no wonder the EotAW skank approve of him

I must say, however, that I was shocked at how unintelligent the average students seemed to be. This is Harvard, after all, and all of these students are at least 18 years old (many are older still). Am I being unfair? I would certainly concede that isolated comments are hardly reliable portents into the students’ respective capabilities, yet I was still surprised.

In Ireland, where I am from, students of this age really would be much more well informed. Aside from knowledge (one may believe that, before the age of 18, people would be better served developing aspects of their lives other than knowledge of political philosophy, and I would wholeheartedly agree) two more concerning perceptions forced their way continually into my mind…
1. The average level of innate intelligence and thoughtfulness was much lower than I would have expected from Sophomore students at Harvard…
2. The relatively inarticulate way many of the commenting students phrased their contributions was disappointing (all the more so if Jacob Rus is right about the extent of the post-lecture editing)…

I am sorry if this seems unreasonable. It is just that, from my experience in Ireland (and in other places in Europe) students here – on the whole – seem to be much more advanced in their intellectual development by this age. Here, this would be especially true for those especially who have had every possible opportunity in life (such as nearly all of the students in Sandel’s class).

Well, maybe a little. “Free will” also makes some mischief in the realm of social policy. It lets the rest of us off too easily from helping lazy, foolish, or even depraved people, who are said to be “responsible” for their own bad behavior and its consequences. Yes, they are responsible—in the sense that we shouldn’t give them a free pass for that behavior; but no, they’re not responsible—in the sense that we mustn’t ignore the probably large and intricate web of causes that produced it, almost always including inadequate material, social, and intellectual resources in early life. Of course, ignoring those causes is exactly what conservatives want to do, since addressing them would cost money, which said conservatives have of course earned through their own free and responsible behavior and are not going to part with for the sake of some damn deadbeats.

JoB: How exactly does Davidson’s existence entail the existence of free will?

Who told you cogsci had means to tackle the free will. Don’t take him or her seriously.

On 53: Davidson. Whether he’s right or wrong, the fact he existed shows you’re wrong.

Why not? In fact we don’t have free will, and we do have morality. Metaphysical freedom has been becoming progressively less intelligible for three hundred years and will soon be (like phlogiston, etc.) an intellectual relic. We’ll still have all the same moral problems. We simply won’t have morality’s traditional theological baggage: ie, sin and eternal punishment.

But then the strict Laplacean determinism has long since be supplanted by more stochastic accounts of natural causality. And reflection on selfhood and agency has since become far more socialized. Habermas’ kind of neo-neo-Kantianism, by which he waters down, if not jettisons, the more Hegelian and Marxian aspects of his heritage (Adorno), is emphatically materialist and doesn’t make appeal to TI. And it’s precisely designed to try to reconcile the situated socialized “nature” of selves/agents and their differing ways of life with the “unconditional” demands of universal justice. How successful his attempted mediation is and whether an hermeneutically thicker conception of the life-world, a more Hegelian sense of the “contradictoriness” of the dynamics of such mediation and a more Marxian sense of its material conditioning might not be preferable as more realistic is another matter.

I really dont think this is right. His ethics is not tied to his metaphysics in any significant way and that is why Kantian ethics is untouched by TI being false ; TI is optional in other words. Here are four core elements of his ethics and you will see that one doesnt have to invoke TI at any point in spelling them out :

1) Kant’s distinctive and influensial notion of autonomy which he defines as the property of the will by which it is a law to itself etc does not depend on TI .

2) His distinctive emphasis on moral principles being discoverable a priori ( another central feature and distinctive feature of Kants ethics ) is not dependent on TI at any point.

3) His important and distinctive claim that morality presents itself to human beings in the form of categorical imperative is not dependent on TI being true .

4) Kant’s notion of the highest good is independent of TI. While rational nature is v . important in his account he also offers another conception of ultimate value that can be conceived of as the complete object of practical reason, towards which moral action points towards.

Kants ethics is not dependent on TI and that is of course why its been so influencial and why also it makes sense to talk about neo Kantianism—we see in Rawls or Christine Korsgaard say—as full blown and not something unconnected to Kants philosophy.

To cut a long story very short, Kant’s problem was: if everything is governed by the laws of nature, we have determinism, if we have determinism we cannot have free will and if we don’t have free will we cannot have morality.

You can find variations on Kant’s TI in numerous contemporary responses to this problem, and while his TI might not provide “the answer” to the problem, it remains unsolved and Kant’s approach a valid one.

Also, Habermas relies heavily on Kantian TI and while one is of course free to reject his approach, nobody can deny that he is an influential major player in these debates.

When you talk about “full-blooded kantian ethics” you are simply setting an impossibly high bar and your usage of “dead in the water” doesn’t conform to our ordinary language understanding of the expression.

within kant’s own system, the ethics is very closely tied up with the t.i., in such a way that if we can no longer accept the t.i., then we can no longer accept kant’s own understanding of his own ethics. kant’s own system, as he understood it, is dead in the water if the t.i. is false. that was scialabba’s point.

you then change the subject by saying, “but there are other people who claim some inspiration from kant, and advocate ethical systems somewhat related to his, and their systems are not evidently dead in the water—so how can we take this scialabba guy seriously?”

that is not relevant to g.s.’s point, unless you think that any successes on the part of the korsgaard crowd would vindicate kant’s own system as kant understood it, i.e. the one that g.s. claims is vitiated by its reliance on t.i.

so, again—do you think that korsgaard is committed to the machinery of timeless noumenal selves that exist outside the manifolds of sensory experience and are exempt from physical laws? i don’t think so, and so i don’t think any vital signs on her part can revive kant’s own t.i., or his own ethics.

saying this: “K’s constructivism is a type of TI : moral facts are created/ constructed just as the phenomenal facts are created by us etc.” doesn’t really change anything, since it does not show that kant’s own t.i. is vindicated by neo-kantian constructivists, only that there is some other sort of quasi-idealism about the status of moral facts which might be implicated in constructivism.

you think anemic kantian ethics (a.k.a. constructivism) entails anemic idealism (about moral facts), and you think the work of korsgaard et al. vindicates both. but that still does not show that there is anything wrong with g.s.’s claim that problems with full-blooded, kantian t.i. make full-blooded kantian ethics unacceptable.

Actually, you said that Sandel has no “working solution” to the general problem of adjudicating between universal and associative values and then (falsely) implied that this would leave him paralysed in the Swiss case. I merely pointed out that wrt the general problem, we are all in same boat.

“…Sandel pilots readers skillfully through these philosophical rapids, giving each perspective its due with admirable judiciousness and perspicacity. He is quite right to highlight the moral limits of reliance on the market, since the superior wisdom of minimally regulated markets has been our main civic shibboleth for several decades now. Also illuminating is his argument, following Aristotle, that moral judgments about one or another policy should take into account the way of life and the type of character that the community in question aspires to produce.Nevertheless, to one who subscribes, as I do, to the James/Dewey/Quine/Rorty tradition of philosophical pragmatism, it is a little difficult to take Aristotle or Kant seriously. (It is, I should think, impossible for anyone at all to take Friedman and Nozick seriously.) Aristotle’s impersonal telos-es and Kant’s transcendental idealism are simply dead in the water, like St. Anselm’s ontological proof for the existence of God. They are philosophical relics, as phlogiston and the ether are scientific relics…”

This is obviously a criticism of Kant’s ethics but to say that TI is dead is either irrelevant ( if we Scialabba is assuming that Kants ethics is completely independent of his metaphysics what is the point of saying that his metaphysics is false ? ) or it is false / misleading ( if we recognize that K’s constructivism is a type of TI : moral facts are created/ constructed just as the phenomenal facts are created by us etc. ).