Life, Liberty, Kant, and the Pursuit of Happiness
Wow. That discussion brought up all kinds of new things that I hadn’t gotten out of my original reading of Kant, and the things discussed keep coming up in other places.
For example, in one of my classes, we were talking about security versus privacy as an issue of international communication. None of us had thought about it exclusively, and were all surprised that our responses were something along the lines of “well, as long as it doesn’t bother us, we’d rather have someone make the decisions for us.” In class Tuesday, we talked about the decidedly non-democratic setup of Kant’s ideal society, and how representatives vote, not the whole population of individuals. (see pages 77 and 117) The idea Kant presents of the representative body making the laws that the peoples would make (if they had a chance), and would stand behind was SO apparent in my other class discussion…it is curious that Kant knew so much about people while only living in such a small physical territory. The idea that the universal good, when instituted by the law would obviously be agreed upon by the populace is an interesting support, but it does weaken his argument.
Though this idea of a universal good (/truth/duty) is not supported in Kant’s argument, his idea of universal good and universal endpoint for society and government and mankind as a whole is so interested. I have always been bothered by the idea of development – why do we have to impose our ways of life onto other people? Reading Kant made me realize that this kind of development is inextricably tied to the idea of a universal good. The idea of a moral politician ties into this also – since there is a “universal truth” it must be reflected in the setup of governments too…again, the idea of imposing such a truth sounds like a good idea, but discovering whose is the universal truth seems an impossible task.
So are we justified in aiding so-called developing nations? The international communication world would complain of cultural imperialism - that we (the US) are taking over other cultures with our own, invading and destroying their way of life and replacing it with ours. If ours is a universal truth, then Kant would say this was ok, but who is to say ours is?
For example, in one of my classes, we were talking about security versus privacy as an issue of international communication. None of us had thought about it exclusively, and were all surprised that our responses were something along the lines of “well, as long as it doesn’t bother us, we’d rather have someone make the decisions for us.” In class Tuesday, we talked about the decidedly non-democratic setup of Kant’s ideal society, and how representatives vote, not the whole population of individuals. (see pages 77 and 117) The idea Kant presents of the representative body making the laws that the peoples would make (if they had a chance), and would stand behind was SO apparent in my other class discussion…it is curious that Kant knew so much about people while only living in such a small physical territory. The idea that the universal good, when instituted by the law would obviously be agreed upon by the populace is an interesting support, but it does weaken his argument.
Though this idea of a universal good (/truth/duty) is not supported in Kant’s argument, his idea of universal good and universal endpoint for society and government and mankind as a whole is so interested. I have always been bothered by the idea of development – why do we have to impose our ways of life onto other people? Reading Kant made me realize that this kind of development is inextricably tied to the idea of a universal good. The idea of a moral politician ties into this also – since there is a “universal truth” it must be reflected in the setup of governments too…again, the idea of imposing such a truth sounds like a good idea, but discovering whose is the universal truth seems an impossible task.
So are we justified in aiding so-called developing nations? The international communication world would complain of cultural imperialism - that we (the US) are taking over other cultures with our own, invading and destroying their way of life and replacing it with ours. If ours is a universal truth, then Kant would say this was ok, but who is to say ours is?
posted by Rebecca at 11:27 AM
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