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Thursday 23 February, 2017
This morning while I was playing Witcher 3, I had another Kantian experience. Except this time it wasn't any decision I had to make, it was more of a situation your character witnesses. In the game, one of the captains of the army is taking taxes from one of the farmers. The guy was to bring him a certain quantity of food because of how big his yield from this season was. The guy lies to the captain initially about how much his farm brings in, but the captain is too savvy for that nonsense. The captain feels pity towards the guy though and doesn't charge him the full amount he could and asks the guy to come back the next day. The guy is really grateful and goes away. I ended up having to go do some other story missions where I had to kill a griffin (which was outrageously difficult), and then I came back. When I got back, the farmer was there but he had delivered spoiled goods. Which was a bit of a dick move. (That's another thing we talked about a while back). It reminded me of Kant again, where keeping promises is important to keep a society going. It also ties into the social contract theory we were talking about with Hobbes. To keep a healthy society going, we need to reasonably expect people to act a certain way, ie keep their promises. When they don't act accordingly, it makes society pretty difficult, hence punishments. If the farmer guy had just given the captain the goods he was supposed to, which were less than what was expected, the captain would have been happy and he would have been more inclined to be lenient with other farmers. But because this guy broke his promise, now the captain has to punish the guy for delivering spoiled goods, but now he can't justify being lenient with other people.
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