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GMs: Guiding Morals in GMing
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8980343" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>I'm reminded of the difference drawn by Kant between <em>hypothetical</em> and <em>categorical</em> imperatives.</p><p></p><p>Categorical imperatives are true for everyone, because of their grounding (at least so Kant says) in reason or in morality (which, in Kant's view, is a branch of reason). "You should not lie!" is a famous example suggested by Kant. "You should not kill (without justification)!" is less contentious.</p><p></p><p>Hypothetical imperatives, on the other hand, are - as the label suggests - conditional.</p><p></p><p>"How do I find that awesome website ENworld?" "If you want to visit ENworld, you should type <em><a href="http://www.enworld.org" target="_blank">www.enworld.org</a></em> into your web browser."</p><p></p><p>That second sentence is a hypothetical imperative.</p><p></p><p>In everyday conversation, it's fairly common to drop the antecedent, either because the goal is implicitly understood, or - and perhaps more often - the goal is <em>imputed</em> to the audience of the statement, because people often assume that others have the same goals as themselves, or tend to treat their own goals as if they are goals for human being as such.</p><p></p><p>This is the source of the common phenomenon of hypothetical imperatives being presented, and treated, <em>as if</em> they're categorical.</p><p></p><p>Which I think is what [USER=6991813]@Professor Murder[/USER] may be getting at when posting this:Certainly in my experience of talking about RPGing, it's common to see assertions/instructions set out in a blanket (ie categorical) fashion, when in fact the assertion/instruction is useful only relative to a particular goal which need not be universal among RPGers.</p><p></p><p>I've made a couple of recent threads trying to point out some of those implicit assumptions, which - when brought to the surface - reveal certain RPG "commandments" to be purely hypothetical imperatives for how to play a particular sort of RPG.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8980343, member: 42582"] I'm reminded of the difference drawn by Kant between [I]hypothetical[/I] and [I]categorical[/I] imperatives. Categorical imperatives are true for everyone, because of their grounding (at least so Kant says) in reason or in morality (which, in Kant's view, is a branch of reason). "You should not lie!" is a famous example suggested by Kant. "You should not kill (without justification)!" is less contentious. Hypothetical imperatives, on the other hand, are - as the label suggests - conditional. "How do I find that awesome website ENworld?" "If you want to visit ENworld, you should type [I][URL="http://www.enworld.org"]www.enworld.org[/URL][/I] into your web browser." That second sentence is a hypothetical imperative. In everyday conversation, it's fairly common to drop the antecedent, either because the goal is implicitly understood, or - and perhaps more often - the goal is [I]imputed[/I] to the audience of the statement, because people often assume that others have the same goals as themselves, or tend to treat their own goals as if they are goals for human being as such. This is the source of the common phenomenon of hypothetical imperatives being presented, and treated, [I]as if[/I] they're categorical. Which I think is what [USER=6991813]@Professor Murder[/USER] may be getting at when posting this:Certainly in my experience of talking about RPGing, it's common to see assertions/instructions set out in a blanket (ie categorical) fashion, when in fact the assertion/instruction is useful only relative to a particular goal which need not be universal among RPGers. I've made a couple of recent threads trying to point out some of those implicit assumptions, which - when brought to the surface - reveal certain RPG "commandments" to be purely hypothetical imperatives for how to play a particular sort of RPG. [/QUOTE]
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