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You're listening to the Part examined life, episode 372, part two.

We've been discussing Kant's ethics lectures.

We had sort of finished the first two sections, the first two lectures that we'd read on his introductory observations and the supreme principle of morality, his meta-ethics.

And now we're going to get down to, we read several sections on duties to oneself, which he thinks are sort of the most important, the primary ones.

And then duties towards others.

And a lot of these follow, so even lying, right, the quintessential duty towards others,

it's not really because of the harm it's going to cause other people. It's about what it does to you and your integrity and respecting humanity as an end in itself, which, you know,

you're the humanity that you are most aware of, that you have the most immediate control over

and contact with. So, yes, a lot of these

things sort of actually fall out of our duties towards ourselves. In fact, some of the other,

like charity, we were saying he doesn't emphasize positive virtues, that it's all about

prescriptions. And some of what you would consider positive virtues above and beyond,

like charity

are actually like, well, nature distributes things unequally, and that's kind of not fair. So when we

give to charity, when we give to somebody that's in need, we're just making up for that natural.

So it's actually just our duty. It's not above and beyond. Like, we owe those people. We owe the

poor, unequal share. Like, we owe those people. We owe the poor unequal share.

Like, so nature, like social arrangements.

Society is unjust.

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