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The Categorical Order and the Nazis

שו"תThe Categorical Order and the Nazis
שאל לפני 4 שנים

Good evening!
There is a famous criticism of the categorical imperative that the Nazis allegedly used, that Eichmann, in the West, said he was not guilty at all since he acted according to the imperative that made whatever you want a general law, and he truly wanted the weak not to survive, and as Hitler, in the West, said at the end of the war, that Germany deserved to lose because they were weak (although Nazi philosophy was mixed with Darwinian arguments of natural selection, and a mixture of Nietzschean philosophy of slave morality and the superman, as well as Norse mythology and Heidegger's philosophy of nature, etc., but much was based on the categorical imperative and not, as Arendt believed, on the banality of evil).
And my question is one that, in my understanding, has nothing to do with Kant, since, in my understanding, the Kantian structure is constructed differently, as I will explain below:
1- A person must be moral, since this is the fulfillment of a person, just as it is of being intelligent.
2- Morality is not a relativistic feeling, but an intelligent, educated decision that does not necessarily correspond to the feeling (and therefore one must refer to morality).
Only after these arguments did Kant formulate what constitutes a moral act by the command.
And from the perspective of the Supreme Court, it follows that Eichmann was wrong because the order assumes a priori assumption that a person must be moral and only for the Supreme Court does the order formulate what a moral act is, whereas Eichmann understood that all morality is merely the existence of the order without the a priori assumption that a person must be moral.
Or to put it another way: Kant did not mean that the command is morality itself, but only formulates a moral principle, and in any case, whoever disbelieves in morality itself (which Kant did not define, and Kant himself is not clear enough about the reasoning behind why one should be moral and what not) then the command means nothing to him (and Eichmann understood that the command is morality itself and morality has no meaning of its own, and indeed this argument is more consistent with Nietzsche's that man creates autonomous morality, but I do not think Kant intended this).
I would like to know if I am correct in this analysis?
Thank you very much!
 


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מיכי צוות ענה לפני 4 שנים
I think you mean the following: If we adopt a subjective interpretation of the categorical imperative, meaning that everyone should do what they (!) want to be a general law, then if a person wants something bad, the categorical imperative leads them to bad behavior. But Kant didn't mean that. He meant that one should act in such a way that if it were a general law then the world would be good. If you want something else, you are wrong.

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