Remember the V of November

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

Fireworks have been going of here since thursday. Every-night after the sun sets, about 5, fireworks go off, you can't ever really see them you just hear them. That is the extent of irregular in the past week. Well besides having fish and chips at a pub, horrible by the way. Frozen fish is utterly horrible. I bought tickets for Vienna the other day, my flight leaves at 5 in the morning, I think I am just going to go to London the night before and walk around until the time, might need someplace to store my shit though. I have and acquaintance studying in London, but I don't think he likes me enough for me to impose myself.

I've been reading about Kant and Hegel's moral theories and it has made me realize just how badly taught I was. I took this ethics class my freshman year in school. When we covered Kant we were presented with a dilemma if a Nazi comes up to somebody's house who is harboring Jews and asks if there are Jews there, should the person a) lie b)give up the Jews. The idea in Kant (in the way that it was presented in the text and by the professor) is that any action has to be universalized it is one of the four moments of the "categorical imperative." Lies cannot be universalized because that would create a "practical contradiction," if everyone would lie it would be pointless to assume that anyone was telling the truth. We would have to assume that honesty is a good thing for this to work. So we would have to choose a, we could not lie to the Nazi. The professor acted as if there were ways to get out of it such as saying the that the Nazi being a Nazi has lost his worth as a person (Kant also says we should respect everyone because they are human beings and we should not treat others as means to ends but as ends in themselves) but the final conclusion was that it was a devastating critique because it was counter intuitive. The issue comes down to wether or not Kant can in some way order laws so as one does not have two follow two seemingly contradictory laws. Assuming he can't (even though he can, and anyone that has read more the the Groundwork should realize that) there is a section in the metaphysics of morals specifically addressing such issues, he gives to certain ambiguous cases one being of necessity. If your action would in someway negate the base of the (roughly self perfection and promoting the happiness of others) than you should not engage in that action even though that action may seem moral. This is rather straight forward, don't do something if it causes more harm than good. This should be rather obvious to anyone teaching Kant's moral philosophy much the less writing a text book about it.

People like my philosophy professor raise up straw man just to be able to dismantle them. Simplicity seems to necessarily give rise to straw men. I have been recently accused of doing that very thing in my writing. Creating caricatures of authors just to be able to criticize the hell out of them. Leaving aside the issue that I do this, it is hard to simplify a work and analyze it. Simplification always produces error. See?