Philosophy

by Sharon Kaye

  • the meaning of Kant’s categorical imperative

  • how relativism opposes ethics

  • what it means to treat people as ends in themselves

  • the significance of good will for Kant’s deontology.

  Thought experiment: the trouble with Harry

  Your sweet, funny, little old granny has finally succumbed to the unkind effects of age. Puttering in her garden, she fell and broke her hip. She lies in hospital right now with multiplying complications. There’s nothing the doctors can do; they give her a week at most.

  Sweet, funny, little old Granny has a gigantic, foul-smelling, obnoxious mutt of a dog named Harry. When Granny was admitted to the hospital, the great majority of her distress was not for herself but for her dog: who would take care of him? You, of course, assured Granny that you would take Harry home and treat him like a king.

  That was the beginning of a great war that ended in tragedy. After fighting with Harry over everything from where to poop, to how early in the morning to start barking, to whether the living-room curtains are fair game for dinner, you felt desperate to be rid of him. Nevertheless, you sincerely did not intend to leave the gate unlatched, enabling him to get out while you were away at work. He ran out into traffic and was flattened almost beyond recognition.

  To make matters worse, he badly damaged the Mercedes convertible that hit him, leaving its driver with a deep cut on her face and a bad case of whiplash. Before the ambulance took her away, she grilled concerned onlookers about the tagless dog’s owner and swore she would sue.

  You learned all this from your next-door neighbour when you happened to see him on your return from work this evening. No one knew about Harry’s brief stay at your house. Your neighbour said the woman’s lawyer has begun knocking on doors up and down the street to find out who was responsible for him.

  Meanwhile, you’re already late for your promised visit to Granny at the hospital. You pull out of your driveway and grip the steering wheel of your car with white knuckles as you picture what’s going to happen next:

  You walk into the hospital room and that dear woman turns her bedraggled head. Her fading eyes light up when she recognizes you. She reaches out for a hug. ‘So nice of you to come, honey! Come and sit a spell! How are you? And how’s my darlin’ Harry?’

  Three questions pound heavily through your mind:

  1 When Granny insists on a report about her dog, will you tell her the truth?

  2 When the victim’s lawyer comes knocking on your door, will you tell him the truth?

  3 At Granny’s funeral, when the relatives ask what’s to be done with her dog, will you tell them the truth?

  Liar, liar, pants on fire!

  How often do you lie? Do you lie about how often you lie?

  The three questions at the end of the above thought experiment present three different kinds of lies.

  • The first is a lie to someone you love for their sake. (You want to protect Granny from a hurtful truth that she doesn’t need to know because she will never find out.)

  • The second is a lie to someone you don’t know for your own sake. (You want to protect yourself from the expense and hassle of a lawsuit provoked by your own negligence.)

  • The third is a lie to someone you love for your own sake. (You want to protect yourself from the harsh judgement of your relatives.)

  Be honest: would you be honest? Or would you find a way to ‘justify’ a little dishonesty?

  While most people are probably happy to live with some amount of dishonesty in their lives, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is not. In his view, lying is always wrong: everywhere, any time, for anyone, no matter how painful the truth.

  Kant’s uncompromising position on honesty is a direct implication of his ethical theory, which is, in turn, a direct implication of his metaphysics, which is, in turn, a direct implication of his epistemology. While every philosopher tries to integrate all the elements of their philosophy, none is as systematic as Kant.

  Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. I have not to search for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence. The former begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection, as I am also thereby with all those visible worlds.

  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5683/pg5683.html)

  Kant was arguably the greatest systematizer of all time, building an extraordinarily complex theory of everything, full of so many long sentences and big words – many of which he made up – that it was guaranteed to remain at the centre of intellectual controversy to the present day and beyond.

  Spotlight

  Kant was an eccentric recluse who never left his home town and went on a walk with his butler at the same time every day. His neighbours used to say he was so punctual that they could set their clocks when they saw him pass. He forgot his walk only once – the day he read the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

  An epistemological compromise

  Kant surveyed the debate between rationalists and empiricists and found it at an impasse – both sides seeking unsuccessfully to secure human knowledge.

  Empiricists begin firmly grounded in experience of the physical world, but proceed to render the human mind a passive receptacle of data. Rationalists keep the human mind actively searching for the truth within, but leave us in doubt about the physical world.

  Kant decided that the only solution is to combine the best components from each side. He begins with experience of the external world, but makes that experience essentially active rather than passive, so that we can confidently claim to know what we experience.

  In order to explain this compromise, Kant introduces a new conceptual category, which is based on a combination of old categories. Recall that we encountered the following categories in Chapter 4:

  a priori: knowledge that does not depend on experience

  vs.

  a posteriori: knowledge that depends on experience.

  And we encountered the following categories in Chapter 7:

  matters of fact: observed truths, such as ‘bread nourishes’

  vs.

  relations of ideas: logical truths, such as ‘two plus two equals four’.

  You would think that relations of ideas are always a priori and matters of fact are always a posteriori. In fact, this was everyone’s assumption before Kant arrived on the scene. Kant combines the a priori with matters of fact (which he calls ‘synthetic’) to create a new category of understanding which he calls the a priori synthetic.

  Kant asserts that time and space, the two concepts that together define the physical world, are a priori synthetic concepts. This means that our knowledge of time and space does not depend on experience, even though it shapes that very experience and makes it possible for us to perceive objects in the world.

  Transcendental idealism

  If our knowledge of time and space does not depend on experience, where does it come from?

  It comes from within our minds.

  Kant asserts that time and space are concepts that human beings impose on the physical world. They don’t exist in the world but rather are the way in which the rational mind understands the world. If there were no rational minds, there would be no time or space.

  What would the world be l
ike without time or space?

  No one knows. No one can know. It’s impossible for us to conceive of the world except through these concepts.

  Kant calls the physical world as it would be without the human concepts of time and space the noumenal realm, from the Greek word for ‘thought’. The noumenal realm consists of things-in-themselves and transcends human experience.

  Kant calls the physical world as perceived through the human concepts of time and space the phenomenal realm, from the Greek word for ‘appearance’. The phenomenal realm consists of things-as-they-appear-to-us.

  Kant is called a ‘transcendental idealist’ because, like Plato, the idealist whom we met in Chapter 2, he places ultimate reality in a realm beyond human experience. Against Plato, however, who concluded that the physical world is an illusion, Kant insists that the phenomenal realm is real for us. When rational beings apply the categories of time and space to their experiences they help to construct the world.

  Deontology

  Constructing the world may sound like a highly creative process, but, in fact, Kant thinks rationality imposes strict necessity on it. For example, if you are perceiving the world in a rational way, then every billiard ball must have an equal and opposite reaction.

  But Kant isn’t solely or even primarily interested in the laws of physics. He wants to argue that, just as our concepts of time and space necessitate our experience, so also does our concept of duty. If you’re thinking rationally, then you must act in accordance with the moral law.

  Since Kant’s ethics holds that rational beings discover the moral law within themselves in the form of duty, it is called deontology from the Greek word for ‘duty’.

  The categorical imperative (first formulation)

  The dictates of duty are not only necessary, they are universal, meaning that they are the same for everyone at all times. Since duty tells human beings what they must do by virtue of their rationality, and all human beings are rational by nature, we will all be subject to the very same moral requirements.

  Kant points out that many people make the mistake of thinking of duty in the form of hypothetical imperatives. For example:

  ‘If you want to have friends, then you must be kind.’

  Any such ‘If … then’ statement premises moral obligation (kindness) upon a desired outcome (having friends). Such an imperative cannot be ethical because you only need to deny the ‘if’ part to escape the obligation. If you don’t want to have friends, then you don’t need to be kind.

  Kant argues that true duty can only be conceived of in the form of a categorical imperative – a requirement that leaves room for no ‘ifs’, ‘ands’ or ‘buts’. For example:

  ‘Be kind.’

  Period. It doesn’t matter what you want or need or feel. This is what is required of you as a rational being.

  We could make a list of a great number of duties we are obligated to uphold. In Kant’s view, however, all our duties can be captured in a single categorical imperative.

  The categorical imperative alone has the purport of a practical law; all the rest may indeed be called principles of the will but not laws, since whatever is only necessary for the attainment of some arbitrary purpose may be considered as in itself contingent, and we can at any time be free from the precept if we give up the purpose; on the contrary, the unconditional command leaves the will no liberty to choose the opposite; consequently it alone carries with it that necessity which we require in a law. […] There is therefore but one categorical imperative, namely, this: Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

  Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (http://ethics.sandiego.edu/Books/Kant?MM/Part2.html)

  When considering the morality of the proposed course of action (what Kant calls a maxim), we ask ourselves, what would happen if everybody did this? The categorical imperative requires that our actions be universalizable.

  Case study: Ruth Benedict and relativism

  Kant’s deontology stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from relativism, according to which there are no universal moral truths.

  The twentieth-century relativist Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) was an American anthropologist who travelled the world observing different cultures with different value systems. Some regard homosexuality as immoral; others don’t. Some regard meat-eating as immoral; others don’t. Some regard human sacrifice as immoral; others don’t. Who’s to say which of these values is right and which is wrong? Benedict concludes that all morality is relative to the culture to which you happen to belong. Her view became very popular at the end of the twentieth century because it seems to promote tolerance of diversity.

  The problem with relativism is that the claim that ‘there are no universal moral truths’ is itself a moral value. Who’s to say it is right? That is, by claiming that there is no legitimate way to make moral judgements, relativists deprive themselves of the ability to make any legitimate moral judgements. This is a self-contradiction, meaning the view has to be rejected or revised to avoid the contradiction somehow.

  Most philosophers conclude that relativism is too extreme in its tolerance. The ethical views we’re looking at in this book (Aristotle’s virtue theory, Kant’s deontology, Mill’s utilitarianism) can all be interpreted in ways that are consistent with varying degrees of tolerance.

  Applying the categorical imperative

  Go back to the case of Granny and her dog, with which we began this chapter. What should you do? On Kant’s view, you must ask yourself whether the following would be a good law:

  ‘Everyone should always lie to protect themselves or others.’

  Upon putting the issue in these terms, you may be thinking: ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to live in a world full of liars, and besides, there’s no guarantee that the people I lie to won’t find out…’

  But it’s crucial to realize that Kant’s categorical imperative is not motivated by a concern about the possible consequences of the proposed action. That, after all, would render it a hypothetical imperative, such as:

  ‘If you don’t want to live in a world full of liars, then don’t lie.’

  or

  ‘If you don’t want to run the risk of being found out, then don’t lie.’

  These hypothetical imperatives enable you to escape your duty to be honest. All you have to do is decide you don’t care about living with liars or running risks – then you are free to lie as much as you like.

  That’s not how Kant’s ethics works.

  For Kant, duty is rationally inescapable. The point of universalizing your maxim is to see whether it would even be possible for a fully rational agent to engage in the proposed course of action.

  Rather amazingly, Kant insists that fully rational agents are incapable of committing immoral actions. This is to say that your noumenal self literally cannot lie. When you lie, you sink into your phenomenal self – you give up being a thing-in-itself and become a mere thing-as-it-appears.

  Why is this?

  Kant contends that every immoral act is self-contradictory. And fully rational agents cannot contradict themselves. Therefore, fully rational agents cannot commit immoral acts.

  But how is lying self-contradictory?

  Kant suggests that the very act of speaking presupposes honesty. That is, why would you make verbal sounds for me to hear unless there was an underlying assumption between us that you were trying to communicate something? When you lie you’re not communicating but undermining communication. So your very act negates itself – a self-contradiction.

  Kant thinks every immoral act is subject to the same sort of analysis. Critics assert, however, that it’s hard to see any self-contradiction in many immoral acts.

  For example, suppose you’re taking a bus trip. The man sitting behind you starts speaking to his companion in a very annoying way. After an hour of unsuccessfully trying to ignore him, you have an overwhelming urge to clock him.

  Cl
early this would be wrong. But how is it self-contradictory?

  If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

  Mark Twain

  The categorical imperative (second formulation)

  Kant offers another formulation of his categorical imperative to help show how it applies. He says that that universalizing your proposed actions means always regarding others as ends in themselves, never as the means to an end.

  By ‘end in itself’ Kant means something that’s worth having for its own sake. For example, when a couple decides to have children, they should, and typically do, think of those children as ends in themselves. By contrast, it would be wrong to have children so that they could help out on the farm. This would be to treat the children as a means to the end of having a more productive farm. To treat someone as the means to an end is to use them. It’s wrong to use people.

  Kant would insist that whenever you lie to someone you’re using them. You need them to be ignorant of the truth in order to accomplish your goal. Even if your goal may seem noble – such as protecting them or others from harm – the ends don’t justify the means. Likewise, if you clock someone for being annoying, you’re using them to relieve your frustration.

  Kant thought we should all learn to put our own selfish goals aside, striving instead to bring about a ‘kingdom of ends’.

  Spotlight

  Kant asserted that masturbation is a violation of the moral law, while admitting that it was hard to think of a good argument why.