Overview
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For today's lesson, you need to read the First Section of Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, by Immanuel Kant, in Chapter 8 of Gordon Marino's Ethics: The Essential Writings. Once you've completed the reading, move onto the next part of today's lesson
Today, we begin to consider one of the three most popular (and, arguably, most important) moral philosophies set forth in the history of Western thought: deontology (the others are virtue ethics, which we've already studied, and utilitarianism, which we'll study next week). Immanuel Kant was an eighteenth-century Prussian/German deontologist, and we’ll be reading selections from one of his treatises on moral philosophy today and tomorrow.
The word, “deontology,” is derived from the Greek word, “deon,” which just means duty, responsibility, or obligation. A deontological ethics, then, is one that focuses on our duties or obligations, and understands morality in those terms (instead of in terms of character, for example, or sentiment, or the natural law, and so on). Of course, since we’re talking about ethics, Kant isn’t going to argue that it is always right to perform the duties that have been assigned to you by your culture, your society, your employer, your parents, etc. This isn’t his sense of the word “duty.” Instead, Kant is trying to figure out what our duties are insofar as we are human beings—that is, what duties or obligations do all human beings have, to themselves and to one another. A good action will be one that fulfills our most basic moral responsibilities; an evil action, one that transgresses those duties.
Naturally, as you know from the reading, it gets more complicated than that.
Before going on, it’s important that we see something essential about Kant’s point of view: although he was a deeply (if unconventionally) religious man himself, Kant does not allow his religious beliefs to intrude upon his ethical deliberations. Why not? Because Kant thinks that ethics is only ethics if it applies to all human beings—regardless of their religious beliefs—and as such, he does not think that we can legitimately base our ethics in any one religion (or political party, or cultural attitude or identity, etc.). All ethics that are truly ethics, from Kant’s point of view, are universal. That means, they apply to everyone at all times, regardless of historical era, regardless of nationality, regardless of political or professional affiliations, and regardless of religious beliefs. Moreover, ethics as a field of study is only really useful when it can help us to come to an understanding of good and evil, and this means it has to provide us with a language we can all use. An ethics that talks about “sin” and “salvation” is useful to some people, but not to everyone: atheists, for example, don’t believe in either (at least not in the religious senses of those terms). Similarly, an ethics that derives its principles from the Qur’an, or Torah, or the New Testament, isn’t one that people who do not believe those books are holy can make sense of. The teachings of the Buddha often have a different sort of ethical import for Buddhists than they do for non-Buddhists, and so on. For this reason, Kant is going to base everything on reason alone—that’s his whole philosophical project, in a way—and thus, despite his personal religious commitments, he will not accept any ethics that isn’t based solely on rational principles.
Given that Kant rejects the precepts of religious ethical teachings, then, as well as cultural beliefs, traditions, and so on, he does not believe that the principles of morality are written down anywhere, whether in a book or in nature or in our hearts. No amount of empirical investigation will get us any closer to the truth of morality, Kant thinks, and so we’re going to have to begin our ethical inquiries in a logical fashion, from the most basic definitions—and then see where we can go from there. For this reason, in some ways, Kant’s ethics is the most thoroughly philosophical of all the philosophical ethical perspectives. His ethics is rooted in philosophy and nothing else.
To help us continue the project not only of understanding moral philosophy, but also understanding how these moral philosophers fit into the history of philosophy as such, take a moment to watch this brief introduction to Kant’s life and work, as well as an overview of his moral thought.
The first question of ethics, we might say, is “What is good?” And of course, there are all sorts of answers to this question: there are good actions, like giving charity, and good people, like Gandhi, and good character traits, like courage, and good intentions, like many parents’ desires to raise their children well, and good laws, like the Magna Carta. But the general question “What is good?” needs to be an answer to all of those more specific questions. It’s almost Socratic: what is it that everything we call “good” has in common, but which nothing we call “evil” possesses?
Kant’s answer to this question, as he notes in the very first lines of the reading, is “a good will.” Really, here, he’s arguing against Aristotle and the tradition of virtue ethics, but as we’ll see later, it works as a response to utilitarianism, as well. By “a good will,” Kant does not mean “goodwill,” that is, the feeling of love or kindness or compassion for other human beings. He means to say something about the will itself. So, what is a will? As we saw in Kierkegaard and Augustine, the will is that element within the human being that makes choices: it’s not the intellect, exactly, since we can know better but still choose evil; and it’s not the emotions, since we can want not to do something but choose to do it anyway. It’s the part of us that responds to the alternatives we see and privileges one over the others; it’s informed at times by desire and emotion, and informed at times by knowledge and intellect, but it is itself neither of those things. In saying that the only thing that is good in itself—that is, the only good thing that doesn’t get its goodness from something else—is a good will, Kant is saying that there are no feelings, no desires, no traits of character, and no bits of knowledge that can’t be put to evil purposes. Love—often heralded as good—can be turned to evil, either when the person we love doesn’t love us (“I’ll make him love me”) or against those who threaten the ones we love (“I’ll kill you if you insult her again”). Compassion can lead us to do the wrong thing, if we give unfair advantages to people with whom we are sympathetic (“You’ve had a rough life, so I’ll let you off with a warning”). The virtues can be used for evil, Kant argues: a courageous villain is even worse than a cowardly one. And, as opposed to Socrates’ assertions that to be good is simply to know what the good is, Kant proposes the idea that there is nothing about intellectual knowledge of what is good that necessitates that we put that goodness into practice: almost everyone who has ever betrayed another person knew that it was wrong before they did it. No, these things do not have their goodness in themselves; they get it from something else. Where do they get it from? A good will. Courage is only good when it is unified with the will to do good in the world; intelligence is only good when it is unified with the will to do good (again, intelligent bad guys can do much more harm than stupid ones can); knowledge is only good when it is used for good purposes by people who choose to do the good; love and anger and pride and humility and all the feelings are only good when, again, they are unified with a good will.
What makes a good will good? Nothing, Kant argues: since a good will is good in itself, it doesn’t get its goodness from anything else. How do I know if I have a good will or a bad one? I know my will is good because I will the good. (It’s that simple.) How do I make my will good if I’ve been making bad choices? By making good choices. (It’s that simple.) How do I know that a choice is good? As promised, now it’s getting a little complicated.
Good choices are going to be choices that are made in accord with a certain standard, a standard that would be chosen by every single human being whose will was good. He calls that standard “the moral law.” Since Kant has already ruled out the possibility that there is a list somewhere of good things to choose, he thinks human beings are going to have to figure this out for ourselves. How do we do that? Well, we try to think of everything we know about the moral law—despite the fact that we don’t already know what the moral law is. What would have to be true of every moral principle? This is an interesting exercise, if you can think sufficiently abstractly to engage in it. We’re not trying to figure out which actions are good and which are bad, not just yet anyway. We’re doing something more basic here: we’re trying to figure out what it is that all moral principles have in common. Are all moral principles rooted in love and compassion? No—even cold, distant people can do the good, if they will it. Are they all edifying and instructive? No—even if we already know the good, that is, even if we don’t learn anything from the principle, it’s still good when unified with a good will. Do they all intend to change the world for the better? No—sometimes the right thing to do is not to change anything, or only to change something within oneself. So … what can we say that is true of every conceivable moral principle?
Don’t worry if you can’t figure this one out. It’s a hard problem, and even Kant—one of the greatest super-mega-geniuses in the history of philosophy—can only think of two.
1. All moral principles will be principles of the will, which is to say, they will be principles about how we should choose to act.
2. All moral principles will apply to everyone at all times, which is to say, there will never be exceptions to moral principles.
We’ve already seen that the property of applying to everyone at all times is called “universality”: all moral principles will be universal. And the word Kant uses to denote a principle of the will is a “maxim,” so that all moral principles will be able to be articulated as maxims. (The form of a maxim is quite straightforward: “I should only lie when it benefits someone,” for example, or “I should never kill lions who are not trying to kill me.”) This doesn’t seem like very much to go on, I admit. But part of Kant’s genius here is to show us how immensely powerful even just these two facts about all moral principles can be, when joined together.
Combining those two facts gives us something like this: all moral principles take the form of universalizable maxims. (We have to say “universalizable,” rather than “universal,” here. Why? Because a “universal maxim” would be one everyone subscribed to, but we know from our experience that there are evil people as well as good. Not everyone adheres to moral principles. A “universalizable” maxim, then, is one that everyone could adhere to—whether or not everyone does. And a non-universalizable maxim would be one that, usually for logical reasons, no one, or at least not everyone, could adhere to—examples of which we’ll get in the reading for tomorrow.) As I’m sure you’ve noticed, maxims are subjective: which is to say, they always take the form of first-person assertions about one’s own behavior (“I should do this,” or “I should not do that”). Genuinely moral principles, since they apply to everyone, need to be able to be articulated in a more generalizable form, however, and this formal difference is really the only difference, for Kant, between a maxim and a moral law. Thus, the moral law will be not be articulated in the form of maxims, but in what Kant calls “imperatives,” which are general assertions about how people should act. If the maxim is, “I should never kill lions that aren’t trying to kill me,” then the imperative is, “One should never kill lions that aren’t trying to kill one.” It’s also the case that, in the translation of maxims into imperatives, we’ll lose all particularities—thus, my maxim might be, “I should marry Rosa,” but the imperative would have to be more general, that is, it would need not to make reference to any particular person (“Everyone should get married,” for example). Thus, we can start to see how the moral law and our individual actions are related:
1. I choose not to kill the lion, Cecil.
2. The maxim of this action is, “I should not kill the lion, Cecil.” If someone were to ask me why I didn’t shoot Cecil, I would say, “Because I shouldn’t kill Cecil.”
3. If my maxim is in accord with the moral law, it would be because my maxim was a particular articulation of a general imperative: which is just a fancy philosophical way of saying that my answer to the question, “Why shouldn’t you kill Cecil?” is “Because one should not kill lions that aren’t trying to kill one.”
Now, we still don’t quite know if this is a moral principle—but why? Because, as Kant notes, there are two kinds of imperatives: hypothetical and categorical. Hypothetical imperatives have the form of hypothetical statements, which are (in logic) simply “If …, then …” statements (they’re also sometimes called “conditional statements” by logicians, because they only apply if you meet one or more conditions). Thus, a hypothetical imperative would be something like, “If you love nature, then you shouldn’t kill lions.” This says nothing about morality, however, because it doesn’t apply to everyone all the time—it only applies to those people who love nature. Most of our imperatives are like this: If you are hungry, then you should eat; if you want a happy retirement, then you should save while you’re young. If I go to Human Resources and tell them I want more money withheld each month from my paycheck and put into my 401(k), and the HR manager asks me why, my answer is something like, “Because I want to have a happy retirement.” That answer depends upon my belief in the hypothetical imperative articulated above. Importantly, hypothetical imperatives always identify a group or class of individuals to whom the imperative will apply—and they are not, for that reason, simple statements of cause and effect (e.g., “If you don’t take a shower, then you might start to smell bad” is not an imperative because it isn’t telling us how to act; “If you don’t want to smell bad, then you should take a shower” is an imperative, however). One way to make sure that an if-then statement is a hypothetical imperative is to make sure that it identifies a group of people to whom some recommendation or command applies (people who love nature, for example, or people who want to have a happy retirement, or people who don’t want to smell bad, etc.).
But there’s another answer to the question, “Why shouldn’t one kill lions?” that isn’t hypothetical in nature. If someone asks an animal rights activist this question, their answer is almost certainly not going to be, "Because you love nature," or “Because then you’d be violating the law,” or “Because lions are nice.” Instead, it’s far more straightforward: you just shouldn’t kill lions. It’s just wrong. This doesn’t depend upon a hypothetical imperative; there’s no “If …, then …” here. Instead, the animal rights activist is asserting that killing lions is a violation of the moral law: because the moral law applies categorically, that is, without any qualifiers or conditions (we might say it’s unconditional). The animal rights activist believes that everyone is bound to act in accord with this imperative, because it would be morally wrong to do otherwise. You shouldn’t kill lions because killing lions is wrong, and if you refrained from killing lions for any reason other than that it was just wrong, your action wouldn’t have any moral worth (which is not to say that it’d be morally wrong, just that you would be doing the right thing for the wrong reasons—like someone who only refrains from stealing because she’s afraid of being caught). If you kill lions then, from this point of view, you’ve done something morally wrong (whereas, if you fail to save for retirement, you may have made a mistake—but not an ethical one). The imperative here is a categorical imperative.
Kant uses the term “categorical imperative” in two ways: initially, he uses it like this, as a general name for all imperatives dependent upon the moral law. But for the reading tomorrow, he’s going to use the singular and refer to “the categorical imperative,” and this is just the general form of all categorical imperatives. Which is to say that, for Kant, there is really only one moral imperative that anyone has to know or act upon or live by:
The Categorical Imperative:
Act only so that the maxim of your actions could be willed to be a universal law.
Which is just Kant’s way of saying that an action is only morally permissible if everyone, anywhere and at any time, could choose to act on it. Alternatively, we could say that an action is always morally impermissible (that is, wrong) if it can’t be something everyone could do. Again, this is different from saying that everyone would or does choose to act in this way; obviously, many people violate the moral law. It’s just to say that, if they wanted to, everyone could act in this way without contradicting themselves or creating a world in which rational beings would not want to live. But more on that, tomorrow.