'Categorical Imperative'

What does Kant's categorical imperative say?

Something like this is what I remember.  I have a recollection of my mother telling me about the Categorical Imperative when I was about seven, so I think I can understand it at the level of a 7-year old, at least.  (I think that she wanted me to be precocious, and impress teachers.)

"A person should not do a thing if it would not be OK for everyone to do it."

I think it may be somewhat untrue.  Some things are OK to do if only a small portion of the people would ever want to do them.  

Obviously it's untrue if misinterpreted in some evil way, so I need to find a better statement of it.

The reason I thought of this now is that Elroch sent me a message saying that maybe I shouldn't feel obligated to leave if I voted early, because if everyone left who voted early, then the group would have hardly any members.  That is seems like a pretty good application of some version of the categorical imperative.  I don't know if Kant considered communication. The first person who does something can start a discussion about it. 

I think he must have made up his Imperative in context of some larger argument.  Actually I got to take a course at U. Penn from Alan Kors about the Intellectual HIstory of Western Europe, but I don't think I understood it.  I think I lost about 99.9% of what was said in that course.  But it is never too late.  Kant seems to be one of the founders of Communism, philosophically.   Communism has never been implemented the way the philophers intended, I suspect, but I have not tried to confirm that.

I'm sure I could learn about it more if I would take time to read Wikipedia about it just for starters.

I am also interested in the philosophy of impulsive actions but that is another topic for sure.  People suggest ADD medicine but that does not seem to be a deep solution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative

For myself it was a paper we were assigned to write on "The Nature and Purpose of Right Action" for my philosophy 101 class back in "65. At the time I had just become actively involved in some political activities and was uncertain if I was doing the right thing. Without being specific (either then or now) I saw the assignment as an opportunity to prove my case either way.

I worked on it very hard for several weeks. For every argument that said I was right there was a counter that I was not. In the end I submitted an unfinished, inconclusive paper and I have been wrestling with this concept ever since.

My final conclusion - "it depends on the circumstances" 

Niether Communism nor Socialism nor Democracy have ever been realized in their "pure" form. Just because we have elections doesn't mean we make good choices.

My first wife was a big fan of Ayn Rand's "Objectivism". How simple to just gather the world's artists and intellectuals and let them run things. Forgive my terminology, but philosophers never seem to take into account that there are a lot of idiots in the world. And they have a right to be here too. Therefore any socio-political system we can devise that does not allow for plenty of idiots is doomed to failure. 

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I don't know the specifics of your early vote but I know you are a valued member and valuable members are always in short supply.

Holding your vote until the final 24 hours is a good idea but as a rule it cannot be enforced. Not without a little software support from the website. Therefore it is not a rule; but a good idea and a metter of self-dicipline. There are times when the early vote doesn't hurt anything, but those times are too numerous and varied to enable a specific rule which would always apply.

When members see that someone has already voted they are encouraged to vote early themselves. Therefore, in my groups, I try to minimize early voting by making it a rule that members cannot post a comment saying they have already voted, or a comment containing the current votes, prior to the 24 hour mark.That is a rule which CAN be enforced.

Early votes go largely unnoticed by most because of the steps involved in the "archive trick". In the V3 version of the website, the votes can be seen at all times. That is what the members asked for about seven years ago and the website is finally promptly responding to the member's wants and needs.

My suggestion to the website is to have a seperate "Candidates List" which would be visible, wherein any member can suggest a move (candidate). Actual voting should be disabled until a specific time such as the final 24 hours. That way candidate moves can be discussed by the members and voting would be better educated.

I am certain the website will not provide this system.

One time after a history course in 7th grade, and it was pretty good I guess, because Mrs. McCaig had us take notes in outline format! ... I wrote in a paper that I thought computers would be best at governing a civilization.  I had been reading some Science Fiction.  My insight was that computers could be more impartial, and would just maximize some goodness function or happiness function.  But yes, I was very blind to politically and societally important matters like U.S. racial history (US in 1960s was coming out of segregation still.  My schools had some racial integration but also some segregation.) and the tension between nature conservation and economic development/ population growth. Plus the tendency of the military to grow due to the violence and greed and xenophobia in people. Plus how gender issues affect politics, plus religion and language differences ...

It is very hard to program all that in to make a Benificent Ruler world government computer program that people would even start to consider. So it looks like we're stuck with politicians, at least for my lifetime.

Maybe Google is onto it (now they're Alphabet except for the search engine.)  Google certainly has some power to influence some of my economic decisions and guide them towards some greater good, but I don't know that they're trying to do that at all.

At the time I thought that I was a 'smart person' and bound to succeed because of some personal excellence that I had, but I was very shortsighted in 7th grade and have become slightly more aware since then, I hope.

Also I wonder if there is a Coursera course for this area of philosophy.  Government course on Coursera maybe.

I had a teacher in Jr High who explained to us that Democracy is the most inefficient form of government. It takes forever to get anything done while it is all bogged down in commitees and bureaucracies.

By comparison, a dictatorship is highly efficient. One person decides how it will be and that's it. The only problem is that dictators are usually self-centered egomaniacs who don't give a hoot about others.

Elections provide us with the most "popular" leader who is most likely a self-centered egomaniac who doesn't give a hoot about others, but s/he will pretends to give a hoot in order to get elected. I think the best aspect of a democracy is not that we elect our leaders, but that, unlike dictators, they are answerable to us.

In vote chess; if every move is treated as a free and secret election, we will always elect low rated moves because low rated chess players (voters) will always outnumber high rated players (voters). That is why we need discussion and to listen to the better players discuss their strategies.

I think it won't be long before facebook is governing civilization. Orwell was off by 30 years.

An important note to take into account is that Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, etc., are incomplete without the consideration of his views on empirical anthropology.  He wrote very little on the subject, but you can read about Kant's views in Allen Wood's Kant.  In fact, the categorical imperative would be an extreme oddity without some "content," if you ask basic questions about Kant's general perspective, as expressed in the Critique of Pure Reason, namely, that "thought without content is empty; intuitions without concepts are blind."  This sentiment and general perspective runs through the entirety of his philosophy, and moral philosophy is no different.  Wood says that Kant probably never sat down and focused on writing an extensive empirical anthropology because it was a topic that he lectured on each semester (multiple classes, if I recall correctly) and was the most attended course during his time at Konigsberg.  That's not a very satisfying answer to me, but that's what Wood speculates.