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haha, love how you fooled me with THE link. hope every click makes you laugh.

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It does ☺️

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As you’re not being entirely serious, I Kant tell if you’re confusing Heidegger (Being and Time) and Sartre (Being and Nothingness) or if that’s just part of the joke.

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I must admit I didn't realize that mistake! But I also reject all responsibility, that one is 100% on GPT-3

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For a graduate-school philosopher, the prefaces to math books will look like "undergraduate philosophy", and a biologist at an MA level will see metaphors for his favorite basic theories everywhere as well. One thing that scientists typically don't see is how a concept is invented; they are already born into the world where the concept is a part of a language and thus doesn't seem to be like much of an invention. You can think of the philosophers as inventors of "words" (concepts), who end up having to give a million of examples of how to use them in a sentence, so that at the end of the book the word feels familiar. If their words (or rather, schemes of thought) get really stuck in the language, then they will feel too familiar in the original books to care; if they get stuck in a way that is different from what the philosopher aimed at, the book will feel weird and wrong.

E.g. It's only easy for you to talk about moral utility as something quantified because this view was developed (by theologicians) and then secularized (by the philosophers around 17-18th centuries). But it's a big deal, and the reason why it's worth to study it is because some of such concepts end up holding the weight of their origins.

E.g. one of the schemes of reasoning that was a product of secularization of concepts is when we reason on the basis of "society" being somehow an active force, which a scheme that was quite purposely taken from the theology during the French revolution (for a very precise reason, by the way) and then very carefully and far from completely critically peeled by the generations of sociologist. "Of course we don't actually think that it's a real active force", you'll want to argue, but in what precise way and how and why thinking as-if it was is so potent and useful and yet so wrong – that's a problem that is quite easier to see and understand if you look at it diachronically, noticing the changes and thus recognising both the trends and the limitations the concept encountered.

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Or – What Kant "invented" (and again, it's hard to talk about that very precisely – the question has all the epistimological limitations of the history without much of its epistemological possibilities, so I'll give you a simplified and slightly wrong reproduction of Deleuze's view) is thinking on the basis of subjective limits. (Which has also, by the way, its history in theology). At some point Kant was into one notorious mystic and believed too much into what that guy said, and then he suddenly realised that he's thinking some really stupid things and decided to preclude any possibility of such a situation once and for all. Thus instead of a philosophy that tries to start from some kind of positive axioms, he writes a "critique" (which was also in a sense a new philosophical concept!), which is precisely thinking on a basis of being limited in your thought. Namely: "given that we can't know God and neither can we know every outcome of our action – what kind of epistemology, ethics and aesthetics can be created on the basis of this limitation taken completely, 100% seriously?". That was a very good approach to those questions. And yes, the results he got from it might be a little bit weird, but we don't read Kant for practical recommendations: we read him to understand how a person who wants to very seriously criticise the very possibility of knowing such things would coherently try to continue navigating the world. Notice how his epistemological stance (we can't predict the effects of our specific actions) precludes hard quantification of moral utility.

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I think the 2nd section is actually pretty relevant. I think the thing LM multiplyers doesn't capture is that the constraints are over actions rather than over states of the world, and the thing that a Kantian cares amount is the intention behind the action. I think there probably are ways to formalise it though.

I'm also not sure that VNM utility is doing anything work here. The key claims of utilitarianism are that individuals can aggregate things they value into preferences (other way round to VNM) and that this aggregation can be extended across people. But VNM doesn't give us any of that - it doesn't even give us a formalisation of it because it only cares about ordinal preferences. (this is why I think welfare economics is dumb, fuck pareto improvements, all my homies hate pareto improvements as a baisis for comparing states.)

Maybe the best application of maths to ethics is social choice theory to formalise contractarianism? Key argument behind contractarianism is that induviduals are the relvent units of anylsis rather than states of the world and socail choice theory maintains this property.

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