will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire for knowledge, knowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for man to attain.

#Philosophy #Modus Vivendi #Bertrand Russell

Kant’s deontology starts from a simple idea: morality isn’t about outcomes, vibes, or damage control—it’s about duty. An action is moral only if it could be willed as a universal rule and if it treats people as ends in themselves, not as tools. This is where autonomy comes in. So respecting someone means respecting their capacity to choose rationally. The moment you lie, you’re not just bending the truth, you’re hijacking another person’s decision-making. You’re feeding them fake inputs so they act the way you want, not the way they would choose if they actually knew what was going on.

Take a concrete, uncomfortable case: you know a man is cheating on his wife, and one day she asks you directly whether it’s true. From a Kantian perspective, lying to “protect her feelings” isn’t kindness, it’s paternalism. By lying, you deny her autonomy, you decide, on her behalf, that she shouldn’t know, that she can’t be trusted with the truth. Even if the truth causes pain, telling it respects her as a rational agent who has the right to make decisions about her own life with full information. That respect outweighs consequences. The ethical failure isn’t the discomfort that follows the truth but the quiet arrogance of thinking you’re entitled to rewrite reality for someone else. #Immanuel Kant #Deontological ethics #Philosophy

Reading (Hoffer 2010)