Today's post comes to us courtesy of K. Cerqueira, an educated gentleman who will today teach us a little more about the philosophy behind Libertarianism.
"There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal." - Hayek
Quick philosophy lesson kids, you've probably heard this one. Say you're
standing next to a train track shortly before a fork junction. On one
side, 5 people lay tied up, and on the other side there's this fat guy.
There's a switch in front of you that you can pull to flip the fork,
sending the train to kill the fat guy while saving the other 5. What do
you do?
Well there was this guy called Kant who didn't precisely have an opinion
on this question (it was devised later by dumber philosophers who write
useless papers for a living, in between giving puerile lectures at
diploma mills) but he did have this to say about it: every action you
take should be in accordance with some universal law which is applicable
in all situations. A set of such universal moral laws is called a
deontology because it proscribes a set of duties. So if your deontology
says something like, thou shalt not murder, then the particulars of the
situation, i.e. the very contrived way in which the consequences are set
up, don't really matter. You'd be killing a guy by pulling the lever,
so you can't contradict yourself by doing so. There are further
complications in this example but we aren't philosophers playing fucked
up language games, so let's keep it simple.
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And so we witness the end.
12 years ago
