So there's this great big movement and thought after the Protestant Reformation, right?

And you got a whole bunch of people in Europe especially thinking a whole bunch of thoughts

about government and morality and how we relate to each other and almost trying to reimagine the world with a

social order that wouldn't necessarily require the whole monarchy thing that we'd

become accustomed to. This all happened against the backdrop of the age of absolute monarchs and there was crazy abuse.

This also coincidentally extends over into the period that we associate with the liberal

Western revolutions, right?

Like the American Revolution and the French, with all those ideas about all people are created equal,

and we've got these inalienable rights that are endowed

upon us, to us by our Creator, like life, pursuit of happiness pursuit of stuff all of that business is a product of the thinking

especially the thinking a little bit before the time of this one guy Emmanuel Cant he's a German philosopher and like a lot of his

contemporaries he was really interested in thinking through a sustainable workable moral

philosophy that went beyond just the high church dictates to

everybody what right and wrong is or just the high state dictates to everyone what

right and wrong is. What would it look like for morality to exist apart from external

forces acting upon us? And well, external human forces acting upon us. And he comes up with this thing

that is a very, very famous philosophical

maxim. And look, if at this point you're like, oh no, we're doing philosophy, this is a nightmare,

I don't like these words, this was boring and college just hang with me because it's going to make sense in just a minute.

So he's got this thing called the categorical imperative.

Sometimes you'll hear people call it the moral imperative, whichever, whatever.

So here's a crude summary of what he thought.

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