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9:27

(In »The syntheist agent and her desires and drives«)

Since ethics is a more or less free choice between various alternatives – the more freedom that exists in a context, the more ethics is required – and since Kant has made the subject and object of ethics into one and the same thing, he is forced to reduce his ethics to a tautology. When asked the question why it is right to do the right thing, Kant answers laconically that every action should be carried out as if it were universally valid. In other words, it is right to do what is right for the simple and pointless reason that it is right to do the right thing. And then we have not even touched upon the question of exactly what this automatically executed right thing actually is. The only reasonable reaction to Kant’s tautological imperative comes from his successor Nietzsche, who realises that all notions that value philosophy is able to formulate as the right thing in advance must be rejected. Instead he recasts value philosophy as an anthropological project occupied with what Man is anyway already doing and why. The prescriptive value philosophy of Kant is answered commendably by Nietzsche with a descriptive and interactive enlightenment project. Thereby Kant is reduced to a banal moralist, while Nietzsche stands out as the real ethicist.