Abstract
Commanders gain authority from obedience and lose authority from disobedience. We should expect commanders to therefore devise commands that reduce the probability of disobedience. To aid recognition of these techniques for reducing the risk of disobedience, I focus on the extreme of case of commands that reduce the probability to zero. Each of my ten commandments illustrates a logical technique for engineering out disobedience. Once you master these safety measures, you can confidently legislate your own universal maxims. Your innovations will be good news for Immanuel Kant’s characterization of morality in terms of categorical imperatives. The commandments also raise interesting questions about responsibility for necessities and the nature of rule following.
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Notes
Children can and must learn the English alphabetical sequence A, B, C,.. by rote. There are only 26 letters in no intrinsic order. Children cannot learn 1, 2, 3,.. by rote. There are infinitely many numbers. The child must learn a rule for continuing the series indefinitely. Since there are infinitely many moral truths, there must be moral rules.
Moore’s examples of common sense judgments are all contingent. Perhaps he infers tautological status would make any appeal to common sense superfluous. All tautologies are true – even astrological tautologies. Since tautologies need no further support, common sense can furnish no distinctive support. However, distinctive support of a tautology can be rendered when that tautology is difficult to recognize as a tautology.
C. H. Langford (1968, 323) nurtures ambivalence about whether tautologies are informative into the paradox of analysis. The paradox affects the theory of rational choice and mathematics.
This became orthodoxy until the last quarter of the twentieth century. Meta-ethicists allowed that moralities can be analytically false. G. E. Moore contended that the ethical egoist inconsistently says I ought to maximize my good while denying that others are also obligated to maximize my good.
Ian Proops (2021), The Fiery Test of Critique Oxford University Press. Kant’s rumination surfaces in Paul Guyer’s “Notes and Fragments” volume for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Ak 18: 37, Reflection 4945, 1776–78.
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Sorensen, R. Commandments Thou Shalt Not Break. Philosophia 51, 1643–1662 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00602-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00602-z