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Cites

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3		-====Self-consciousness requires us to will universal independence====
4		-KORSGAARD 96
5		-Christine Korsgaard. "The Sources of Normativity." Lecture 3. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. 1996. Gender modified. http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/'documents/a-to-z/k/korsgaard94.pdf
6		-Kant defines a free will as a rational causality that is effective without being determined by any alien cause. Anything outside of the will counts as an alien cause, including the desires and inclinations of the person. The free will must be entirely selfdetermining. Yet, because the will is a causality, it must act according to some law or other. Kant says, "Since the concept of a causality entails that of laws . . . it follows that freedom is by no means lawless . . ." 2 Alternatively, we may say that since the will is practical reason, it cannot be conceived as acting and choosing for no reason. Since reasons are derived from principles, the free will must have a principle. But because the will is free, no law or principle can be imposed on it from outside. Kant concludes that the will must be autonomous: that is, it must have its own law or principle. And here again we arrive at the problem. For where is this law to come from? If it is imposed on the will from outside then the will is not free. So the will must adopt the law for itself. But until the will has a law or principle, there is nothing from which it can derive a reason. So how can it have any reason for adopting one law rather than another ? Well, here is Kant’s answer. The Categorical imperative tells us to act only on a maxim that we could will to be a law. And this, according to Kant, is the law of a free will. To see why, we need only compare the problem faced by the free will with the content of the Categorical imperative. The problem faced by the free will is this: the will must have a law, but because the will is free, it must be its own law. And nothing determines what that law must be. All that it has to be is a law. Now consider the content of the Categorical imperative. The Categorical imperative simply tells us to choose a law. Its only constraint on our choice is that it have the form of a law. And nothing determines what that law must be. All that it has to be is a law. Therefore the categorical imperative is the law of a free will. It does not impose any external constraint on the free will’s activities, but simply arises from the nature of the will. It describes what a free will must do in order to be what it is. It must choose a maxim it can regard as a law.3 Now I’m going to make a distinction that Kant doesn’t make. I am going to call the law of acting only on maxims you can will to be laws "the Categorical imperative." And I am going to distinguish it from what I will call "the moral law." The moral law, in the Kantian system, is the law of what Kant calls the Kingdom of Ends, the republic of all rational beings. The moral law tells us to act only on maxims that all rational beings could agree to act on together in a workable cooperative system. Now the Kantian argument that I have just described establishes that the categorical imperative is the law of a free will. But it does not establish that the moral law is the law of a free will. Any law is universal, but the argument doesn’t settle the question of the domain over which the law of the free will must range. And there are various possibilities here. If the law is the law of acting on the desire of the moment, then the agent will treat each desire as it arises as a reason, and her conduct will be that of a wanton. 4 If the law ranges over the interests of an agent’s whole life, then the agent will be some sort of egoist. It is only if the law ranges over every rational being that the resulting law will be the moral law, the law of the Kingdom of Ends. Because of this, it has sometimes been claimed that the categorical imperative is an empty formalism. And this in turn has been conflated with another claim, that the moral law is an empty formalism. Now that second claim is false.5 But it is true that the argument that shows that we are bound by the categorical imperative does not show that we are bound by the moral law. For that we need another step. The agent must think of herself as a Citizen of the Kingdom of Ends. Those who think that the human mind is internally luminous and transparent to itself think that the term "self - consciousness" is appropriate because what we get in human consciousness is a direct encounter with the self. Those who think that the human mind has a reflective structure use the term too, but for a different rea - son. The reflective structure of the mind~~‘s~~ is a source of "self-consciousness" because it forces us to have a conception æ that is you, and that chooses which desire to act on. This means that the principle or law by which you determine your actions is one that you regard as being expressive of yourself. To identify with such a principle or law is to be, in St. Paul’s famous phrase, a law to yourself. An agent might think of herself as a Citizen in the Kingdom of Ends. Or she might think of herself as a member of a family or an ethnic group or a nation. She might think of herself as the steward of her own interests, and then she will be an egoist. Or she might think of herself as the slave of her passions, and then she will be a wanton. And how she thinks of herself will determine whether it is the law of the Kingdom of Ends, or the law of some smaller group, or the law of the egoist, or the law of the wanton that is the law that she is to herself. The conception of one’s identity in question here is not a theo - retical one, a view about what as a matter of inescapable scientific fact you are. It is better understood as a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking. So I will call this a conception of your practical identity. Practical identity is a complex matter and for the average person there will be a jumble of such conceptions. You are a human being, a woman or a man, an adherent of a certain religion, a member of an ethnic group, someone’s friend, and so on. And all of these identities give rise to reasons and obligations. Your reasons express your identity, your nature ; your obligations spring from what that iden - tity forbids. Our ordinary ways of talking about obligation reflect this con - nection to identity. A century ago a European could admonish another to civilized behavior by telling him to act like a Christian. It is still true in many quarters that courage is urged on males by the injunction "Be a man!" Duties more obviously connected with social roles are of course enforced in this way. "A psychiatrist doesn’t violate the confidence of her patients." No "ought" is needed here because the normativity is built right into the role. But it isn’t only in the case of social roles that the idea of obliga - tion invokes the conception of practical identity. Consider the astonishing but familiar "I couldn’t live with myself if I did that." Clearly there are two selves here, me and the one I must live with and so must not fail. Or consider the protest against obligation ignored : "Just who do you think you are ?" The connection is also present in the concept of integrity. Etymologically, integrity is oneness, integration is what makes something one. To be a thing, one thing, a unity, an entity; to be anything at all: in the metaphysical sense, that is what it means to have integrity. But we use the term for someone who lives up to his own standards. And that is because we think that living up to them is what makes him one, and so what makes him a person at all. It is the conceptions of ourselves that are most important to us that give~~s~~ rise to unconditional obligations. For to violate them is to lose your integrity and so your identity, and no longer to be who you are. That is, it is no longer to be able to think of yourself under the description under which you value yourself and find your life worth living and your actions worth undertaking. That is to be for all practical purposes dead or worse than dead. When an action cannot be performed without loss of some fundamental part of one’s identity, and an agent would rather be dead, then the obligation not to do it is unconditional and complete. If reasons arise from reflective endorsement, then obligation arises from re - flective rejection.
7		-Analytics
8		-Kantian state of reciprocal constraint doesn’t exist in the US – all USFG action is unilateral coercion and must be rejected
9		-Mills 15
10		-Charles Mills (the John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University). "Black Radical Liberalism (by Charles Mills)." PEA Soup, philosophy blog run by professors David Sobel and David Shoemaker. 23 February 2015. http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2015/02/black-radical-liberalism-and-why-it-isnt-an-oxymoron.html
11		-"Black radical liberalism" is my attempt to reconstruct from different and usually counterposed bodies of political thought what I see as the most promising candidate for an emancipatory African American political theory. So I am less concerned with the question of whether any African American political theorists actually self-consciously identified what they were doing under this designation than with the question of whether it stands up to criticism as a plausible way forward. In taxonomies of African American/black political thought, the standard contrast would be: ~~Neat visual diagram by Charles Mills removed for card formatting purposes.~~ I am arguing for a synthesizing, reconstructed black liberalism which draws upon the most valuable insights of the black nationalist and black Marxist traditions, and incorporates them into a dramatically transformed liberalism. So the taxonomies would now be drawn differently: ~~Neat visual diagram by Charles Mills removed for card formatting purposes.~~ How does black radical liberalism differ from black mainstream liberalism? By definition they are both "liberal" in endorsing liberalism as a political philosophy, but black radical liberalism seeks to transform liberalism to make it responsive to the alternative realities of the black diasporic experience in modernity, and the correspondingly necessary reordering of liberal normative priorities. Black radical liberalism both (i) recognizes white supremacy as central to the making of the United States and (more sweepingly) the modern world, and (ii) seeks the rethinking of the categories, crucial assumptions, and descriptive and normative frameworks of liberalism in the light of that recognition. Black mainstream liberalism either (i) refuses to recognize white supremacy (for example, by endorsing the "anomaly" view of U.S. racism ~~see Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History~~) or, (ii) even if it does give lip service to its reality, assumes nonetheless that the categories, crucial assumptions, and descriptive and normative frameworks of liberalism can be adopted with little change to the task of getting rid of it. OBJECTIONS: (1) But how can Marxist and liberal insights be reconciled? Aren’t they necessarily opposed? Liberalism comes in different varieties, and black radical liberalism would obviously be a left-wing variety. Liberalism is opposed to state-commandist socialism, but state-commandist socialism has proved itself to be a historical failure, both economically and morally. Liberalism is not in principle opposed to social democracy or market socialism. (2) But how can black nationalist insights be reconciled either with Marxism or liberalism? Black nationalism likewise comes in different varieties. The key insight of the tradition, in my opinion, is the recognition of the reality and centrality of an ontology of race, and how it shapes people and their psychology, which can be accommodated in a modified Marxism and liberalism.
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13		-Analytics

EntryDate

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1		-2016-11-19 22:32:19.0

Judge

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1		-Srikar Pyda

Opponent

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1		-Millburn AJ

ParentRound

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1		-8

Round

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1		-3

Team

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1		-Lexington Weiler Neg

Title

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1		-NOVDEC- NC- Kant

Tournament

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1		-Glenbrooks