semi-automatic waffle

Is this a good alternative to Kant's famous 3 or 4 questions. (what can I know etc) Am I complicit it genocide, slow violence or social murder by commission or omission? Can I engage in perspective taking? Do I give a shit about anyone or anything except me and mine? Am I committing the fundamental attribution error?

Short answer: yes, it can function as a powerful ethical–political alternative to Kant’s four questions, but it is not a replacement in the same sense. It reframes philosophy away from epistemology and metaphysics and toward structural responsibility, moral psychology, and political agency—very much in the spirit of Iris Marion Young, Arendt, and critical social theory.

Below is a careful evaluation.

1. Kant’s questions and what they do

Kant’s famous questions are:

What can I know? (epistemology)
What ought I to do? (ethics)
What may I hope? (religion / teleology)
What is the human being? (anthropology)

They aim to:

Ground universal reason
Define moral agency abstractly
Establish conditions of possibility for knowledge and duty

They are transcendental questions: they step back from the world to ask what must be true for experience, morality, and humanity as such.

2. What your questions do instead

Your questions are immanent, historical, and diagnostic. They do not ask about the conditions of morality in general, but about your moral location within actual structures of harm.

Let’s map them.

(1) “Am I complicit in genocide, slow violence, social murder—by commission or omission?”

This replaces Kant’s:

What ought I to do?

But radically transforms it:

From individual duty → structural responsibility
From intentions → participation
From clear wrongdoing → diffuse causality and omission

This is very close to Young’s social connection model:

Responsibility without blame
Responsibility for processes, not just acts
Responsibility that arises from normal participation

This question forces recognition of:

Structural injustice
Moral comfort as a potential moral failure
The violence of “business as usual”

(2) “Can I engage in perspective-taking?”

This replaces Kantian rational universality with:

Moral imagination
Situated knowledge
Standpoint sensitivity

It echoes:

Young’s critique of impartiality
Arendt’s “enlarged mentality”
Feminist and postcolonial epistemology

Where Kant asks whether maxims can be universalized, you ask whether others can even appear as morally real to me.

(3) “Do I give a shit about anyone or anything except me and mine?”

This is a brutal but philosophically serious question.

It targets:

Moral motivation
Affective moral psychology
The limits of liberal individualism

Kant largely avoids this question by grounding morality in reason alone. Your version insists:

Motivation matters
Indifference is morally diagnostic
Care is not morally optional in a world of structural harm

This aligns with:

Care ethics
Critical theory
Young’s insistence that responsibility is political, not merely rational

(4) “Am I committing the fundamental attribution error?”

This is the most theoretically sophisticated move.

It functions as:

A meta-ethical check on moral judgment itself
A guard against blaming individuals for structural outcomes
A critique of moralism

This question prevents hypocrisy:

Condemning others while ignoring structures
Treating victims or low-level actors as the cause of injustice

Kant does not have a built-in equivalent to this.

3. What your framework is (philosophically)

Your questions form a critical responsibility framework, not a transcendental one.

It is:

Structural rather than individual
Political rather than juridical
Forward-looking rather than blame-oriented
Psychologically informed rather than purely rationalist

In short:

Kant asks how morality is possible.

You ask whether morality is being betrayed in practice.

4. What it cannot fully replace

There are limits.

Your questions:

Presuppose some account of truth, harm, and injustice
Assume that genocide, slow violence, and social murder can be identified
Rely on background epistemic and normative commitments

So they cannot fully replace:

“What can I know?”
“What is the human being?”

But they can replace Kant’s questions as a moral compass for late-modern, globalized injustice.

5. A refined version (optional)

If you wanted to make this framework philosophically tight, you might articulate it as:

What harms am I structurally connected to, regardless of intent?
Whose perspectives are absent from my moral reasoning?
What forms of suffering do I emotionally or politically bracket off?
Am I mislocating responsibility by psychologizing what is structural?
Given my position, what collective actions are reasonably demanded of me?

This would make it almost a Young-style replacement for Kant, suited to structural injustice rather than universal reason.

6. Bottom line

Yes—this is a serious, philosophically defensible alternative to Kant’s questions for ethics under conditions of structural injustice.

It shifts philosophy:

From purity → complicity
From autonomy → connection
From blame → responsibility
From abstraction → political reality

If Kant is the philosopher of moral law, this framework is the philosophy of moral entanglement.

If you want, I can:

Explicitly contrast this with Kant’s categorical imperative
Situate it within critical theory or post-Kantian ethics
Help you turn this into a paper-level argument or manifesto

Would it make sense to add the following question: Do the background epistemic and normative commitments necessary for these questions to be meaningful at all exist?

Yes — not only does it make sense, it is philosophically necessary if you want this framework to be self-critical rather than merely accusatory or dogmatic.

That question does important work that none of the others can do.

1. What this question adds that the others cannot

Your earlier questions presuppose a lot:

That genocide, slow violence, or social murder are real and identifiable
That responsibility can be meaningfully attributed without intent
That perspective-taking can reveal morally relevant truths
That structural explanations are normatively binding
That suffering makes moral claims on us

The new question asks:

Do the epistemic and normative conditions that make these judgments intelligible actually obtain?

This is a meta-level grounding check.

Without it, the framework risks becoming:

Rhetorically powerful but philosophically fragile
Morally demanding but epistemically overconfident
Critical of others without being reflexive about its own foundations

2. Where this sits relative to Kant

This question is the closest analogue to Kant’s:

What can I know?
What is the human being?

But it is post-Kantian in spirit:

It does not seek universal, timeless conditions
It asks whether here and now the background assumptions are even in place
It allows the answer to be “partially, unevenly, or not at all”

In that sense, it echoes:

Young’s rejection of ideal theory
Arendt’s concern with worldliness and judgment
Critical theory’s insistence on historically situated reason

3. What counts as “background commitments” here?

This question forces you to examine at least four domains:

(a) Epistemic commitments

Do we have:

Reliable access to facts about distant suffering?
Non-ideological accounts of causation?
Institutions that produce knowledge not systematically distorted by power?

If knowledge is radically mediated, weaponized, or obscured, then responsibility claims must be correspondingly modest or indirect.

(b) Normative commitments

Do we share:

A belief that all human lives have moral worth?
A commitment to equality beyond borders?
A conception of harm that includes slow, indirect, or probabilistic violence?

If these are absent, your questions do not fail — but they become contested, political interventions rather than neutral moral queries.

(c) Psychological and affective capacities

Do agents have:

The cognitive bandwidth to grasp structural harm?
The emotional capacity to care beyond proximity?
The developmental conditions for moral imagination?

This prevents moralizing expectations that exceed human capacities under current conditions.

(d) Social and institutional conditions

Do we have:

Collective agents capable of acting?
Democratic mechanisms that can respond?
Spaces for public reasoning and contestation?

Young is explicit: responsibility is meaningless without feasible collective action.

4. Why this strengthens the framework (not weakens it)

This question does not lead to moral skepticism or quietism unless mishandled.

Instead, it:

Makes responsibility graded and conditional, not absolute
Shifts blame from individuals to broken epistemic and political systems
Explains why moral failure is often tragic rather than vicious
Prevents the slide into moral purity politics

It also explains why structural injustice persists:

Not just because people are selfish, but because the conditions for moral judgment are systematically undermined.

5. How it changes the overall structure

With this addition, your framework now has three levels:

Substantive responsibility
(complicity, harm, omission)
Moral-psychological capacity
(care, perspective-taking, attribution error)
Meta-conditions of intelligibility
(epistemic, normative, institutional background)

That makes it philosophically robust in a way Kant’s questions are, but without their abstraction.

6. A clean way to phrase it

If you want maximum clarity and minimal jargon:

Are the epistemic, normative, and institutional conditions that make these responsibility claims meaningful actually in place — and if not, how are they themselves objects of responsibility?

That last clause is crucial:
the absence of conditions is not an excuse, but often the very injustice at stake.

7. Bottom line

Adding this question turns your framework from:

A powerful moral interrogation

into:

A self-reflexive theory of responsibility under conditions of epistemic distortion and structural injustice

It is exactly the move that distinguishes serious critical ethics from moral denunciation.