You know that Christina wants to kill your friend Mariah, who you have just left sitting at the bar. Christina comes up to you and asks if you know where Mariah is. If you tell her the truth, Christina will find Mariah and kill her. If you lie and tell her that you saw Mariah leaving five minutes ago, Christina will be thrown off the scent, allowing Mariah to get away. What should you do? Tell the truth or tell a lie?
It seems crazy even to ask the question. The consequences of telling the truth are dreadful. Of course you should lie—a very white lie, you may think, in a very good cause. But in the view of Immanuel Kant—one of the most influential and, some would say, the greatest philosopher of the past 300 years—that is not the right answer. Not lying is, according to Kant, a fundamental principle of morality, or “categorical imperative”: something that one is obliged to do, unconditionally and regardless of the consequences. This implacable insistence on duty, together with the notion of the categorical imperative that underlies it, is the cornerstone of Kantian ethics.
Kant’s ethics, the paradigmatic deontological, or duty-based, system of morality, has had a huge influence on subsequent ethical theorists, who have avidly developed his ideas or energetically reacted against them. The nub of the Christina-Mariah case was put to Kant, and he unfalteringly stuck by his categorical guns, insisting that it is indeed one’s moral duty to be truthful on all occasions, even to a murderer. In his unwavering focus on duty for duty’s sake, with total disregard for any consequences, foreseen or unforeseen, Kant maps out a path that is as opposed to consequence-based systems of morality as it is possible to conceive.
Hypothetical versus categorical imperatives To explain what a categorical imperative is, Kant first tells us what it isn’t, by contrasting it with a hypothetical imperative. Suppose I tell you what to do by issuing an order (an imperative): “Stop smoking!” Implicitly, there is a string of conditions that I might attach to this command—“if you don’t want to ruin your health,” for instance, or “if you don’t want to waste your money.” Of course, if you are unconcerned about your health and money, the order carries no weight and you need not comply. With a categorical imperative, by contrast, there are no ifs attached, implicit or explicit. “Don’t lie!” and “Don’t kill people!” are injunctions that are not hypothesized on any aim or desire that you may or may not have and must be obeyed as a matter of duty, absolutely and unconditionally. A categorical imperative of this kind, unlike a hypothetical imperative, constitutes a moral law.
In Kant’s view, beneath every action there is an underlying rule of conduct, or maxim. Such maxims can have the form of categorical imperatives, however, without qualifying as moral laws, because they fail to pass a test, which is itself a supreme or overarching form of categorical imperative:
Act only in accordance with a maxim that you can at the same time will to become a universal law.
In other words, an action is morally permissible only if it accords with a rule that you can consistently and universally apply to yourself and others (in effect, a variant of the golden rule; see The golden rule). For instance, we might propose a maxim that it is permissible to lie. But lying is only possible against a background of (some level of) truth-telling—if everyone lied all the time, no one would believe anyone—and for that reason it would be self-defeating and in some sense irrational to wish for lying to become a universal law. Likewise, stealing presupposes a context of property ownership, but the whole concept of property would collapse if everybody stole; breaking promises presupposes a generally accepted institution of promise-keeping; and so on.
The requirement of universality thus rules out certain kinds of conduct on logical grounds, but there seem to be many others that we could universalize, yet would not wish to count as moral. “Always look after your own interests,” “Break promises where you can do so without undermining the institution of promising”—there doesn’t appear to be anything inconsistent or irrational in willing that these should become universal laws. So how does Kant head off this danger?
“Two things move the mind with ever-increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.”
Immanuel Kant, 1788
Autonomy and pure reason The demands of the categorical imperative impose a rational structure on Kant’s ethics, but the task is then to move from logical framework to actual moral content—to explain how “pure reason,” without empirical support, can inform and direct the will of a moral agent. The answer lies in the inherent value of moral agency itself—value based on the “single supreme principle of morality,” the freedom or autonomy of a will that obeys laws that it imposes on itself. The supreme importance attached to autonomous, free-willed agents is mirrored in the second great formulation of the categorical imperative:
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.
Once the inestimable value of one’s own moral agency is recognized, it is necessary to extend that respect to the agency of others. To treat others merely as a means to promote one’s own interests undermines or destroys their agency, so maxims that are self-serving or damaging to others contravene this formulation of the categorical imperative and do not qualify as moral laws. In essence, there is a recognition here that there are basic rights that belong to people by virtue of their humanity and that may not be overridden: a profoundly humane and enlightened facet of Kantian ethics.
Kant has long been mockingly portrayed as the consummate and archetypal philosopher, ensconced in his ivory tower and meditating deeply on dark Teutonic metaphysics. The image is enhanced by the fact that Kant lived the whole of his long life as a bachelor academic in Königsberg, never once, it seems, setting foot outside the town of his birth.
The dark hues of the picture are deepened by the sheer austerity of his philosophy and the fiendish difficulty of the language in which it is presented. Indeed, Kant sometimes goes out of his way to offer ammunition to his assailants; one of the most notorious cases is his musings on sexual love, which (as the philosopher Simon Blackburn has pointed out) sound more like a description of a gang rape:
Taken by itself it is a degradation of human nature; for as soon as a person becomes an object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing and can be treated and used as such by everyone.
Be that as it may, while there is some basis for the caricature, the final verdict must be that Kant is one of the most original and influential thinkers in the history of philosophy; one whose huge and indelible mark is to be seen equally in modern ethics, epistemology and metaphysics.
the condensed idea
Duty at any cost
| Timeline | |
|---|---|
| c.AD30 | The golden rule |
| 1739 | Hume’s guillotine |
| 1781 | The categorical imperative |
| 1785 | Ends and means |