‘I cannot tell a lie’ – George Washington reputedly said, aged six. Whether Washington did or did not tell a lie, no doubt he could have told lies. Most people readily accept that, although we can tell lies, there is something wrong in lying: we must not – we ought not to – lie. Curiously, many rest more easily with being ‘economical with the truth’, even though the outcome can mislead as readily as straight lies. Most of us sometimes lie, either defending the lies as ‘little white lies’ or as avoidance of worse wrongs – or with no good justification at all, save feebleness in facing the truth.
‘Do not lie’ is one duty, a negative duty, prescribing what not to do. We can avoid telling the truth by lapsing into silence, doing no telling at all. ‘Do not kill, torture or steal’ gives voice to other negative duties. A positive duty is to come to the aid of those whose lives are in danger. Caveats are usually added. Most people are lying when they sign documents, confirming they have read terms and conditions in the small print; but does that count as immoral? Many people, Immanuel Kant included, insist that capital punishment – killing murderers – after a just legal process is not merely permissible, but obligatory.
Many accept the duties just mentioned. Utilitarians, as seen, try to harmonize their approach, at least to some degree, with such common sense morality – acting in accord with those duties may maximize happiness – but it is Kant, the great Enlightenment philosopher, who sought to provide rational groundings to such duties. He is central to deontological ethics – ‘deon’ meaning one must. Deontologists promote certain duties. Were that the essence of deontological ethics – as is casually supposed – utilitarianism would be a deontology: utilitarians insist that our duty is to maximize happiness. Deontology, though, is usually contrasted with consequentialist approaches such as utilitarianism. Deontological morality, as typically understood, lacks regard for an action’s overall consequences; well, that is the line propounded. Some actions are wrong, are morally prohibited, even if overall outcomes would be splendidly good. Further, moral duties hold fast for each agent: duties do not depend on how they impinge upon the moral duties of others. Here is an example.
Killing an innocent man is wrong – full stop. It is wrong even if, through my not killing this innocent man, many innocent individuals are killed by others; that immorality belongs to the others. Their immorality does not taint me. If ‘do not kill’ is indeed one moral duty, then Jim (recall ‘Jim and the Indians’) ought not to kill, even though the outcome is bad, with Pedro killing the twenty captive Indians. Jim’s hands are morally clean, despite the known consequences, despite him, in a sense, letting the twenty die. Some fancy footwork or casuistry – some subtle reasoning intended to rationalize or perhaps mislead – is needed here to ensure that there is a morally relevant distinction between killing and letting die. Had he taken up the offer to shoot a captive, he would have intended a death; in declining the offer, he intended no deaths, though he foresaw twenty. He is not to blame for the happenings that he foresaw (please see ‘double effect’). Of course, that does not help the twenty doomed captives.
Deontological morality demands that we do the right thing even if good does not result. The right, so to speak, wears the trousers; the right takes priority over the good. My duty has regard solely to my doing the right thing – acting according to the relevant moral maxim, the moral principle that I endorse – even if the result is that another, or many others, fail in their duties. Deontologists are under no obligation to maximize the number of right actions. Paradoxically, according to deontological ethics it is not morally permissible for me to do something wrong, even if it would prevent numerous wrongs being performed by others.
Immanuel Kant is no easy writer to read, whether in his original German or in English translation. Native German speakers have been known to find the English translations easier to understand; hence, unsurprisingly, interpretations of Kant’s ethics vary. Pretty constant, though, is Kant’s image as a stern and unbending moralist.
‘Two things fill me with wonder,’ proclaimed Kant, ‘the starry sky above and the moral law within.’ Moral demands are not grounded in consequences or happiness or our biological contingencies:
My worth as an intelligence is raised infinitely by my being a person in whom the moral law reveals to him a life independent of all animality, and even of the whole world of sense.
Moral behaviour is a demand of reason; and reason, for Kant, is tied intrinsically to autonomy, self-government, not to emotions. We are focusing here on persons, on human beings as rational agents, rather than as entities of nature at the mercy of biological urges. Reason leads us to Kant’s Categorical Imperative, morality’s heart. Let us see what this means.
Imperatives are orders: pour another drink; turn off the mobile – but those imperatives are conditional on certain desires, needs or aims. If you desire intoxication – on that condition – well, pour another drink. I need peace and quiet, so turn off the mobile. If they were categorical imperatives, they would hold universally, for one and all, independently of contingent desires. The bizarre conclusions, in those examples, would be that everyone must have another drink and have peace and quiet (mind you, this author would support the latter as a state of unintruded bliss).
A categorical imperative lacks contingent conditions: it has built within both universality and impartiality; it applies to all equally, impartially. Arithmetical truths, 2 + 2 = 4, hold the same throughout the universe, whether in Great Britain, China or on Mars – whether one is black, white, Chinese or Martian. Moral duties, being based on reason, also hold universally, impartially – unconditionally – insisted Kant. We may be forgiven for believing, then, that the utilitarian demand must be a categorical imperative. Indeed, without using that terminology, utilitarians clearly think that is so: the ‘maximize happiness’ imperative is not conditional. Kant rejects that imperative, as we shall see.
Kant’s Categorical Imperative grounds all morality. It is usually treated as revealed in three versions; they are meant to amount to the one imperative. Here is Kant’s Formula of Universal Law:
Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
A maxim, to be morally acceptable, must pass this universalizing test. The test harmonizes with the common cry, ‘What if everyone behaved that way?’ – a cry encountered already within rule utilitarianism. Let us see how the test works, and hence differs from rule utilitarianism, before considering why it should be thought to be morality’s grounding.
The universal and the general are distinct; the general is a matter of degree. Kant sought laws that are universal, applying to everybody everywhere, impartially, untied to any particular individual; he also wanted them to be pretty general. A universal law with little generality would be ‘never shoot anybody who wears a hat and yellow socks’. A more general law, yet not with Kantian universality because tied to a particular, would be: everyone must give Miranda, that particular woman, whatever she wants. If applying to all, ‘do not lie’ is impartial, but that accolade may mislead; it is a greater burden on would-be liars than non-liars.
Here is Kant’s most promising example of the formula in operation, one that, as it happens, concerns promises.
I borrow some money, explicitly promising to repay, yet I have no intention of doing so. My personal maxim, the rule that I apply, is that of promising while intending to break the promise (hereafter, a ‘lying promise’). How does that maxim stand according to the Formula of Universal Law? To answer, turn the maxim into a universal law – a law of nature, as Kant describes it – whereby everyone follows the personal maxim of making lying promises. Could I rationally will that state of affairs to exist?
Kant answers ‘no’ – it would be irrational to accept promises, if promises universally were not to be kept. The idea of universal lying promises is contradictory in its very conception; the institution of promising could not exist. Passing the formula’s test is, though, a necessary condition for a maxim to be moral. Thus, making promises with no intention of keeping them is ruled out; it is immoral. Similar reasoning leads to the more general conclusion that lying and dishonesty are immoral. The Categorical Imperative has revealed some negative duties – what we must not do.
The reasoning is not intended to succeed on the basis that we would not want to universalize the maxim, or that it would be imprudent to do so. Were it to succeed on that basis, it would be conditional on contingent desires – desires that we just happen to have – or on rule utilitarian consequentialist considerations. Kant’s test determines whether a contradiction arises. Hence his Categorical Imperative differs from the Golden Rule, found in Confucius, in St Matthew’s Gospel and elsewhere, namely: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Golden Rule could be an appeal to self-interest or to fairness; we should need to universalize and specify some doings to assess how things stand regarding the Categorical Imperative.
IMMANUEL KANT: THE DIGNITY OF HUMANITY
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), born in Königsberg, remained in the Königsberg locality all his life. Had he died early, in his fifties, he would have died an unknown professor at an undistinguished university in an undistinguished German town. By the 1780s, though, his major Critiques were appearing; he gained international fame as a remarkable and admired Enlightenment philosopher, to be placed beside Plato and Aristotle.
Crooked timber of humanity: Kant rejected his Lutheran, Pietistic, upbringing, with its biblical appeals, but kept its stress on our thinking for ourselves, an Enlightenment impulse. He was struck by how morality binds us: people can recognize their duties and the ‘beauty and dignity of human nature’. Such is not the province solely of philosophers.
Kant was also struck by institutional injustices – of labourers suffering lives of hard work, contrasting with wealthy lives that can lead the wealthy into selfishness and disrespect for the poor. Thus, Kant spoke of ‘the crooked timber of humanity’.
Slipping a tip: Kant thought moral duty must be carried out for its own sake; yet happiness, as the highest good, is deserved by those morally strong enough to perform their duties. Happiness depends on God’s salvific will, on his grace. Schopenhauer quipped, ‘That is akin to slipping a tip to a head-waiter when pretending to be above such things.’
Universal dignity: Arguing for the dignity of, and respect due, to all people – an unconditional egalitarianism – Kant saw it as an impersonal principle rather than as an urging to enjoy people’s individualities. Over his own writings, he quoted sixteenth-century Francis Bacon, ‘About ourselves we are silent’. He had regard for socializing, though, favouring good meals in good company – with jokes.
The ‘disinterested interest’ of moral respect, he strangely termed ‘the courtesy of the heart’. A few days before his death – very ill, almost blind – Kant rose when his doctor entered, waiting for the doctor to be seated before following suit. He was pleased to note of himself:
The sense of humanity has not abandoned me.
Even Kant’s ‘best case’ – the rejection of lying promises – has problems. There need be no contradiction in lying promises being universal, for people may not know that others follow the lying promise maxim, or they may be irrational enough not to grasp its consequences. The test requires all players to be well-informed rational agents. Let us assume such supplementation applies; and let us turn to another Kantian example, one that locates the contradiction in the willing rather than the conception of what is willed.
Consider a man in despair, weary of life, contemplating suicide. Could the personal maxim of killing oneself – a ‘principle of self-love’, of prudence – become a universal law of nature? The maxim universalized is:
For love of myself, I make it my principle to cut my life short when prolonging it threatens to bring more troubles than satisfactions.
There could not be a rational willing of such a universal law, insists Kant, for nature would be contradicting itself; hence, suicide is morally wrong. Although the reasoning mentions the prudent, Kant argues that the immorality arises because of a contradiction in the willing itself. His reasoning, though, is obscure. There certainly is no contradiction of conception in universal suicide; it is logically possible that everyone commits suicide or – to include a related maxim for consideration – seeks to kill others. Contrast that with the would-be lying promiser; he sees success crumbling were lying promising universalized.
Kant’s world was pre-Darwinian; his claim that there is a contradiction in the suicide’s willing depends upon nature being teleological, that is, possessed of purposes. That world is alien to many of us today: people have purposes; nature does not. Staying with Kant’s view, the contradiction in willing universal suicide occurs because nature’s purpose of life preservation clashes with the suicides’ life destruction. There exists a contradiction, or at least an irrationality, in willing universal suicide out of self-love, given the natural purpose of self-love, of life preservation. The universalizing test here, though, appears unnecessary: any irrationality would arise with just one individual willing suicide, given his self-love. To avoid that criticism, Kant would need to argue that nature’s purpose is compatible with a particular individual suicide but not with someone willing universal suicide; it is that latter incompatibility that makes an individual suicide immoral.
Presumably Kant would also appeal to nature’s purposes to show that enjoining enforced mass murder is an immoral maxim; yet surely such immorality does not rest on the maxim failing a universalizing test, be it because of nature’s purposes or not.
For another example, let us try stealing, so to speak. The aim is to possess another’s property. If the would-be thief wills the universal maxim – everybody to steal whenever he or she wants – tension arises in the willing. It would surely be irrational to will one’s ownership of property (through theft), yet also will that property ownership not be respected: the thief would be willing that his property be exposed to theft. That line of reasoning could also show how killing others, while seeking one’s own life preservation, is morally wrong. With the theft example, however, we may ask whether the institution of property ownership can be justified – after all, some, for instance, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, perceive privately owned property to be theft. The Categorical Imperative is a poor guide regarding whether the institution of private property is morally acceptable. With life preservation, maybe no further justificatory question arises; life is not a conventional institution requiring justification, unlike property being privately owned.
The above discussion relates to negative duties. Kant also argues for the positive duty to help others. Kant tells of a man who recognizes the hardships of others, yet lacks all desire to help, thinking, ‘Let each one be as happy as heaven wills, or as he can make himself.’ Kant observes:
If such a way of thinking were a universal law of nature, the human race could certainly survive… But a will that brought that about would conflict with itself, since instances can often arise in which the person would need the love and sympathy of others, and he would have no hope of getting the help he desires, being robbed of it by this law of nature springing from his own will.
The universalizing in the above shows only that his ignoring the plight of others could get in the way of his receiving help – but that sounds like self-love, a prudential concern. Certainly, on the surface, it is far removed from the lofty approach of Kantian duty.
The Categorical Imperative test rests on showing how the end sought in an individual case would be frustrated, were the desired action universalized. To secure our ends through dishonesty, lying or unfairness, we require the norm of people being honest, truthful and fair. To secure our ends through theft, killing and meanness, we require others to respect property and life – and to be helpful.
Even if the reasoning regarding lying promises works – the most convincing application of the Categorical Imperative – it fails to show that the institution of promising is morally valuable: it shows that, if there is the institution, then there is a problem in universalizing lying promises. Were there the institution of bribery, we could add, there would be a problem in universalizing non-acceptance of bribes. Hence, the universalizing condition, until more is said, is insufficient to show that the institution under review is itself valuable. The universalizing requirement harmonizes, though, with some plausible thoughts. Perhaps there is something morally dubious about individuals who want to give but never receive, to love but never be loved, to have their promises accepted but never accept promises from others. Their moral dubiety, though, cannot be solely that they fail the Categorical Imperative test; lots of innocent acts also fail the test.
I play cricket only if I can be wicket-keeper. Were everyone to play cricket on that basis, there could be no cricket. I am a seller of hats, but never a buyer; were everyone to follow my maxim, there could be no buying or selling of hats. There is, though, nothing immoral in someone playing cricket only if he is a wicket-keeper, or selling but never buying hats. Were the Categorical Imperative test applied to states of affairs, not just actions, we should encounter more problems. Simply being the sole winner of this competition, the tallest woman, the eldest man, all logically require that others are not, yet surely there is immorality neither in such states, nor in seeking them. Failure to pass the Categorical Imperative test is not sufficient to show that the tested maxims are immoral. For actions to be morally permissible, it is not necessary for the related maxims to pass the test.
What should we make of maxims that do pass the test? I could will without contradiction that everyone wears a hat when outdoors, but hat-wearing is not an obvious moral matter and certainly is not universally morally obligatory. Is passing the test, though, sufficient to show that actions of a certain type are at least morally permissible? On the surface, the utilitarian aim of maximizing happiness could be willed universally, though presumably it would need to be reined in to exclude, for example, promise-breaking – or perhaps promise-keeping should be reined in, letting happiness maximization take higher priority. Committed anti-Semites could consistently universalize destruction of the Jews, accepting that if it transpired that they, the anti-Semites, were Jewish, they too should be destroyed – but that universal destruction is surely not morally permissible. Consistent universalizing fails to rule out such immoral partialities; thus, passing the Categorical Imperative test does not guarantee that the proposed maxim and actions are morally acceptable.
Let us turn to a further possible immorality, one that focuses on an individual’s treatment of himself. Kant argues that it is wrong to neglect our talents. Presumably he does not include talents for theft, rape or deceitful political spin; the resultant actions of such talents are no doubt excluded through application of the Categorical Imperative, as already discussed. Kant, though, tells of some South Pacific Islanders (allegedly) ‘letting their talents rust and devoting their lives merely to idleness, indulgence, and baby-making – in short, to pleasure’. There is no contradiction in everyone disregarding his or her talents, promoting universal sloth; none the less, according to Kant, no one can rationally will such disregard to become a universal law of nature – but why?
Kant’s reply is that ‘a rational being necessarily wills that all his abilities should be developed, because they serve him and are given to him for all sorts of possible purposes’. It is difficult, though, to see how that derives from the Categorical Imperative, save through some mysterious purposes of nature.
In summary, passing the Categorical Imperative test fails to establish that the actions are morally permissible, let alone obligatory, and failing the test does not show the actions as immoral. Despite that, many feel that Kant is on to something. Maybe that something shines better when the universalizing focuses very much on people’s autonomy, their freedom to act as they determine, to govern themselves. We step into autonomy.
Kant addresses people as rational autonomous agents; we can govern ourselves. We can override our biological urges, selfishness and personal ambitions; that governance is shown in our performance of moral duties. Kant places children, non-human animals, trees – pebbles, indeed – to one side and presumably also those suffering from senile dementia or similar. Those individuals are incapable of acting from duty; they fail to recognize, if they recognize at all, the distinction between wants and duties.
Most of us possess some awareness of moral duties and how they can conflict with wants, aims and possibly even with what is good for us. Moral duties cannot be determined by contingent facts about us, about what our desires happen to be, but must be determined by reason, applying to all. If Kant is right, then two points emerge. First, duty must be able to motivate us to act, to act morally. Secondly, biological urges that some have, but others lack, must not constitute the dutiful person’s motivation. We could perhaps still accept that our reasoning rests on biology; but if so, it must rest on biological features essential to all rational agents.
Concerning the first point, human beings, because autonomous, are typically aware of, or can reason about, their moral duties. An unhappy paradox may emerge. People who fail to perform their duties must be lacking the relevant autonomy, the relevant reasoning – or, at least, their autonomy yields to various urges – but if they lack that autonomy or lack sufficiently strong autonomy, they no more merit moral blame than the tree whose bough breaks in the storm, striking passers-by.
That very picture of autonomy as rationality vying with desires had been challenged by David Hume, who claimed that reason is but a slave to the passions, to desires (please see below). Hume argued that reason cannot tell us our aims; reason can only lead us to the best means for achieving our aims. Our aims and desires are grounded in our human nature.
Concerning the second point, consider two figures, Carrington and Cheryl, both encountering beggars in distress. Cheryl is emotionally moved; out of genuine concern, she gives them money, talks to them and tries to help. Carrington lacks such emotion; he views the beggars with disdain, yet, aware of his duty, gives some money. According to Kant, Carrington, not Cheryl, receives the moral credit. Biological luck fixed their different characters, not moral worth. Cheryl acted from her compassionate nature, blindly, slavishly; her action ‘has no true moral worth, however amiable it may be and however much it accords with duty’. Carrington was driven by law-giving reason – by his good will.
Moral worth requires a good will; that is all. Just as contingent factors outside our control, such as biological constitution, should not affect moral worth, so too the contingencies of consequences, out of our control, are irrelevant. To quote Kant:
Even if it should happen that, by a particularly unfortunate fate or by the niggardly provision of a step-motherly nature, the good will should be wholly lacking in power to accomplish its purpose, and if even the greatest effort should not avail it to achieve anything of its end, and if there remained only the good will (not as a mere wish but as the summoning of all the means in our power), it would sparkle like a jewel in its own right, as something with its full worth in itself.
Kant’s understanding of moral behaviour leaves inexplicable why we often find certain feelings – remorse, dignity, shame – morally significant. It leaves inexplicable why we typically prefer people moved to help us because of our plight and not because of their thought: it’s our duty. It makes mysterious why it is surely morally right that we feel grief at a friend’s death and willingly attend the funeral, even if inconvenient.
We may also challenge Kant’s understanding of morality as untouched by luck. Our grasp of Kant’s moral law, it seems, depends on the luck of our upbringing and intellectual capacity grounded in neurology. People whose intellectual impoverishment amounts to lack of rationality appear to fall outside Kant’s moral realm. That raises questions about how such individuals ought to be treated, questions raised regarding infants, dementia sufferers and, indeed, non-human animals.
THE MORALITY OF PUNISHMENT
Retribution: Law-breakers – when the laws are morally justified – deserve to be punished. That is, argues Kant, to treat them with respect, as moral agents, responsible for their actions. To punish criminals solely to deter people from crimes – a utilitarian stance – treats them merely as means to an end. The penal law is a categorical imperative:
… and woe to him who creeps through the serpent-windings of utilitarianism to discover some advantage that may discharge him from the justice of punishment and its due measure… for if justice perishes, human life would no longer have value in the world.
Yes, punishment inflicts suffering on criminals, but that is not an offence against their autonomy, according to Kant.
Capital punishment: Justice must be done, even if no benefits result, for otherwise we should be participants in crime:
Even if a civil society resolved to dissolve itself with the consent of all its members – as might be supposed if a people inhabiting an island resolved to separate and scatter themselves throughout the world – the last murderer lying in the prison ought to be executed before implementing the resolution.
Kant here relies on a principle of equality: a victim has suffered a loss, therefore the criminal must suffer an equivalent loss, maybe ‘with interest’, given that he broke the law – but what counts as ‘equivalent’?
Penance: To inflict non-consensual suffering on criminals, even when no benefit results, strikes many as horrendous. Punishment ‘cancelling out’ the wickedness or ‘balancing’ the unjust benefits gained seems more ‘nonsense on stilts’, as Bentham would no doubt say.
What is wanted, we suggest, is for criminals to repent, feel remorse, eager to make amends. That involves suffering, but from the criminals’ own grasp of their wrongdoings. It shows respect for the criminal and the victim – and has regard for securing consequential benefits. Of course, it is wildly ideal.
Duties not to kill, not to steal, have so far been derived from the Categorical Imperative’s first presentation. It focuses on the general conditions – the form – that moral principles must satisfy; my willing to kill, willing to steal, would be ensnared in formal contradiction. There, autonomy is to the fore in considering what agents must or must not do: that is, their duties. Questions of autonomy also arise when people are possible victims of doings; indeed killings and theft are primarily seen as wrong because they violate others, their rights – the respect due to them. The Categorical Imperative’s second presentation reveals the content of morality to be that very respect due to others. It is the Formula of the End in Itself, the Humanity Formula:
We should treat humanity never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.
The universalizing test – the Formula of Universal Law – offers some support for the Humanity Formula: minimally, there exists some tension in my willing that I use others solely as a means to my ends, if that requires the possibility of my willing that everyone uses others similarly – for I should then be willing that I be treated solely as means to the ends of others. The universalizing test, though, generates problems for wicket-keepers, as we noted; the Humanity Formula does not. Fanatical anti-Semites perhaps act in a morally coherent way, according to the universalizing test; but they would clearly offend the Humanity Formula.
Let us look more closely at how we treat people. Most of us work for others, helping them to achieve their ends (sometimes, hindering). We are means to their ends, but not solely so; we have usually chosen the work voluntarily, taken on roles, to earn livings that are means to our ends. We are autonomous, self-governing, making our own choices. Of course, questions may be asked as to whether the work is truly voluntary if the sole alternative is starvation. Certainly when people are coerced into slavery or press-ganged into the navy, even if with payment, the slave-owners and captains would be using them merely as means – just as they may use horses to draw carts and waterfalls to turn wheels. Further, it is doubtful whether people’s autonomy is respected today, when businesses and governments, via data collection and media outputs, manipulate people’s desires and political beliefs. Indeed, are people being respected when ‘mystery shoppers’, police and regulators are permitted to lie to uncover wrongdoings?
Our moral intuitions summed as ‘respect for people’ are grounded in treating people as ends, not merely as, for example, units of wealth creation. We respect guests by standing, checkout staff by refraining from mobile phone use; we treat them as individuals with interests. More obviously within morality’s arena, if we lie to people or cheat people, we lack respect for them. We are manipulating them, usually for our own ends. True, we sometimes lie, believing that ignorance is to people’s blissful benefit; but perhaps autonomy always requires access to the truth.
Kant’s promotion of respect does not sit happily with his insistence that duty alone should motivate morally. Respect for people, we may sense, requires feelings for their well-being; respecting people out of dispassionate duty sounds almost as paradoxical and unpleasant as befriending someone only if paid. Acknowledgement of people’s autonomy can, though, be expressed as respect for people’s rights; arguably, that respect can be coldly given. Respect for rights is often associated with the third presentation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, the Formula of the Kingdom of Ends:
Every rational being must so act as if he were, through his maxims, a law-making member in the universal kingdom of ends.
The emphasis is on people as legislators, granting rights. Can our maxims, set out as people’s rights, become universal laws of a Kingdom of Ends, a kingdom of rational agents? The approach polishes deontology with a ‘contractualist’ shine, the emphasis being on which laws can be justified rationally to each and every member of the community – for example, laws upholding rights to life, property and liberty. We meet approaches related to this line in Chapter Nine, when assessing the morality of political authority.
The Categorical Imperative, in all three forms, delivers certain obligatory moral maxims. There are bound, though, to be occasions when it is unclear how a maxim should be applied. Jim, in ‘Jim and the Indians’, must not kill, according to some. Jim respects the Indians by not killing any one of them. Is he really respecting them, though, by letting them all die? We have a distribution problem here: the distribution of respect. Only by disrespecting one – killing that one – is Jim, we may argue, respecting the remaining nineteen.
Kant apparently assumes that the Categorical Imperative delivers maxims that, together, are consistent. Abstractly, they may be; in particular circumstances, though, they could point in different directions. Are you obliged to keep your promise to return the sword to your friend this evening – an example from Plato – when you see that he has gone out of his mind and will harm himself with it?
A terrorist uses an innocent child as a human shield, while he attempts to detonate a bomb. Only by killing the child can the detonation be prevented. Is that what you should do?
A lorry driver is trapped in his cab, acid spilling over him, burning him, causing him horrendous pain. No escape is possible. He pleads to be shot dead. Should you shoot?
Should Kant’s ‘do not kill’ maxim apply here? The examples raise questions of how actions should be described. Exactly what are you doing? Is shooting the driver understood correctly as killing him, or as relieving his pain? Consider, for example, the case where a physician delivers increased morphine to a patient terminally ill and in great suffering, a case maybe of assisted dying. He seeks to avoid the charge of murder:
I intended the effect of reduced suffering – clearly a good. I foresaw the patient’s death – a bad. The death was a later unintended effect of what I did to achieve the good.
The Doctrine of Double Effect is being deployed: an agent is morally responsible for what he intends, but not thereby what he foresees as consequence, providing the intended effect is a sufficient good to make up, in some way, for the undesired, but foreseen, bad effect. The distinction is often used in law and theology. We may, though, doubt its moral significance when the agent – the doctor, in this case – knows of how closely related, causally, the two effects are. True, he may want only to relieve the pain and not cause the death, but if they are so entwined, and he knows that, it is disingenuous to deny his moral responsibility for the bad effect; he knowingly killed, even though he would have preferred non-fatal means to have relieved the suffering.
Returning directly to Kant, he addresses only one case of a seeming dilemma – that of whether to lie to a would-be murderer about his intended victim’s whereabouts. Kant argues that so long as you adhere strictly to what you sincerely believe true, you cannot be blamed. If believing the victim to be indoors, you tell the murderer that he has left – well, says Kant, the victim may have slipped out unbeknownst to you and, by sheer misfortune, the murderer bumps into him and ‘executes his purpose upon him’. You could then, with justice, be accused of causing the man’s death.
Various replies to Kant are on offer. Sometimes we know that such bad luck will not arise: the victim cowers behind the door; we can see his shadow. We may also argue that a would-be murderer does not deserve the truth for such an immoral purpose. According to Kant, though, a lie always harms mankind. Mysteriously, lies, for Kant, are never morally permitted – well, so it seems.
Many people accept duties such as Kant’s – we ought not to kill; ought not to lie; ought to help others – but they are seen as prima facie duties, duties at first sight, not absolute. The duties are real enough, but in particular cases they clash, needing judgement regarding highest priorities. Reflect on placebos prescribed to patients; patients benefit, for placebos can work and often with fewer side effects. Patients are, though, deceived, believing the pills to possess pharmaceutical powers. The mystery is: how do we judge which duties trump which – and when? We find a similar mystery in the next chapter, when weighing up different virtues.
Regarding the terrorist using a child as human shield, many would have the immediate intuition that the child morally ought not to be killed – certainly not, if just a few other lives are at risk. What if ten thousand will be killed – and it is certain that, if nothing is done, the terrorist will detonate? Such cases give rise to ‘threshold deontology’. One obvious problem is how to determine the threshold. Is using a child solely as a means to an end acceptable if it will definitely save a million lives, but unacceptable if it will save only five? Here, as elsewhere, the belief that there must be numerical right answers is chimerical. Here, as elsewhere, we need to realize that sometimes whatever we do occasions some wrongdoing. Maybe here no good answers are possible until faced with the dilemma – or should governments, for example, keep torture equipment in reserve ‘just in case’, for one day it may be put to good use, revealing information that saves thousands of lives? That very question may make us recoil.
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Utilitarianism directs morality towards overall welfare, greatest happiness. Kant brings to the moral medley, among other things, ‘respect for persons’, never treating people solely as means, but as autonomous individuals with interests – that is, morality demands that we recognize the dignity of man, acknowledging that human beings merit the same rights as each other. Perhaps that is an ideal goal ‘if only’ we were all rational. According to Kant, it certainly matters that at least I, a rational agent, do not act immorally, even though the result may be that many others end up delivering immoralities. That agent centrality – what I do – was seen not to harmonize all that readily with utilitarianism’s universality and impartiality. It also fails to harmonize well with Kant’s own focus on universality and impartiality.
It is difficult to believe that a proper understanding of morality requires no reference to agent centrality – to which actions are my actions; to what gives substance to my life; to what can motivate me. Curious as it may seem, agent centrality takes centre stage when the moral spotlight turns to the virtues. Hence, it is to the virtues that we now turn.