In other words, it is reasonable, or possible, to justify one’s actions from something else than your preferences—- It took me a time to parse all the negatives there.

Although I “use” Kant in much the way hilzoy does (I admit I probably have many of my ideas about things from him, but I can’t be sure I understand him), I have a question to something that was said above:

zdenek: “This is why he does not think that we have a direct duty to be good but only indirect one:”

But what about our duty to not be evil? Some people*, distinguish between a duty to do good, which is conditional and a duty to not do evil, which is unconditional. To quote Thoreau: “It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous, wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him”.

But does Kant mean that not doing evil is a direct duty (in the sense of the zdenek quote)?

• (Yes, me included)

Now I think that Zizek is mangling Kant in the process, but you have got to pay attention to his process of thinking…which is anti-liberal to the max and a philosophical explanation of Lacan, which is hardly psychoanalytic at best.

What Zizek might do best is play with a certain mode of sadism, but I think to try to understand this on a purely Kantian level is misguided at best.

In other words can one look to moral law to fix the question of what counts as good character and then as it were just implement the rule or act in accordance with that duty ?
Mature Kant’s answer seems to be that to think that this can be done is incoherent .

Think about how Aristotle gets out of this mess. Character is the basis of our actions, and we are responsible for our character. How do we come to have our character? Through habituation and our upbringing. There certainly were choices along the way that we made that affected the character we came to develop, but it would be a mistake to say that there was a moment when we chose our character. And yet, we are still responsible for the character we came to have. This means that responsibility is not tied to a discrete act of choice that can be temporally located. And that picture, I want to suggest, isn’t too far from Kant’s (mature) view.

Talk of an “atemporal act of primordial choice” is confused because it just suggests the same old picture of an act being the ground of responsibility – although in this case, somehow in a different place outside of time. The mistake is obviously compounded by the incoherence of saying that this choice occurs “prior to his temporal bodily existence.” But with the Aristotelian picture of character in mind, we find the grounds of responsibility cannot be located at any discrete moment of choice in a causal history. In that sense, it may make more sense to say that the acquisition of our character and responsibility is atemporal. Admittedly, Kant doesn’t help himself by talking about a transcendent choice, but I’m suggesting that it is really the issue of responsibility that he has in mind. Of course, there’s more Kantian metaphysical baggage that goes along with this picture, but Aristotle had metaphysical baggage of his own.

Now the question about choosing one’s character can be put this way : can we choose having moral feelings or having conscience ? and secondly what sort of duty is the duty to listen to our conscience ?
To the first question Kant answer is no we have limited control over this mechanism and that is why his answer to the second question is that we do not have direct duty to obey such commands ( we have indirect duties in this regard only, since they are not products of wille ).

“did Kant actually propose this?”

The consensus answer is:

“no, though something that might be mistaken for it in a not very good undergraduate paper on Kant.”

i.e., if this is typical of Zizek’s work, it ain’t so great.

‘cause it’s fun! Bwahahahahaha!