm particularly driven to procrastination by the fact that I found the reading (Kant) to be really slow and difficult to understand and unappealing--in short, just icky. I'm not looking forward to this paper at all, which is why I am now in serious, pathological indecision as to whether to change my Ethics class grade system from Credit/D/Fail to letter grade. The deadline to make the change is this week, but I won't know my essay grade until 2 or 3 weeks from now. I really don't know if I understand Kant well, so I have no way to predict how well I will do on this essay even after I have written it. THAT's how unclear he is; after all this reading, I don't even know if I understand his points or have juat grossly misinterpreted them to the point where think I understand them. YUCK! As a result, I'm really nervous and anxious! I don't want to write this paper, and I have no idea whether to go for a potential good letter grade in the letter-grade system (my last ethics paper earned me an A) or stay with CR/D/F to protect myself from a bad grade--his essay grades are usually bell-curved around a C; last time only 15% of the class received an A or A-. I did well on my last essay, which makes me really happy, but also really worried because if I overconfidently change to letter-grade system, my presumptuousness could kill me. SO many people get Cs, Ds, and Fs on these papers that I cannot feel safe about my next grade no matter what my last one was. Eeek! Help!