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FIVE

Kant and the Moral Law

In the history of moral philosophy, few names deserve greater prominence than that of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). He lived a totally uneventful life in Königsberg, yet his small book Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) is of central importance for any serious student of ethics as is the Critique of Practical Reason. Kant says that his aim in The Groundwork was to establish

a completely isolated metaphysic of morals which is not mixed with any theology or physics or metaphysics.

First, some definitions are needed: A statement is analytic if the predicate is included within the subject – thus ‘all spinsters are female’ is analytic as the meaning of the subject (spinster) includes the predicate (female). Analytic statements are necessarily true – they must be true because their truth depends on the way words are used and it simply would not make sense to say they were not true. The statement is also a priori which means that its truth is known independent of experience – we do not have to undertake a survey to determine that ‘all spinsters are female’ is true.

A statement is synthetic if the predicate is not included in the subject and therefore it firstly tells us something about the subject which we would not otherwise know and secondly it may or may not be true – for instance ‘All bachelors are happy’. This statement is also a posteriori because it is based on experience, in other words we would have to undertake a survey of bachelors to decide whether it is true.

Kant maintained that all moral concepts have their origin a priori. Almost every statement is either a priori analytic or a posteriori synthetic, but Kant considered that statements about the moral law were very unusual in that they were a priori synthetic – in other words they were a priori (independent of experience) but they were synthetic (not analytically or necessarily true). Kant’s task in The Groundwork is partly to explore how this unusual situation can arise – Kant seeks to establish the a priori principles by which we make moral judgements, he wishes to establish the fundamental principle of action which underpins all moral decision-making. Kant thought these principles were inherent in the universe. Unlike Plato, Aristotle or Aquinas he is not concerned with some ‘good for human beings’. Kant is concerned with the fundamental principles of morals which form the basis for our moral choices. It might be thought that if Kant considered that the principles of morals were inherent within us, he would discuss psychology or human nature, but this is not the case. He considered moral principles to be an a priori given and therefore to be arrived at independent of experience.

Unlike Aquinas, Kant did not believe that morality should be founded on natural theology. He shared with Aquinas a commitment to reason as a guide to right action, although unlike Aquinas he did not bring in any assumptions which depended on belief in God as part of his approach to morality (Aquinas, as we have seen, was strongly influenced by his belief that human beings survive death and their destiny lies in God). Kant did not consider that God’s existence could be proved – he rejected the cosmological and ontological arguments – however he thought that God’s existence was a postulate of practical reason. Effectively Kant thought that, on the basis of morality, God’s existence could be arrived at as a necessary postulate of a just universe, however this is not to say that Kant thought that God’s existence could be proved. Part of Kant’s approach to morality was that individuals should act as if there was a God – but this is not the same as saying that there is a God.

Kant’s theory is deontological – that is it stresses duty or obligation (this comes from the Greek deon meaning duty). The opening words of the Groundwork provide a ringing declaration of Kant’s fundamental position:

It is impossible to conceive anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without qualification, except a good will. Intelligence, wit, judgement, and any other talents of the mind we care to name, or courage, resolution, and constancy of purpose, as qualities of temperament, are without doubt good and desirable in many respects; but they can also be extremely bad and hurtful when the will is not good which has to make use of these gifts …

The goodness of a human being’s will does not depend on the results it produces since so many factors outside our control may determine the results:

A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes … it is good through its willing alone – that is, good in itself.

In fact, the more human reason ‘concerns itself with the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the farther does man get from true contentment’ (5). A good will is fostered by a human being acting rationally and eliminating those inclinations and desires which tend to undermine rational decision-making. This does not mean that inclinations are necessarily wrong – simpy that they are not a reliable guide to the rightness of moral conduct.

If the development of a ‘good will’ is the highest task for any human being, there is one essential precondition which Kant does not argue for but considers must be assumed even though it cannot be proved – that is that human beings are free. Without freedom, there can be no discussion of morality as morality necessarily presupposes the ability to choose right or wrong. If human choices are wholly determined – if we are not free – then we are not moral agents.

Kant’s method is to start by assuming that moral judgements are true. He then sets out to analyse the conditions which must be in force if these are to be true.

Kant distinguishes between two types of imperatives or commands under which human beings act:

 Hypothetical imperatives are imperatives that are based on an ‘if’, for instance: ‘If you want to stay healthy, take exercise’ or ‘If you want your wife to love you, remember her birthday’. We can reject the command (to take exercise or to remember birthdays) if we are willing to reject the ‘if’ on which the command rests. These imperatives bid us do things which are a means to some end. They are arrived at by the exercise of pure reason.

 Categorical imperatives, by contrast, are not based on any ‘if’, they do not depend on a particular end and, Kant considers, they would be followed by any fully rational agent. They are ends in themselves and not means to some other end. Moral duties are categorical because they should be followed for the sake of duty only, simply because they are duties and not for any other reason. Categorical imperatives are arrived at through practical reason and they are understood as a basis for action.

There is no answer to the question, ‘Why should I do my duty?’ except ‘Because it is your duty.’ If there was any answer it would represent a reason and would make the imperative hypothetical and not categorical.

Human beings, in Kant’s view, are not wholly rational – but they can strive to become so. Animals are dominated by desires and instincts and these are present in human beings as well. However Kant considers that humans also have the ability to reason and, through the exercise of reason, to act not in accordance with our inclinations but according to the demands that reason makes on us – in other words from a sense of duty. A categorical imperative is one that excludes self-interest and would be one that any fully rational agent (human or otherwise) would follow and if any command is held to be categorical, it is necessary to show that it fits under this heading.

It is not easy to separate actions done from an inclination and those done from a sense of duty – it is important to recognise that it is not the action which determines goodness but the intention, motive and reason lying behind the action. The businessman who is honest because it suits him or because he feels like being honest is not, according to Kant, acting morally because he is not acting rationally. The good person must act correctly, according to reason, no matter what the consequences and independent of his or her own feelings or inclinations. If a person wills to perform an act, and if this willing does not rest on a sense of duty, then it will not be a morally good action. An action which is not done from inclination at all but purely rationally, from a sense of duty, will be a morally good action. This does not mean that one has to act against one’s inclinations, but it does mean that one’s inclinations cannot determine one’s moral duty.

There are, of course, particular moral rules which are categorical and which everyone would agree to such as ‘Thou shalt not kill’, but Kant considers these to be derived from a more general principle and he seeks to determine what this is. He arrives at a number of different formulations of what he terms ‘The Categorical Imperative’ on which all moral commands are based. The best known are the three that Kant includes in his summary of the Groundwork (79–81) and which H. J. Paton (in The Moral Law, Hutchinson) translates as follows:

1 Act as if the maxim of your action was to become through your will a universal law of nature.

This is the Formula of the Law of Nature and is saying that we should act in such a way that we can will that the maxim (or general principle) under which we act should be a general law for everyone. Kant therefore aims to ensure that we eliminate self-interest in the particular situation in which we find ourselves. Kant considers that if we will to act wholly rationally according to such a principle, then we shall develop a good will. There are, however, other formulations, including what Kant terms the Practical Imperative –

2. Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.

This is the Formula of the End in Itself. Kant says that it can never be right to treat people just as a means to some end – human beings are always ‘ends in themselves’ and Kant describes human beings as ‘holy’ because of this. It can never be right, therefore, to use human beings as a means to the end of our own happiness or to treat any group of people as a minority that does not matter. This principle enshrines the idea of the equality of each and every human being irrespective of class, colour, race, sex, age or circumstance.

3. So act as if you were through your maxims a law-making member of a kingdom of ends.

This is the Formula of the Kingdom of Ends. Kant envisaged rational agents acting as if they were making laws for themselves based on the use of reason and, in so far as they do this, they will become ‘lawmaking members of a kingdom of ends’. The laws adopted by all members will coincide because they are all rational and if there are disagreements then rational arguments should be able to resolve these.

It is, perhaps, significant to note the similarities between Kant’s call to disinterested duty and Jesus’ call to ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ (Matthew 22:39). The love that Jesus had in mind was not based on emotion but on a call to right action towards every other human being (Kierkegaard, in Works of Love, describes this as non-preferential love) and this could be seen as very similar to Kant’s basic position – although it should be added that Jesus’s first commandment was the call to love God before anything else and this Kant rejected. For Kant, the only service to God comes in acting morally to other human beings according to the dictates of reason.

Kant considers that the highest aspiration of a human being is the development of a good will and such a good will is developed by acting rationally according to the principles laid down by the Categorical Imperative. Humans can, if they wish, think of their moral duties as if they were Divine Commands, but morality is specifically not based on such commands. If it was, it would then be arbitrary (cf. the Euthyphro dilemma p. 7).

God is largely peripheral for Kant although God is needed to underwrite Kant’s trust in the fairness of the Universe – particularly the idea that, after death, the virtuous and vice-ridden will be treated appropriately. Kant has a tremendous faith in the metaphysical fairness of the Universe – which is strange as he wished to bar the door to metaphysics because he did not think it was possible to argue from the world of experience (phenomena) to anything beyond this. However, he had faith in the justice of the Universe and he considered that mortality was a postulate of practical reason. Kant’s view can be taken as implying that if the Universe is fair, it follows that human beings must survive death as clearly in this life the virtuous are often treated very badly and those who pursue the path of vice all too often have an apparently happy and contented life.

Kant largely reduces religion to ethics – to be holy is to be moral. Religion is only valuable as a way of helping people to lead a moral life. He considered that philosophy had supremacy over theology as philosophy was based on reason without unsupported faith claims. Kant considered that religion had to operate within the bounds of reason alone and he reinterpreted the claims of Christianity so that they expressed a call to moral righteousness. Jesus was the perfect exemplar of the morally good life. As we have seen, Kant considered human beings and human reason to be autonomous and he thus rejected heteronomy (for instance using God’s will as a guide to what is morally right or wrong).

Kant has a problem at the heart of his whole enterprise which is often not recognised and which he did not fully resolve. Kant considered that human beings should aim to act wholly in accordance with the Categorical Imperative – the maxim of their action would then be good. However, he recognised that many people would fail to do this and they would become corrupt as they acted from an evil, false or irrational maxim. Once a person’s life had become dominated by such general principles, they would then be in bondage. The difficulty Kant had was how to explain moral regeneration or a turn around from the evil to the good when he also considered that human beings could bind themselves by their corrupt maxims. The alternatives were to either:

1 say that human beings were not bound by their corrupt maxims and Kant was quite clear that they were, or

2 to say that human beings, once bound, could not turn round from the corrupt to the good and this would have meant that the position of corrupt human beings was hopeless.

As Michalson points out (Fallen Freedom, pp. 125ff.), Kant’s response to this was a most surprising one given the peripheral place allotted to God in most of Kant’s philosophy. He maintained that it was only through the incarnation in which God became man in Jesus Christ that human moral regeneration can take place. In this one area, at this particular point (but not elsewhere) God was central for Kant, yet he did not face up to the consequences of this. It was Kant’s successors, Kierkegaard and Hegel (and, following Hegel, Marx) who were to take seriously the alternatives that Kant failed to grapple with. As Michalson says:

Kierkegaard and Marx represent what happens when just one of the two aspects of Kant’s account of moral regeneration is taken up and emphasised in isolation from the other aspect. As such, their positions shed light on Kant’s own effort to have it both ways.

In Kierkegaard’s hands, the muted Kantian appeal to grace is transformed into a full-blown ‘project of thought’ in which a transcendent act alone is the only antidote to our willed ‘error’, or sin. Contrary to our usual view of these matters, it is in fact Kierkegaard and not Kant who has the more ‘rational’ position here … Kierkegaard shows the only way to offset a willed error is through a reconciling act coming from the ‘outside’, producing the ‘new creature’ … Alternatively, Kant’s more characteristic tendency to locate our moral recovery in our own efforts – however impossible he has made it for himself fully to do this – leads in some sense to Marxism (which) … expels the last remnants of otherworldliness remaining in the position of the philosopher … (Fallen Freedom, pp. 129–30).

Kant represents a divide in the road in the history of moral and philosophic thought. The road that Kierkegaard takes firmly embraces the central importance of a personal God and the action of this God both in history and in the lives of individual human beings. Hegel takes the opposing path and rejects such a view of transcendence – Marx then takes Hegel’s view further and morality becomes entirely a social construct. These issues are still very much alive and the divide is still present today.

Questions for discussion

1 Suggest two moral maxims which would give rise to contradictory actions. How might the differences between these be resolved?

2 Could it ever be morally right, according to Kant, to torture one person in order to get information which would save the lives of a large group?

3 Describe the difference between a hypothetical and a categorical imperative. On what grounds might someone reject an imperative that was claimed to be categorical?

4 On Kant’s view, should the moral principles of intelligent green spiders differ from the moral principles of human beings?

5 What place does God have in Kant’s moral philosophy?

6 In Kant’s view, is saving the life of a child a morally good action? What are the difficulties from his viewpoint in answering this question in the affirmative?