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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: J. David Velleman

Kant’s quantitative individualism

23 Sunday Jun 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, German Tradition, Politics, Self

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

expressive individualism, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel, Immanuel Kant, J. David Velleman, law, Onora O'Neill, Patrick O'Donnell

In response to my discussion a while ago of the problems between Buddhism and qualitative individualism, Patrick O’Donnell suggested that J. David Velleman’s Self to Self offered a possibility of bridging the gap between the two. My reaction was skeptical, since Velleman explicitly situates himself as a Kantian, and I have taken Kant as exactly the opposite kind of individualist, a quantitative individualist. I said as much in response, claiming that for Kant “ethically most significant about human beings are those characteristics we all share, not our differences – the right way for one person to act in a given context is broadly the right way for any other person to act in the same context.”

Patrick’s response was where the discussion got really interesting. For this is the first time I’ve seen someone question the very distinction between qualitative and quantitative individualism. Continue reading →

Is it morally wrong to eat your dead dog?

05 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Death, Disgust, Family, Food, Monasticism, Morality, Sex, Virtue

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Confucius, J. David Velleman, Jonathan Haidt, nonhuman animals, Peter Singer, virtue ethics

Jonathan Haidt opens his The Righteous Mind with two hypothetical examples, “thought experiments” as analytic philosophers would say:

A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.

And

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.

Haidt asks us: Did the people in either of these cases do something morally wrong? My reaction was, and is, to say yes in the first case but not the second. Continue reading →

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