Challenges of the Knowledge Society (May 2012)
A TRADITIONAL FALSE PROBLEM: THE RIGORISM OF KANTIAN MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. THE CASE OF VERACITY
Abstract
According to many of its traditional critics, the main weakness in Kantian moral-political philosophy resides in its impossibility of admitting exceptions. In nuce, all these critical positions have converged, despite their reciprocal heterogeneity, in the so called accuse of moral rigorism (unjustly, I would say) directed against Kant’s moral and political perspective. As such, basically, I will seek to defend Kant against this type of criticism, by showing that any perspective attempting to evaluate Kant’s ethics on the grounds of its capacity or incapacity to admit exceptions is apriorily doomed to lack of sense, in its two logical alternatives, i.e. either as nonsense (predicating about empty notions), or as tautology (formulating ad hoc definitions and criteria with respect to Kant’s system and then claiming that it does not hold with respect to them). Essentially, I will try to show that Kantian ethics can organically immunize itself epistemologically against any such so called antirigorist criticism.
