Lying is always an immoral act
Not doing what is in your power to do to prevent harm to others is immoral — Rank Amateur

This is not what Kant is saying. He is saying that lying can never be moral for any reason, not that it is always immoral to lie. He does not directly prescribe lying as immoral.

Interestingly Kant thinks that not ling is more important than preventing harm to others. Your duty to not to lie is mandatory, your duty to save another life only something that you are supposed to do when you can.

Of course, but I think it's normally assumed that those (evasive) options are not available and your only options are to say nothing, tell the truth or lie. — ChrisH

Not by Kant, he is very specific that only when you have no other option than answering yes or no that you must not lie. This even gives scope for permitting the telling of 'white lies' in order not to offend, such as when asked by your aunt if you like the hideous tie she bought you for your birthday you could answer 'I have never seen such an interesting tie'.

Bill Clinton used Kant most famously when asked if he had had sex with Monica he answered "I did not have sexual relations with that woman'. In the Kantian sense this was not technically a lie because he was never asked to explain what he defined 'sexual relations' as meaning.

So I think that Kant give a lot of room for being truthful with discretion. When the murderer asks you whether his intended victim is in your house you could also answer that you do not know. This would not be lying because at that exact moment you don't know whether the person is still in your house or has run away by the back door.

That is not the point, Kant will tell you that the only thing in your view that is right is if everyone else made the same act things would not get worse. All of our actions must treat others as ends in themselves and not just as a means to our ends.

In my view though, and I think that Kant would probably agree with me, is that I would not open my front door to a person with bad intentions towards me or my household, so I would not open the door and I would call the police. Isn't that what most sensible people would do?

Kant quite specifically does not tell us what is an immoral act or whether the act is good or bad in relation to practicality. He is specifically telling us what acts and under what conditions that we can claim 'moral worthiness' of the act.

Under no condition, even such an exaggerated one as the murderer at the door can you claim that lying is of moral worth. It might be the right thing to do, the only thing to do but that will never make telling a lie morally worthy.

His original example was about lying promises. You promise to repay money loaned knowing that you cannot do so. No matter how noble the purpose that you need the money for, it is never morally right to lie in order to get it.

I think that Kant gives us a valuable way of looking at morality, even when we cannot attain moral worthiness, it still is theoretically attainable. We will be better people by pursuing the aim without attaining it than we would be by mitigating morality or just giving up all together.

After the Brexit referendum result, I theorised that in future elections all voting should be done on-line, and before being allowed to vote every voter should answer a short multiple-choice quiz on the main issues of the election. If they could not get the answers right they would be excluded from voting. I suppose that is one way of forcing voters to at least a basic level of knowledge, but would it ever be accepted? I very much doubt it.. — Tim3003

Churchill said two things highly relative to your point. Firstly that the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter. Secondly he said that Democracy is the worst system of government apart from all of the others. So you are not the first person to think like this, you are in quite good company.

As long as some people tell the truth sometimes, lying would work. — Terrapin Station

The people that tell the truth would only believe people they can verify are most likely not to lie. This is kind of the current state of world affairs.

Well, they can't work when everyone always lies, because then it's the same as telling the truth. People would just assume that anything anyone says is a lie. — Terrapin Station

So ultimately lying is self defeating. The murderer at the door comes at the end of Kant's Groundwerk as an answer to a question on his perfect duty to never make a lying promise. It doesn't everyone to always lie, just the majority and the trust system breaks down.

The same happens with animals, each species has a number of 'cheaters'. With humans we deal with this by an 'arms race' where the conned become increasingly wary and harder to con. Eventually the only way the cheater can get anything from society is by adopting the moral rules. Other species may avoid arms races because there is always the chance that the cheaters will become unstoppable and destroy system.

I think that simply not opening the door is the most obvious solution, don't you?

But I believe the French have a different view... — unenlightened

they lost their right to an opinion when they revolted!

Important to remember that Kant allows you not to always tell the truth. The murderer at the door is a good example. Firstly, when he asks if your friend is in the house you may answer simply that 'you don't know'. This is not a lie because you do not know if your friend has exited through the back door, tunneled out of your house, been teleported to the the Enterprise and been caught up in the rapture.

Secondly Kant no where says that you had to open the door in the first place! He does allow for creative thinking and only forces the truth out when having to answer a yes or no question.

If you lied to the murderer at the door and unknown to you your friend had snuck out the back, and due to your lie the murderer goes away and runs into your friend and kills him, then your lie was a direct cause of the action.

Lies cannot be universalised because if they were they would not work. Lies only work in an environment of honesty and trust. If everyone lied about X no one would be trusted about X and then no one would be given the chance to get away with X. Lies only work because people believe promises, undermine that and lies don't work anymore (and we would be living in a far worse place).

It is my opinion that the problems in understanding these aspects of reality, will never be resolved until we release the scientific representation of time, and return to the religious ideology for guidance. — Metaphysician Undercover

A brave opinion put well. I agree with it more than I disagree.

Could we say that for Berkeley the objective and the subjective are basically the same thing?

Things can only be "in a manner" for a percipient; so unless there is an all-seeing infinite intelligence that thinks and perceives the ding an sich in all its infinite possible "manners"; things in themselves simply exist. — Janus

I think that for Berkeley the ding an sich is God. There is no veil of perception to be overcome, just God, his ideas of objects and us and our minds, it is all clear and very direct.

The Wahhabi sect of Sunni Muslims are more fanatic than the Iranians Mullah's. Bin Laden was a Wahhabi as is al-quiada.

Afghanistan has never been truly conquered in it's history. Armies invade but can never make it work, the Soviet occupation failed and so will the American one.

My mind is drawn back to the crusades where Richard the lion heart was reluctant to take Jerusalem. He knew that it was easy as a military target but he also knew his people had no long term capability to stay there and rule the place. US policy today is quite similar to the crusader policies as I see it.

The crusaders occupied, fortified, ruled and then left all of their conquests within a few generations. The natives know this about us and only need to be patient. So little has changed since the Roman times.

Great post, keep them coming.

. Maybe Berkeley disproves Locke's ontology without providing an acceptable alternative. That's what I remember about Berkeley, he provides a lot of good arguments against some ontological principles, without providing an alternative to those refuted principles. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is right in line with my question. He does actually provide a lot of support for his theory however a lot of that support is almost identical to the support Locke had used and Berkeley had refuted. Kind of like saying you can't use that reason to support matter but I can use it to support spiritual substance.

If we can expose this tactic it would seriously undermine immateriality as an alternative to Locke.

Great post, thanks. Some of my ideas on what you said.

The ability of the mind to generalise was not, I think, something much considered by Locke, and indeed one of his main weaknesses (as it was also with Berkeley). — Wayfarer

Berkeley says that we cannot form abstract ideas of colour without shape, or of bodies without a background, motion without something moving. It is this separation that Locke uses to describe primary and secondary qualities that Berkeley calls abstract ideas. Berkeley says he cannot abstract in that way, can you think of an abstract man, of no particular size, body type, colour, hair etc?

It is this abstraction that allows Locke to claim the general term of matter. For Berkeley this is incoherent, because he cannot imagine a secondary quality in absence of a primary one and so Locke is abusing language by only using it as symbols of denotation. I am still not 100% on how this works, but I hve limited language understanding.

He argued that secondary qualities only exist in the world because of our relationship to the object. Therefore the existence and knowledge of other things is revealed through the sensation of a material that underlies all physical substance. We can figure out that objects exist outside of our mind because we have knowledge of these things independent of the things themselves. In other words, physical substances exist whether we perceive them or not, and therefore it is a physical substance that makes up the object. This is Locke’s main point.' — Wayfarer

Yes he did argue this but Berkeley denies any direct sensation from the underlying material, all we sense is the object being supported by matter. Locke himself says that matter is 'something I know not what'. Which is enough for Berkeley to claim Locke is being insufficiently empirical basing a theory on such flimsy evidence. His evidence of ideas seems much stronger and offers a direct sensory experience of the object as long as we can accept God in the role of producer, director, editor and author of our experience of the world.

It was this that Berkeley attacked. Any attributes of an object, even those so called 'primary', are present to us as 'ideas in the mind'. He says - I think misleadingly - that 'what we know are ideas'. Why that's misleading, is because it's not as if 'ideas' are the objects of perception; rather it's that whatever we know, is present in our mind as 'an idea'. And we never know anything that is not present as an idea, because that is what 'knowing' comprises! — Wayfarer

Locke says that ideas are inscribed on the mind (as you said in the beginning of your post) Berkeley says that our experience of the object causes an idea of it to form, however all we can know directly are our ideas. Hume developed this with the copy principle that ideas are copies of impressions.
They are all three legitimate empirical approaches, and all probably wrong but until today we don't really understand how the mind works and we cannot know the full nature of 'ideas'.

This thread appears to wander all over the place, — Metaphysician Undercover

Although reading all of the different points of view is fascinating, my thread asks only which theory is instrumentally better, Locke's material thesis or Berkeley's immaterial thesis.

Locke builds his case on an ability to abstract ideas from general terms and on primary and secondary qualities. Locke continues on from Descartes by offering indirect realism and by saying that it is ok to doubt, with the little knowledge we have we can still get by and build working scientific theories.

Berkeley attacks Locke over abstract ideas, something he says he cannot do. He also attacks primary and secondary qualities and tries to show that even primary qualities are subjective. Berkeley rejects Locke's mitigated scepticism that asserts a materiel substratum that is something that Locke cannot know what it is, indirect realism is a mistake. He goes back to Descartes and says there is no mind body problem, all there is are minds. Everything comes from God and is just ideas, thus we can know directly what is going on.

If we could try and stay on topic it might help us get somewhere.

Would you not say that Plato's theory of the forms informed idealism also? — Happenstance

Plato is the first dualist as I see it but not necessarily an idealist. Berkeley is talking to the followers of Descartes who agreed on material and spiritual substances hence the duality. Berkeley tells them to just drop the material substance and everything else can be explained.

Berkeley says the world is real and therefore physical, the physical things in his world are not made of matter. Matter can exist independently and ideas cannot.

You point out the second weakness of his theory which is his lack of metaphysics for God. His first weakness is approaching the whole deal from the Cartesian internal introspection point of view.

The quasi-Cartesian stance can be forgiven, is there really a better way for us to acquire knowledge? But his absent metaphysics of God are more I think a product of his time.

In Berkeley's time atheism was in it's early stages, the vast majority of the western world believed in a God whom they were scared of. God was much more taken for granted then than now. I think that this may explain his glossing over of the subject because people had a much stronger idea of God than they do today.

Idealism was born out of Melebranche's occasionalism which had God destroying and recreating the world on a second to second basis, thus being present in all of our lives. Berkeley say's why would God make such massive and destructive efforts just to prove his existence when he could do the whole thing mentally

Berkeley doesn't deny that material bodies exist, but your second claim is the very point that he denies. The whole point of his philosophy is to deny the reality of 'mind-independence'. 'Esse est percipe', 'to be is to be perceived'.
— Wayfarer — Janus

He does dent material bodies but not physical ones. Objects owe their existence to the power of Gods idea giving them physical form. This physical form however is not material in the way the materialist say's. This material is a spiritual material (substance) not made up of a mind independent substrata.

This is a question to both of you, are illusions, even though they exist, real? — Happenstance

Berkeley is a proper empiricist, all the laws of nature are preserved, real and empirically knowable. With everything being an idea of God causation is also explained. There is no necessary connection between events except Gods will, event A precedes event B because God makes it this way. God is the ultimate causal force in the universe, being finite spirits ourselves we also have some minor causal efficacy but none whatsoever exists in objects.

I agree with Berkeley in that regard. He reminds us that it’s a conceit to believe we can see the world as if from no perspective whatever, as if sense-knowledge is absolute. In so doing we attribute to sense-knowledge a kind of absoluteness which is not warranted. This is his principle point. — Wayfarer

I have also gleaned from Dancy that Berkeley is only attacking the theory of materialism that also accepts spiritual substance - in which case he is also attacking Descartes and saying Rene you got it wrong, there is only one type of substance and that is spiritual

I am not clear on whether Locke accepted spiritual substance or not although I suppose he must have. Locke presents us a world created by God that runs by itself, so I guess he does allow for it.

Also Berkeley has a strict definition of 'sensible thing', for him the tree presents itself to our senses,'matter' or material substrata do not directly present themselves as 'clouds' of atoms, particles and forces. Matter presents itself in the form of the tree, all we sense is that aspect, anything more behind it is beyond our senses.

Clarification.

Ok been reading some Dancy on Berkeley.

1. Berkeley wants to deny material substance but want to allow the existence of physical things.
2.'Physical' means part of the outside world.
3. He takes the word physical to mean material and so in one sense accepts material things
4. Does not accept that material things can exist outside of minds.

So Berkeley on one hand accepts physical objects as material things but because he doesn't accept that physical things can be mind independent . So the physical side of matter presents no conflict, only the quality matter has to exist independently stops materiel being a synonym physical.

So what Berkeley does is deny material objects while insisting on the existence of physical things.
Only minds and ideas exist (two things) but only one substance exists - minds / spirits.

This is the most incoherent reply you've had yet. If an idea can only resemble an idea, then an idea is a resemblance of itself? Or, it would be that resemblances are the fundamental aspect of reality - not ideas!

"Notions" is a synonym for "ideas", so you've contradicted yourself. — Harry Hindu

An idea can only resemble another idea. I already said that the whole 'notion' business is where he starts to come undone. Notions are kind of the seeds of ideas, but we also have notions of matter.

Thanks for the post, I also immediately thought of Spinoza although in the subject matter he never gets a mention. I remember something about him though, every thing is determined yes but he also says that if he could understand his desires he could control them or something like that. Need to dig him up again and look at that.

why is it easier to predict the mind of God than it is to predict the mind of another human being? — Harry Hindu

Berkeley says that we don't have ideas of other spirits or of God, because an idea can only resemble an idea. We do have 'notions' of other minds and of God because of our intuitive knowledge that we have ourselves minds. The notion theory is a bit more complex than I make it out and it is one of the weakest parts of his theory.

So, why do idealists complain that science can't explain the mind - the human mind - like it can explain gravity or chemical reactions when gravity and chemical reactions are ideas of God? — Harry Hindu

Science can explain what gravity does but it can't explain how it happens or why, there is still no gravity equation. Newton clearly admitted that all he was doing was asserting what it does and how to measure it, that's even less than neuroscience can tell us today about 'minds'. God is not such an unrealistic alternative.

I didn't say he does it perfectly and IMO he runs into a lot of difficulties in the reestablishment of spiritual substance in place of matter.

Focus on the 3rd dialogue, it is where he is on a 'sticky wicket'.

I am struggling with the distinction between fatalism and determinism.

I admit that I haven't read his Dialogues, only Principles of Human Knowledge and even then, that was a while ago. But cheers for the heads up anyway, I'll download a copy and give it a read. — Happenstance

In it he pretty much uncovers every possible objection to his theory and overcomes them.

But anyways, about Berkeley and his subjective realism: if I observed an oar in the water and it is bent then according to Berkeley, the oar does not appear to be bent, it's actually bent. But if I put my hand in the water, I feel the oar is straight! Does this mean that there are two actual oars I am perceiving?. — Happenstance

Berkeley addresses and answers this objection in the Dialogues. Optics was actually his best subject, his book on it did much better than immaterialism.

Are idealism and determinism compatible? — Harry Hindu

100% Everything is caused by God.

I am also struggling with the distinction between determinism and fatalism.

Perhaps I am trying to say that a person acting 'out of character' is a person not acting according to his personal set of deterministic influences. By showing that it is possible to do so would seem to limit determinism and free up a place for a freewill to exist through true agent causation.

Your proof, as far as I can see, consists in redefining what it means to "act freely." — SophistiCat

I love Russell but that isn't what I am trying to do, any success is purely accidental. I do not seek to redefine either term just to contextualize (?) them. Determinism exists with exceptions and freewill exist in those exceptions where determinism does not.

I think that's what I am trying to say anyway :)

It's the "that" and "is" I'm having trouble with. Replace them both with "could be" and you'll have a fine theory, but trying to prove that they actually are is a lost cause.
5 minutes ago — Ciaran

Ok so something like 'It could be the case that non-absolute determinism exist'? Or 'It could be the case that determinism exists with only finite influence'?

Feel free to chip in.

I am looking for a way to make freewill truly compatible with determinism. My approach is to try and firstly show that determinism exists but is not absolute, and that there are occasions when we can be free from it's influence. Secondly to establish the possibility of a limited libertarian freewill, not limited in its freedom but limited in its employment.

'Sleepwalking through life' is a state that also needs further examination. We now know that our brains are inherently lazy and are much happier using old memories of observations than doing the hard work of processing all that sense data. This is how magicians and illusionists trick us, our brain tends to process a mere fraction of the visual sense date we receive, relying on memory to fill in the blanks.

Yes I can see that I am merely providing sufficient grounds. Is it fair though to demand necessity from something that is dealing with causation? I

Yes, so if we 'choose' to sleepwalk through life, we must also 'choose' to stop sleepwalking, yes? — Ciaran

Perhaps it is not a choice. If it is born from crisis then it could well be a violent internal reaction (yes I am aware that Hume has an answer for this). An event happens which 'shakes' out of the trance, this much is deterministic I will give you.

If a determined event causes / leads us to act out of character, the decisions then made while out of character are still decisions of freewill even if the conditions leading to put us in the state to do so were deterministic.

Did I make sense?

I think that we oversimplify the nature of determination and causal influence. We know that there is a factor called 'the individual' that allows two people in the same circumstances to act differently. Some people do 'break' the chains of influence that determine their acts as far as we can tell.

If determinism is true, and we can understand and quantify it then we should be able to predict everyone all the time. I don't think that these forces have quite the hold over us that the determinist or compatibilist say. Any hold it has over us is voluntary, we chose to sleepwalk through life because we are fundamentally lazy.

I am trying to prove that we can act freely even if we choose not to most of our lives.

in which case we have to ask, what woke us up? — Ciaran

You have hit the nail on the head. If we say the awakening happens through causal influence then the theory sinks like a lead balloon. We need to examine what we believe are the causes for people to behave out of character and see if we can find a genuinely internal one.
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Could it be that the mind acts like the universe and has it's own a parallel process of reflective determination? I think that often these acts of freewill / uncharacteristic acts are born from personal crisis.

I realise my argument is not as strong as the counter argument that you present, however there could be a case where human behavior is as complicated as the universe.

The problem with your characterisation is that you don't seem to be able to take the first step without intuition, and as soon as intuition has got involved it is no longer free will. — Ciaran

I am not trying to base the hypotheses on intuition at all, or at least I don't think that I am. Acting in character is when we do things as we 'sleepwalk' through life, I may be appealing here eastern doctrines of enlightenment.

My point is that we do not actually make decisions, we let the issues decide themselves by considering (if we even bother to think about them) the determiniastic forces and influences and following the ones most suitable for our needs. Our needs in this case I believe is to be able to remain in a sleepwalking state.

In this state freewill becomes something that we try to avoid because we do not know what we want. The hardest situation any of us face is deciding what we really want, it takes so much effort that we prefer just to submit to causal influences.

Awaking ourselves (achieving even temporary enlightenment) we are capable of agent causation which we refer to as acting out of character. When a policeman or firefighter risk their lives to save others we applaud their bravery but we are not surprised by it because we see them as acting in character. When we see them balking at such a task we feel that they were acting out of character.

When we see a mild mannered, cowardly person risk their lives to save another we are surprised by the act and give it a special place of honour. Could this be because we are secretly applauding their ability to wake up and make truly conscious decisions?

I know that there are many holes in my theory but it is at the early stage of development, maybe we can grow something out of this or maybe it will die on the table.