Kant Do That: Quick Intro to the Categorical Imperative

In the 18th century, German philosopher Immanuel Kant hypothesised a method of rational thought that could be used to make moral laws known as the Categorical Imperative. For Kant, a moral law should be made through objective reasoning as opposed to subjective emotional reasoning and must be applicable on a universal scale and that it is our duty to act accordingly.

This led him to make a distinction between two types of imperatives: hypothetical and categorical. A hypothetical imperative is not necessarily a moral command, but one in which the desired outcome benefits the individual. “Donate to charity, because other people will think well of you.” If you desire to be highly thought of, then you should donate to charity. If you don’t want to donate to charity, then that’s alright but people won’t think well of you.

In Kant’s view, moral imperatives need to be categorical. Which he demonstrates in various forms. The first being Universalisability.

“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction.”

There are two key phrases in this sentence. ‘Maxim’ and ‘universal law’. A maxim is a rule or principle of action. And a ‘universal law’ is a rule which can be applied to all beings capable of rational thought.

What Kant is saying is that before we decide to act, we must first assess what the motive behind the act is (the maxim) and whether it can validly be applied universally. Say, for example, you’re playing a game of Blackjack. You’ve lost seven hands in a row and decide that for the next hand you’ll stack the deck in your favour. The maxim being used here is that of cheating. By choosing to cheat you’ve made it alright for everyone else in the world to also cheat from now on. This is also contradictory, you were using cheating to gain an upper hand, but if everyone else cheats against you then nobody really has the upper hand and you become trapped in a cycle of cheating. Therefore, the maxim of cheating can’t be universalised due to the result.

Secondly, Kant proposes the Humanity Formula.

“So act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in another, always as an end, and never as only a means.”

What does he mean by an ‘end’ and ‘only as a means’?

A person is an ‘end’ because this preserves their dignity as a rational being. It stops us from being treated as objects, or he prefers, ‘mere means.’

He does not rule out the possibility that using people as a means is not moral. There are examples to which using someone as a means is perfectly agreeable, so long as the person to which you are using as a means has given you their consent. Suppose that you work on a till at the supermarket, and I’m a customer. I come to you so that I can pay for my produce. This act alone does not remove your humanity from the equation, even though I’m using you as a means to an end, in fact we may have a jolly good conversation. The problem would be if I were to somehow remove your dignity as an individual in the process. I may pay for my goods and instead of thanking you I could instead slap you. This would suggest that I was using you as a mere means to an end by stripping you of dignity right at the end, to Kant, this would be unacceptable and fail his Categorical Imperative test.

A third aspect of the Categorical Imperative is that of the Autonomy Formula.

“Act so that through your maxims you could be a legislator of universal laws.”

This is where Kant places a dramatic focus on the aspect of the individual as a free rational being. Or rather, a being of free will. This formula supposes that humankind is not simply bound to moral laws beyond its control to create, going against a long-standing dogmatic view that moral laws are created by divine beings, or God. Kant is placing the onus on moral laws being a creation of humanity. And as such we should act in careful consideration of the implications of our maxims. He isn’t stripping us of acting in accordance to desire but asking us to consider what that could mean if applied to all. Enlightenment thinkers celebrated this idea in an age where religion was being challenged on a philosophic and scientific level, though whether Kant himself was pro or against religion is still widely debated.

Finally, Kant introduces the Kingdom of Ends formula to his hypothesis.

“Systematic union of different rational beings under common laws” and “act in accordance with the maxims of a member giving universal laws for a merely possible kingdom of ends.”

In a final push to unify his concept of Categorical Imperatives, Kant dictates that a moral law can only be acceptable if the members of a state deem it to be beneficial to all. Simply put, a moral democracy.

This means that a moral law must pass the criteria to be realisable universally, respect the humanity of each individual and be formed on the basis that the law was brought about through free will. He is marrying each formula to another, bringing it all together in a neatly idealised bow.

Categorical Imperative and Life

You may be wondering how any of this affects your daily life, it is a very deep and critical theory with a very high standard set. But much of what Kant has said has been applied to laws that we today can often take for granted.

Take a look at the Human Rights Act of 1998 and you’ll see that a vast majority of it is derived from Kantean logic. Article 3: Freedom from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, for example states “No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” This is a Categorical Imperative at its simplest (and finest). Torture is wrong in any instance and using Kant’s argument here is why:

1. By allowing the torture of one individual in a society it means that all individuals could be subjected to torture. Would you like to be tortured?

2. If you torture someone to extract information then you are using this person as a mere means to an end. Therefore, robbing them of their right to be treated as a rational being (as Kant would say, an end)

3. What is the motive for torture? If this person has offended you then your retaliation to torture is not caused from logical objective reasoning of free will, but an uncontrolled reaction of emotion. It is simply not an autonomous decision.

Now that we have seen how this mode of reasoning has been applied to law, how do we ourselves apply it to daily life? Most of us (or at least I hope most of us) will no doubt be outraged by the thought of murder. We wouldn’t murder someone else because we too wouldn’t like to be murdered, we would also hold this value across society (indeed we do) and therefore we can all live happily agreeing that murder is wrong. More trivially, we all wait at the pelican crossing while a parent and child cross the road because it provides a safe passage point for pedestrians, we can all agree that waiting is the morally right thing to do because it stops the suffering of an individual who could potentially be run over.

But is it a perfect theory?

Not really.

The Categorical Imperative asks us to live in an extremely virtuous world where our desires should be set aside for cold reason. According to Hegel, this is an unnatural state of being for humans who are primarily fuelled by their own desires. There would be no incentive for humans to act accordingly because there would be no reward for doing so.

Hegel also argues that Kant’s law for Universality is deeply flawed. Hegel uses an example of giving money to the poor. The act of beneficence is seen as morally virtuous, Hegel argues that if everyone gave money to the poor then there would eventually be no more poor, and as such beneficence would be unsustainable and immoral according to Kant’s law which forbids contradictions.

Kant’s work is based on an idealised society of moral values. This simply doesn’t work in the real world where moral issues can have grey zones. Let’s revisit murder. Murdering someone is wrong, but aren’t there permissible cases? By and large we all agree that murder is wrong most of the time, but what if the victim was not the murdered individual, but actually a person who had been subjected to years of mental and physical torture, a person who eventually broke and was driven to killing the perpetrator of the torture. By law the act of murder has taken place, but would we as a society agree to the punishment of the person driven to such an act? Kant makes no distinction, to him the act of murder is simply wrong in any and every circumstance.

Friedrich Nietzsche also condemns Kant’s idealised view of the will. Kant suggests that each of us is capable of taking a disconnected objective stance when rationalising our will. This higher form of will is completely independent of our baser desires. Nietzsche argues to the contrary, for him this form of idealised will is still held to account by our desires, it is just a part of a large network of internal desires and motives. For Nietzsche it isn’t simply that we don’t commit the act of murder because it benefits society as whole (as Kant would have us believe), but primarily due to the fact that as an individual we wouldn’t want to be killed, simple self-preservation.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative is as relevant today as it was in his own time. It fuelled discussion regarding ethics and morality and paved the way for standards that are set in our own time. This is really just an introduction into the theory, the actual work and surrounding debate is vastly more intense and worth looking into. Below you’ll find some useful links and further reading on the subject. But if you want to jump straight into the original source then I recommend reading Kant’s The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

Kant Do That: Quick Intro to the Categorical Imperative

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