Instructor: James Woodbridge
email address: j.woodbridge@yale.edu
Course Webpage: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jw556/yale/DS4.htm
Office Hours: TTh 4pm-5:30pm, and by appointment
Office: 406B Connecticut Hall
Office Phone: 432-1683
Dept. Phone: 432-1686

THIRD PAPER ASSIGNMENT

Pick one of the following topics, and write a 5 page paper completing the tasks assigned.

Your paper is due in my mailbox in 108 CT Hall by 11am on Friday, April 14th.

Topics:

1. Explain and critically evaluate Kant's argument, in the Critique of Pure Reason (especially A32-33), that time is transcendentally ideal. In the earlier, parallel argument for the ideality of space, Kant seems to rely on the assumption that Euclidean geometry is the only possible structure of space. What work does this do for him? We now recognize that this assumption about geometry is untenable. Is there any assumption playing an analogous role in Kant's argument regarding time? If so, is there any alternative account for the nature of time constructible from its rejection? If not, would the argument for the ideality of time stand even if that for space does not?

2. Mill, briefly alluding to Kant's Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals in the opening chapter of Utilitarianism, claims that although Kant offers a principle of morality, "when he begins to deduce from this precept any of the actual duties of morality, he fails, almost grotesquely, to show that there would be any contradiction, any logical (not to say physical) impossibility, in the adoption by all rational beings of the most outrageously immoral rules of conduct. All he shows is that the consequences of their universal adoption would be such as no one would choose to incur" (p. 4). After describing Kant's principle of morality (that is, describing his principle of morality and discussing how Kant proposed to derive specific duties from that principle), present in your own words Mill's objection and then evaluate it.

3. Suppose you are about to send away for life a prisoner you know to be falsely accused. Before you do, you pause to consider the morality of your action. On the one hand, locking up this prisoner will cause a lot of good: the general population will feel safer thinking that this bad person is no longer a threat; the victims will feel the satisfaction of vengeance; and potential criminals will be restrained by the fear of punishment. On the other hand, you reflect that punishing people for crimes they did not commit is usually thought to be unjust. Are there, according to Mill, utilitarian reasons for saying that the prisoner has a right which it would be immoral for you not to respect, regardless of the consequences in this particular case? How convincing is his reasoning on this issue?