. . . Kierkegaard writes:


For Kant, only rational beings (e.g. most human beings) are bound to the moral law, the law which one gives himself. Non-rational beings cannot be bound to the moral law, as they have not bound themselves to the moral law.

All beings are rational and come with the moral law, standard equipment.

recent biology has indicated that the fetus is informed within the womb rearranging or rewriting its genes

so intelligence it would seem is difficult to determine just when it starts

The fetus does have apparently experience and knowledge of the mothers body/environment before birth

and accorddingly if its genes are written of the knowledge of the outside physcial world we are on very shaky ground here, to deny intelligence.

No dictators allowed. No monopoly allowed.

Individuals do not make up the state. Institutions make up the state and they are constrained both by their charters, written or unwritten, and individual non-understanding of the nature of the state. Institutions can be anything but intelligent and they therefore have no desire and no moral law.

I would agree that the state is not a being, but an existing thing. Morals cannot be legislated, so they say, and they are right even if they don't know how. The state can impose ethics on its officials. Even though the terms originally meant about the same--morals and ethics--no more than custom or tradition, ethics has come to take on a legal significance. Moral law should remain as Kant had it, that inner law that guides intelligent decision.

Abortion would be a tough problem for ethics class. But, Kant's examples were mainly directed toward personal choice that did not involve outright murder. He might choose a different publisher for his new Critique and never explain why to the new owner.

What is moral law and what makes someone bound to it?

Are you sure we're all rational? Reason takes a back seat to emotion when you're grieving, when you're hopeless, and when you're forlorn and lovestruck. And reason takes a back seat to biology when you're overtired, in terrible pain, or when you get a big tumor in your frontal lobe. So while under some ideal conditions we're rational, we certainly don't default to a rational state. Most of us CAN be rational, but then again most of us can also be Olympic calibre athletes under some conditions that few of us experience. So it's hard to accept that reason is some essential, primary quality of ours.

Thus, if "moral law" (still undefined vis a vis this conversation!!!) is beholden to reason, then morality is subject to all the other things that can interfere.

Are you sure we're all rational? Reason takes a back seat to emotion when you're grieving, when you're hopeless, and when you're forlorn and lovestruck. And reason takes a back seat to biology when you're overtired, in terrible pain, or when you get a big tumor in your frontal lobe. So while under some ideal conditions we're rational, we certainly don't default to a rational state. Most of us CAN be rational, but then again most of us can also be Olympic calibre athletes under some conditions that few of us experience. So it's hard to accept that reason is some essential, primary quality of ours.

Thus, if "moral law" (still undefined vis a vis this conversation!!!) is beholden to reason, then morality is subject to all the other things that can interfere.

I do not know if this would have much bearing on the case, BUT, recent biology has indicated that the fetus is informed within the womb rearranging or rewriting its genes according to the perceptions of the environment of the parents, more particulary the mother, so intelligence it would seem is difficult to determine just when it starts, just as it was once believed by many that intelligence was the sole property of the mind instead of the whole body, so to this new info should give us doubt about the intelligence of the unborn. The fetus does have apparently experience and knowledge of the mothers body/environment before birth, and accorddingly if its genes are written of the knowledge of the outside physcial world we are on very shaky ground here, to deny intelligence.

Do you remember how massive and overwhelming emotion was when you were a child?

It's often occured to me that organized thought is a way of dealing with that depth and power of emotion - of channeling it

How's you and yours?

As for emotion and thought, clearly babies and toddlers can have happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, affection, love, etc without having capacity for reason or truly organized thoughts about a subject.

I'll reply to this thread in a series of multiquotes, we'll see how it works out.

Government is, by definition, a monopoly over certain aspects of society, most notably over law and order. You can't have a private court with a different system of laws, punishments, etc. competing with the government's courts.

The modern nation state has other monopolies. For examle, the US gov't has a monopoly over the postal service. The Canadian gov't has a monopoly over health insurance and health care. The Canadian gov't also has a monopsomy over agriculture. The UK gov't used to have a monopoly over coal mines.

Individuals make up the institutions that make up the state. Again, there really is no such thing as "the state." It is simply a group of individuals who are in a position of power.

Here's a thought experiment: are mobs and gangs subject to moral laws? According to your logic, a mob isn't but a gang is. Whereas a mob could be said to be made up of various "institutions" (i.e. group A deals heroin, group B is the hitman squad), the mob is not bound to moral rules whereas the gang, which is much smaller and clearly made up of individuals, is. The fallacy is that you're ignoring that the institutions that make up the mob are made up of individuals, so the mob is really no different from the gang or the state. All are made up of individuals, and if accept that there is some kind of universal ethical system, then those organizations should follow those rules just as individuals do.

I'm confused. The point I'm making is that the state, since it is made of individuals, is bound to the same moral rules that individuals are bound to. If moral rules are an inner law that guide individuals, shouldn't that also apply to a group of individuals, like the state?

The point of this thread is to ask "what if" Kant was still around. What does his ethical system say about treating future moral agents?

I think we all agree that most humans (exceptions: unborn, infants, severely retarded, brain dead) are capable of moral deliberation and thus should be treated as ends in Kantian ethics. The key question is whether the unborn and infants should be treated as ends as well since they will be capable of moral deliberation in the future.

Well, the assumption of this thread is that there is a universal ethical system that everyone is "bound" to in the sense that all of your actions can be objectively called "right" or "wrong."

Tversky and Kahneman have produced evidence that humans suffer cognitive biases which would tend to minimize the perception of this unprecedented event:
Denial is a negative "availability heuristic" shown to occur when an outcome is so upsetting that the very act of thinking about it leads to an increased refusal to believe it might occur. In this case, imagining human extinction probably makes it seem less likely.
In cultures where human extinction is not expected the proposition must overcome the "disconfirmation bias" against heterodox theories.
Another reliable psychological effect relevant here is the "positive outcome bias".
Behavioural finance has strong evidence that recent evidence is given undue significance in risk analysis. Roughly speaking, "100 year storms" tend to occur every twenty years in the stock market as traders become convinced that the current good times will last forever. Doomsayers who hypothesize rare crisis-scenarios are dismissed even when they have statistical evidence behind them. An extreme form of this bias can diminish the subjective probability of the unprecedented. (wikipedia.)