Is and ought: can what happens tell us what we should do?

Humans possess dignity, which is "above all price," because they are free moral agents. Hence Kant's basic rule: treat every person as an end, never merely as a means.

Put simply Kant: people have dignity, a worth beyond any price, because they are free moral beings. So never treat a person merely as a tool for your purposes; always treat them as valuable in themselves.

Where to read it Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Ak. 4:429 and 4:434–435.

For Kant, acting morally means acting from duty, not from whatever one feels like doing; acts are judged by their intentions, never by consequences nobody can control.

In Hegel, calling something necessary and calling it good amount to the same judgment. The French Revolution was both: it had to come, so it was right.

Other readings Terry Pinkard (Does History Make Sense?, 2017) defends Hegel's philosophy of history against the common reading of it as a theory of inevitable progress, grounding it in an account of human subjectivity.

Where to read it Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic §6; Philosophy of Right, Preface.

Freedom, for Hegel, means recognizing necessity: since whatever happens had to happen, there is no room for a subjectively good choice, only for grasping why things are so.

Put simply Hegel: being free means understanding that things had to happen as they did. Since everything happens as it must, there is no room for choosing what seems good to you, only for grasping why things are so.

In the text In the Philosophy of Right (§124), Hegel calls the right of subjective freedom "the pivot and center of the difference between antiquity and modern times"; "freedom is the insight into necessity" is Engels's summary of Hegel in Anti-Dühring.

Other readings Robert Pippin (Hegel's Practical Philosophy, 2008) reads Hegel's freedom as a relation: agents take their purposes as their own and act within institutions of mutual recognition, so the individual's own endorsement matters.

In Hegelian fashion, the Manifesto makes no distinction between forecast and prescription: the proletariat's triumph is predicted, predestined, and right, all at once.

Put simply Marx, like Hegel: the Communist Manifesto does not separate what will happen from what should happen. The workers' victory is predicted, fated and right, all at once.

Nobody yet knows what good and evil are, "unless it be he who creates": the categories we live by must be questioned, not trusted.

Put simply Nietzsche: no one yet knows what good and evil are, "unless it be he who creates." So we must question the moral categories we live by, not trust them.

Without God, there is no "intelligible heaven" in which values might be found; human beings must create them themselves.

Put simply Sartre: without God, there is no higher realm where values are waiting to be found. People have to create their values themselves.

Sartre's moral imperative is about choosing, not about what gets chosen: no code says which option is right, and declining to decide is itself a decision one answers for.

Critical Theory, in Shore's account of the Frankfurt School's common project, is normative: describing the world is not enough, it also says what the world ought to be.

Put simply Shore's account of the Frankfurt School's shared project: Critical Theory does not only describe how the world is; it also says how the world ought to be.

For Beauvoir, values come from nowhere but human existence: there is no higher authority handing them down, so making them is our job alone.

Human beings are, in Kołakowski's phrase, the "sole creators of values," and this holds whether one affirms or denies a deterministic account of the world.

Put simply Kołakowski: people alone create values. That stays true whether or not you believe history is fixed in advance.

"We are communist," Kołakowski writes, not from having recognized communism as historically necessary but from having sided with the oppressed, the poor, the persecuted.

Structuralism is ahistorical, and amoralizing too, in that it tends to steer clear of value judgments.

Put simply Shore: structuralism sets history aside, and it tends to avoid judging things as good or bad.

If living a lie is what holds the system up, then living in truth is, unsurprisingly, the fundamental threat to it.

Put simply Havel: if the system rests on everyone living a lie, then "living in truth", refusing to pretend, is naturally the greatest threat to it.

Shore reads Kołakowski and Patočka as holding that robust subjectivity grounds truth instead of relativizing it, linked through responsibility; subjectivity becomes a key word for Havel.

Put simply Shore reads Kołakowski and Patočka as saying that a robust personal standpoint ("subjectivity") grounds truth rather than making it merely relative. Responsibility connects truth and subjectivity, and the word becomes key for Havel.

Political error is possible for a philosopher, who then owns up to it openly; being fooled by a regime that murdered millions of Jews simply for being Jews is not.

Put simply Marcuse: a philosopher can get politics wrong, and then he admits it openly. But he cannot be fooled about a regime that murdered millions of Jews simply for being Jews.

Havel's truth, like the dissidents', exceeds factual accuracy: it is what rescues a person, grounding the self, liberating, giving life meaning, worth living and dying for.

Put simply Havel's "truth," like that of other dissidents, means more than getting the facts right. It is what saves a person: it anchors the self, sets one free and gives life meaning, worth living and dying for.

In Shore's telling the course moves from epistemology (truth as mind matching object), via ontology, to ethics (truth against lies, authenticity against inauthenticity); history occupies the middle.

Put simply Shore's map of the course: from truth as the mind matching the world, through questions of what it means to exist, to truth as the opposite of lies and of living falsely. History sits in the middle.