(November 30, 2013 at 1:24 pm)Drich Wrote:(November 28, 2013 at 9:38 am)apophenia Wrote: Kant makes some good points about the relationship between pragmatism of moral duties and the morality of those duties. In particular, he argues that a duty which is incapable of being fulfilled is not a duty at all, moral or otherwise, that a duty must be capable of being realized to invoke an ought. God's morality, according to that specific phase of Kant's ethics, then doesn't qualify as moral at all. And I think he's right. We don't fault a lioness for eating a human being, for she cannot possibly be conscious of any imperative not to do so, or at least would not, in her natural state, be cognizant of such. She has no duty to be more "moral" and not eat a human, and to claim that she has "sinned" by not living up to our standards of goodness is not only wrong, it is evil itself. To punish the lioness for not being more ethical is as absurd as to claim that we "fall short" of god's standard; the standard does not apply unless you first equivocate on multiple things, including its relevance as a duty. We have no prima facie duty to god on account of him having such standards, such standards aren't moral, nor do we have any justification of any duty toward god based on his standards alone. This simply doesn't work; his standards, and our duty to them, can only be justified elsewhere and elsewise, thus the story of Job, which, for all its appeal, portrays a fascist and ethically bankrupt monster of a god.
This is a perfect example of the Judgement day defense strageity i was speaking of in the above post!
No, it is not. It has nothing to do with whether or not God is or isn't moral, and everything to do with the concept of duty. Kant applied the same framework without alteration to societies and governments later on in his career. Claiming that something is a perfect example of something else, when you obviously don't even understand it as an example to begin with, just makes you look like an idiot. (And this aspect of Kant's ethics has been extensively written about in the literature; if you think you are right, prove it with a citation. I have Oppy and Trakakis' 1300 page history of western philosophy of religion waiting to show otherwise.)