• Michael
    15.6k
    Freedom can't be compromised and still be freedom, such a person cannot be a free agent, and any resultant action can't be construed as moral or immoral. I think this follows from Kant's system.Cavacava

    Again, Kant disagreed. From the The Critique of Practical Reason:

    Ask [someone] whether, if his prince demanded, on pain of ... immediate execution, that he give false testimony against an honorable man who the prince would like to destroy under a plausible pretext, he would consider it possible to overcome his love of life ... He would perhaps not venture to assert whether he would do it or not, but he must admit without hesitation that it would be possible for him. He judges, therefore, that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it and cognizes freedom within him, which, without the moral law, would have remained unknown to him.

    You're interpreting Kant's words according to your own views on morality and freedom. That isn't the right way to go about it. You have to interpret his words according to his views.
  • Wosret
    3.4k
    I think that a more interesting objection is that of art. Plato saw the very dangerous potential of art, for emotional manipulation. We're absolutely saturated in fiction, and no one seems to be able to tell their feet from their head. Even the eight precepts of Buddhism includes refraining from art as dance, music, and entertainment.

    Analogies are attempted emotional manipulation. I tell you a story, and make you feel that it is silly, or dumb, and then say that it is the same thing as the point in contention.

    I don't believe that Kant addressed at all the absolutely devastation power of art on the soul. We "suspend disbelief" and allow ourselves to be taken for a ride, as it were, but always included in art are both representations of the world, and cause and effect, neither of which need to be accurate at all, and the effects on the soul may override experience, tempt people into pretension, and generate widespread mass delusion, and enslavement.

    Once I entirely crack the anti-life equation, I'ma write a book, and then all your souls will me mine, and I'll have escaped death.
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