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1		-In order for an action to be moral, it must first be willed universally:
2		-1. An agent’s will acts on a law that it gives to itself. If pleasure were a law to you, then you would straightaway do the pleasurable act, but since you’re autonomous, you can reason about taking the action. Thus a condition of action is that the will is self-determined. KORSGAARD:
3		-“Self-Constitution in the Ethics of Plato and Kant” by Christine M. Korsgaard
4		-“It remains to show that this is also Kant’s view; and for that we need to revisit the argument by which Kant establishes that action must be in accordance with the categorical imperative, and fill in its missing step. Kant argues that insofar as you are a rational being, you must act under the idea of freedom—and this means that you do not think of yourself, or experience yourself, as being impelled into action, but rather as deciding what to do. You take yourself, rather than the incentive on which you choose to act, to be the cause of your action. And Kant thinks that in order for this to be so, you must act on a universal law. You cannot regard yourself as the cause of your action—you cannot regard the action as the product of your will—unless you will universally. To see why, let us consider what happens if we try to deny it.. If our reasons did not have to be universal then they could be completely particular—it would be possible to have a reason that applies only to the case before you, and has no implications for any other case. Willing to act on a reason of this kind would be what I will call ‘‘particularistic willing.’’ If particularistic willing is impossible, then it follows that willing must be universal—that is, a maxim, in order to be willed at all, must be willed as a universal law. Now there are two things to notice here. First of all, the question is not whether we can will a new maxim for each new occasion. We may very well do that, for every occasion may have relevant differences from the one we last encountered. Any difference in the situation that is actually relevant to the decision properly belongs in our maxim, and this means that our maxim may be quite specific to the situation at hand. The argument here is not supposed to show that reasons are general. It is supposed to show us that reasons are universal, and universality is quite compatible—indeed it requires—a high degree of specificity. The second point is that it will be enough for the argument if the principle that is willed be willed, as I will call it, as provisionally universal. To explain what Imean by that I will use a pair of contrasts. There are three different ways in which we can take our principles to range over a variety of cases, and it is important to keep them distinct. We treat a principle as general when we think it applies to a wide range of similar cases. We treat a principle as universal, or, as I will sometimes say, absolutely universal, when we think it applies to absolutely every case of a certain sort, but all the cases must be exactly of that sort. We treat a principle as provisionally universal when we think it applies to every case of a certain sort, unless there is some good reason why not. The difference between regarding a principle as universal, and regarding it as provisionally universal, is marginal. Treating a principle as only provisionally universal amounts to making a mental acknowledgment, to the effect that you might not have thought of everything needed to make the principle universal, and therefore might not have specified it completely. Treating principles as general, and treating them as provisionally universal, are superficially similar, because in both cases we admit that there might be exceptions. But in fact they are deeply and essentially different, and this shows up in what happens when we encounter the exceptions. If we think of a principle as merely general, and we encounter an exception, nothing happens. The principle was only general, and we expected there to be some exceptions. But if a principle was provisionally universal, and we encounter an exceptional case, we must now go back and revise it, bringing it a little closer to the absolute universality to which provisional universality essentially aspires. The rough causal principles with which we operate in everyday life (I am not talking now about quantum physics) are provisionally universal, and we signal this sometimes by using the phrase ‘‘all else equal.’’ The principle that striking a match causes a flame holds all else equal, where the things that have to be equal are that there is no gust of wind or splash of water or oddity in the chemical composition of the atmosphere that would interfere with the usual connection. There are background conditions for the operation of these laws, and without listing and possibly without knowing them all, we mention that they must be in place when we say ‘‘all else equal.’’ Although there are certainly exceptions, natural law is not merely general, for whenever an exception occurs, we look for an explanation. Something must have made this case different: one of its background conditions was not met. To see how it works in the practical case, consider a standard puzzle case for Kant’s universalizability criterion. It may seem as if wanting to be a doctor is an adequate reason for becoming a doctor, for there’s nothing wrong with being a doctor—in fact, really, it’s rather admirable—and if you ask yourself if it could be a law that everyone who wants to be a doctor should become one, it seems, superficially, fine. But then the objector comes along and says, but look, suppose everyone actually wanted to be a doctor and nobody wanted to be anything else. The whole economic system would go to pieces, and then you couldn’t be a doctor, so your maxim would have contradicted itself! So does this show that it is wrong to be a doctor simply because you want to? What it shows is that the mere desire to enter a certain profession is only a provisionally universal reason for doing so. There’s a background condition for the rightness of being a doctor because you want to, which is that society has some need for people to enter this profession. In effect the case does show that it’s wrong to be a doctor merely because you want to—the maxim needs revision, for it is not absolutely universal unless it mentions as part of your reason for becoming a doctor that there is a social need. Someone who decides to become a doctor in the full light of reflection also takes that into account. That case is easy, but there’s no general reason to suppose we can think of everything in advance. When we adopt a maxim as a universal law, we know that there might be cases, cases we haven’t thought of, which would show us that it is not universal after all. In that sense we can allow for exceptions. But so long as the commitment to revise in the face of exceptions is in place, the maxim is not merely general. It is provisionally universal. So particularistic willing is neither a matter of willing a new maxim for each occasion, nor is it a matter of willing a maxim that you might have to change on another occasion. Both of those are compatible with regarding reasons as universal. Instead, particularistic willing would be a matter of willing a maxim for exactly this occasion without taking it to have any other implications of any kind for any other occasion. You will a maxim thinking that you can use it just this once and then so to speak discard it; you don’t even need a reason to change your mind. Now I’m going to argue that that sort of willing is impossible. The first step is this: : to conceive of yourself as the cause of your actions is to identify with the principle of choice on which you act. A rational will is a self-conscious causality, and a self-conscious causality is aware of itself as a cause. To be aware of yourself as a cause is to identify yourself with something in the scenario that gives rise to the action, and this must be the principle of choice. For instance, suppose you experience a conflict of desire: you have a desire to do both A and B, and they are incompatible. You have some principle that favors A over B, so you exercise this principle, and you choose to do A. In this kind of case, you do not regard yourself as a mere passive spectator to the battle between A and B. You regard the choice as yours, as the product of your own activity, because you regard the principle of choice as expressive, or representative, of yourself. You must do so, for the only alternative to identifying with the principle of choice is regarding the principle of choice as some third thing in you, another force on a par with the incentives to do A and to do B, which happened to throw in its weight in favor of A, in a battle at which you were, after all, a mere passive spectator. But then you are not the cause of the action. Self-conscious or rational agency, then, requires identification with the principle of choice on which you act.” (120-123)
5		-And, only universally willing can be self-determined. KORSGAARD 2:
6		-“Self-Constitution in the Ethics of Plato and Kant” by Christine M. Korsgaard
7		-“The second step is to see that particularistic willing makes it impossible for you to distinguish yourself, your principle of choice, from the various incentives on which you act. According to Kant, you must always act on some incentive or other, for every action, even action from duty, involves a decision on a proposal: something must suggest the action to you. And in order to will particularistically, you must in each case wholly identify with the incentive of your action. That incentive would be, for the moment, your law, the law that defines your agency or your will. It’s important to see that if you had a particularistic will you would not identify with the incentive as representative of any sort of type, since if you took it as a representative of a type you doing so would be taking it as universal. For instance, you couldn’t say that you decided to acted on the inclination of the moment, because you were so inclined. Someone who does takes ‘‘I shall do the things I am inclined to do, whatever they might be’’ as his maxim has adopted a universal principle, not a particular one: he has the principle of treating his their inclinations as such as reasons. A truly particularistic will must embrace the incentive in its full particularity: it, in no way that is further describable, is as the law of such a will. So someone who engages in particularistic willing does not even have a democratic soul. There is only the tyranny of the moment: the complete domination of the agent by something inside him. Particularistic willing eradicates the distinction between a person and the incentives on which he acts. But then there is nothing left here that is the person, the agent, that is his will as distinct from the play of incentives within him. sHe is not one person, but a series, a mere conglomeration, of unrelated impulses. There is no difference between someone who has a particularistic will and someone who has no will at all. Particularistic willing this lacks a subject, a person who is the cause of these actions. So particularistic willing it isn’t willing at all. If a particularistic will is impossible, then when you thus willing a maxim you must take it to be universal. If you do not, you are not operating as a self-conscious cause, and then you are not willing. To put the point in familiar Kantian terms, we can only attach the ‘‘I will’’ to our choices if we will our maxims as universal laws. The categorical imperative is an internal standard for actions, because conformity to it is constitutive of an exercise of the will, of an action of a person as opposed to an action of something within him.” (123-124)
8		-And, this also proves an intent foresight distinction. Foreseen effects are independent of what an agent determines because the consequences themselves are dependent upon things external to the will so only intentions can be self determined.
9		-2. Actions are expressions of an agent’s reasoning from their end to the means, which unifies their action into a cohesive movement as opposed to fragmented steps. ROEDL:
10		-Sebastian Roedl. Prof. Of Philosophy, University of Leipzig. “Two Forms of Practical Knowledge and Their Unity” in Ford and Hornsby, Eds. Essays on Anscombe's Intention (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011) 239.
11		-
12		-“We can give a more specific description of the consciousness of temporal unity that constitutes that unity: it is an act of reasoning. For example, she who is crossing the street because she is getting bread reasons in this way: wanting to get bread, she thinks the fact that the bakery is across the street is a reason to cross the street. She reasons from her end (getting bread) to the means (crossing the street). The unity of the movement represented in “She is doing A” is constituted by reasoning of this form: she is doing A by holding together in one consciousness her idea of doing A and her idea of doing B, being conscious of her nexus.”
13		-For example, the end of reaching the bakery unifies the individual actions necessary for that end, like crossing the street; otherwise the individual steps would not have any meaning. Thus, contradictory ends would never yield an action because willing A and not A would not allow you to unify the necessary steps to achieve that end. And, this also proves an intent foresight distinction. If consequences were relevant, we would have to will the possibility of contradictory ends since an action can have different and conflicting results, which wouldn't allow you to unify your will.
14		-3. Non-contradictions are meta-constraints because a principle cannot be true and false at the same time otherwise it yields incompatible obligations, so the form of the will to abide any moral theory must first will it as universal.
15		-Thus, the sufficient negative burden is to prove that banning private ownership of handguns cannot be willed as a universal principle.
16		-
17		-Contention:
18		-
19		-No empirical object is intrinsically valuable. Their value lies only in relationship to rational agency. KANT:
20		-Immanuel Kant founder of analytic philosophy “Critique of Pure Reason” 1781
21		-“We have therefore wanted to say that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things that we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them to be, nor are their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us; and that if we remove our own subject or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, then all constitution, all relations of objects in space and time indeed space and time themselves would disappear, and as appearances objects they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What may be the case with objects in themselves and abstracted from all this receptivity of our sensibility remains entirely unknown to us. We are acquainted with nothing except our way of perceiving him or her, which is peculiar to us, and which therefore does not necessarily pertain to every being, though to be sure it pertains to every human being. We are concerned solely with this. Space and time are its pure forms, sensation in general its matter. We can cognize only the former a priori, i.e., prior to all actual perception, and they are therefore called pure intuition; the latter, however, is that in our cognition that is responsible for it being called a posteriori cognition, i.e., empirical intuition. The former adheres to our sensibility absolutely necessarily, whatever sort of sensations we may have; the latter can be very different. Even if we could bring this intuition of ours to the highest degree of distinctness we would not thereby come any closer to the constitution of objects in themselves. For in any case we would still completely cognize only our own way of intuiting, i.e., our sensibility, and this always only under the conditions originally depending on the subject, space and time; what the objects may be in themselves would still never be known through the most enlightened cognition of their appearance, which is alone given to us.” (168)
22		-
23		--Analytic

EntryDate

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1		-2016-10-16 09:06:50.0

Judge

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1		-Any

Opponent

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1		-Any

ParentRound

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1		-1

Round

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1		-1

Team

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1		-Christopher Columbus Navarrete Neg

Title

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1		-1- Kant NC

Tournament

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1		-Holy Cross