Correct me if I'm wrong Oh_Man, but basically what Kant's Categorical Imperative means is "If you ar going to do something, do it only if it wouldn't matter if everyone did it."
Since the game companies would go out of business if everyone pirated. You probaly shouldn't do it at all.
The same basic principal applies to littering. Yeah, one person littering doesn't matter that much, but imagine how nasty this world would be if everyone just dumped their garbage in the streets.
The problem is that this is a naive interpretation of the philosophy.
As I've seen pointed out on another forum: To treat it naively, we come to the conclusion that, if everyone dedicated their lives to doctoring, we would have no blacksmiths, carpenters or farmers: Therefore, we should not become doctors.
Using it properly, we come to the conclusion: One should not become a doctor
under specific circumstances.
Many philosophies appear, at a glance, to yield different conclusions regarding appropriate behaviour (
Rule Consequentialism,
Categorical Imperative,
The Golden Rule). If we look at these more closely, they all result in obviously false conclusions and behaviours (Rule consequentialism: don't lie, even if it saves a life. Categorical imperative: no one should become a career doctor, because everyone being a doctor is bad. Golden rule: force another man into a cast, because your leg is broken and you want a cast). For all of these, the faulty conclusions can be mended by adding "if"s and other qualifier statements. Ultimately, for a given set of values (pain is bad, lying is bad, giving is good, whatever), these "different" philosophies, to be perfectly accurate and self-consistent, become different frameworks with which to express the exact same set of behaviours.
Kant's Categorical Imperative states "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." So if we make piracy a universal law everyone is doing it...
And
again, this assumes that all pirating is harmful.
"Pirate under such circumstances that you can be confident you otherwise would not have purchased a product", acted upon by everyone, does not yield the "companies lose profit" issue. Your conclusion is false.
An a question that doesn't even make that much sense. Who exactly is going into debt? All the piraters who are paying back the companies they stole from?
The point was the result: Large swathes of people suddenly going into debt is not good for most other people.
And...
I seriously have no idea what your argument is at this stage, it appears to make very little sense.
...the point of the point made is to illustrate through example how irrelevant
your argument seems to
me.
As stated: "I do not see how your argument has anything more to do with actuality than this one does."
But you are the one that has your entire argument resting on this fact that apparently a large subset, perhaps even the majority, of pirates are on financially tenuous grounds to such an extent that paying for products would send them all bankrupt... The burden of proof rests, squarely, with you.
But you are the one that has your entire argument resting on this fact that apparently the subset of pirates that I and many of my friends belong to
doesn't exist. Deriving from "I think, therefore I am", I conclude that I do, indeed, exist. The burden of proof, squarely, rests with you.
Yes, you are generalising the population from a tiny sample. Which is useless.
It
would be useless if I were trying to make any claim as to
what ratio of pirates are "honest" to "dishonest".
However, that is not the case. I am arguing that "a significant number" are belong to my subset.
I and most of my close friends is most certainly, to me, significant.
Which one do you trust? The answer, neither, because neither are statistically significant samples.
For my position to be correct, at least "minimum threshold for significant" honest pirates must exist. "Minimum threshold for significant", even if I were not talking about I and most of my close friends, is well under 50%.
If you're going to try to speak from a purely statistical perspective... Without evidence either way, we have no business assuming what the ratio of "honest" to "dishonest" pirates is - any outcome, without evidence, is equally likely as any other outcome. Given that "minimum threshold for significant" is below 50%, in over 50% of cases, my argument holds true. From that, your claim is the more specific.
Again, applying the imperative. If it was moral to take things for free because you can't afford them anyway, every single person would no longer care about wealth. They could throw all their wealth away, and then use that as a justification to get a bunch of stuff for free because 'they couldn't afford it anyway'.
Except that "throw[ing] all their wealth away, and then us[ing] that as a justification to get a bunch of stuff for free" yields bad things. Therefore, a proper application of "the imperative": Do not do the thing you just described as bad -
not, do not do something a
limited and specific subset of which results in the thing you just described as bad.
Post has been edited 12 time(s), last time on Jun 22 2011, 6:11 pm by EzDay281.
None.