by Henry Piper (all rights reserved)
The Counterpart to Utilitarianism: Kantian Deontology
Utilitarianism is what philosophers refer to as a consequentialist ethical theory because its determination of whether an action is ethical or not depends on the consequences of the action; it is thus perhaps that utilitarianism, at first blush, seems so commonsensical to us, who live in a practical, results-oriented culture inclined to measure “goodness” in concrete, material terms.
By contrast, the ethics of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is non-consequentialist: for Kant, the morality of an action depends essentially not on the result of the action—an “action” being defined as a deliberate, reasoned decision by a free person—but on the inner intention of the agent or actor. More specifically, Kant defines as purely moral only those actions that are motivated by the intention to fulfill one’s moral duty, thus Kant’s theory is also often referred to as deontological after the Greek term deon meaning “duty.” A person’s intention is a function of the will, the human faculty of choosing or deciding what to do based on deliberate, rational consideration. It is the will that is the source of intention, moral or otherwise, for it is the will that moves, or motivates, a person’s activity; we consider and weigh our options using reason and we use imagination to consider all the possible actions we might take, but we must choose what option to act on or pursue by using our will.
The Good Will Alone is Capable of being Good in Itself
Kant famously asserts, “There is no possibility of thinking of anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be regarded as good without qualification, except a good will”: for Kant, the only “pure good” that humans can rationally contemplate is “the good will,” because this is the only concept available to reason that can be conceived to be “good in itself.” This is so because, though we may consider many other human faculties and virtues to be good, upon due consideration we can see that none of them are truly good in themselves; thus, says Kant, “Intelligence, wit and whatever judgments of the mind one might want to name are doubtless in many respects good and desirable,… but they can also become extremely bad and harmful if the will… is not good.” In other words, though there may seem on the face of it nothing bad about intelligence, consider that there might be nothing worse than an intelligent murderer; thus intelligence, and any other generally positive human trait, is clearly not good in itself, but can be good only when directed by a good will.
The will is nothing more than the faculty of motivation itself, the power of choice, of moving the self from rational deliberation to action, and it is thus, says Kant, that the good will is good “only through its willing.” Thus, for a will to be truly “good,” or “morally worthy,” and so good in itself, it must, says Kant, will the good without other motivation than its moral duty to do good: in other words, one must will and do the good from duty, that is, from the desire to do good, without consideration of the action’s consequences, especially for oneself; importantly, to act “in accordance with” duty means that what we do happens to be what duty prescribes but is not motivated by duty, and Kant would say that such an action might deserve “praise,” since it would mean we are “doing the right thing,” but since we would not be doing it “for the right reasons’—i.e “from duty”—out action would not be worthy of moral “esteem” and would not have “moral worth.” This may seem technical or picky, and it is subtle; but consider: wouldn’t we put more trust in a person who first determines her duty and then does it, rather than a person who just accidentally does what duty prescribes but does it for some other reason—i.e. which one would we trust to do her next time?
In any event, Kant’s strict emphasis on only looking at why a person does what he does and focuses only on whether it is duty that determines the action is why Kant’s theory is referred to as “non-consequentialist: if anything external to the will motivates it, such as the possible consequences of its action, then its motivation is by definition not based only on duty, in itself, and therefore its goodness is dependent upon something other than itself. But if a person’s will is motivated only by moral duty, by the desire to do good, then even if the consequence of a person’s action fails in its moral purpose the will itself would, says Kant, “like a jewel, still shine by its own light as something which has its full value in itself. Its usefulness or fruitlessness can neither augment nor diminish this value.” In other words, whether the consequence from the will’s determination is good and useful, or of no account and fruitless or even bad, still the will in itself, if motivated by goodness, is good.
Strictly speaking, this pure “goodness” of the morally worthy will that is good in itself may seem to be a purely theoretical idea, since we must surely judge a person’s will based on what the person accomplishes, and moreover, we can never be certain, as to even the most apparently noble action (not even our own), that it is really undertaken purely, without qualification—i.e. qualified or tainted by no personal, selfish motive whatsoever—solely for the sake of goodness. However, as we shall discuss in more detail shortly, it is probably not too much to say, as a purely practical matter, that we all do intuitively reckon a person’s inner motivation or intention to do good as a crucial, and sometimes exclusive, factor in our judgment of the morality or “goodness” of a person’s actions.
The Limits of “Happiness”
Notably, Kant, in stark contrast to Mill’s utilitarian ethics, asserts that happiness is not the purpose of human being and thus not the goal of ethics; although, as we have seen, Mill’s own utilitarianism is far from clear on what “happiness” really means, it is clear that Mill’s ethics is consequentialist and thus intended to accomplish some form of general happiness as its concrete and measurable consequence. But if nature had wanted us to be happy, Kant points out, we would have been left like the pig (or the fool), contentedly and mindlessly wallowing in the slop, without reason, self-consciousness and free will, which cause us no end of anxiety, heartbreak, remorse etc. The faculties of reason, self-consciousness and free will, in other words, tend to undermine happiness, and must therefore have an altogether different natural purpose. For Kant, that purpose can be none other than goodness itself, for these faculties are what enable us to distinguish ourselves from animals by distinguishing between right and wrong and by thus assuming responsibility for our actions. Of course such responsibility, and the anxiety that attends it, can be a terrible burden; but it is the inevitable price of freedom, which is that natural gift that distinguishes us from the pig and precisely the reason that we would never agree to change places with the pig. (By way of analogy, consider the story of Adam and Eve, who lived carefree and immortal in the Garden of Eden until they gained the knowledge of good and evil and were thus cast out of the Garden to become mortal but free: in the Garden they were like animals, unfree but perfectly happy, but with freedom and reason they were burdened with the responsibility of moral choice and so their freedom was essentially purchased at the price of the anxiety that such choice entails and the grief and heartbreak that mortality assures.)
In other words, Kant examines the faculties of human beings, notably our powers of reason, by which we are able to consider the various reasons for undertaking one action rather than another, and will, by which we are able to choose our course of action, whether in accordance with reason or not. More specifically, Kant considers what these faculties are best and most uniquely suited to accomplish. Since, as noted above, these faculties seem if anything to tend to undermine the attainment of simple happiness (since the care-free, non-reasoning and instinctually-determined pig seems better suited to this than we), therefore, Kant argues, it cannot be happiness for which nature intended them. But what human reason and will are uniquely and peculiarly suited for is the determination of what is good, by reason, and the ability to act in accord with that determination, by will. Thus human beings must, concludes Kant, be intended by nature to employ reason and will to achieve the moral good, or, even if not “intended,” surely there can be no better or nobler pursuit than moral good to which to apply them.
Moral Worth
When a person makes a charitable contribution, the utilitarian would simply label that a “moral” or “ethical” action, assuming the charitable action to be one that, as its consequence, produces happiness or alleviates suffering; but Kant would only consider that charitable contribution to be genuinely “morally worthy” to the extent that the giver was acting not according to her own, selfish “inclination,” such as a desire for praise or fame or profit, but simply because to make the contribution was good in itself—in other words, done for the sake of one’s moral duty to seek goodness and not for the sake of any possible, predicted consequence, including the possible personal gain of the actor. Kant naturally favors any action that produces a happy consequence, and refers to such actions as “praiseworthy,” but he would not credit an action with “moral worth” unless it is motivated solely by the intention to do good, the intention, that is, to follow one’s moral duty.
Thus, according to Kant’s theory, a corporation that undertakes a “charitable” cause—with the obvious expectation of good publicity—is deserving of no moral credit since evidently the corporation is not acting out of a charitable motive but expects, rather, that its own profit will benefit as a result of the increased business that is the likely consequence of such publicity and the “good will” (in the business sense) accruing to its corporate brand (and, we might note, the corporation cannot act at all, in any human sense, since it is not a person). Kant’s view on this seems altogether consistent with our general sense of things: we would typically not give someone moral credit for an action undertaken for her own personal advantage, would we?
Moral Intention
Thus, as the above corporate “charity” example may already indicate, Kant’s views, while seemingly abstract, theoretical or idealistic, are likely to accord substantially with our own typical intuition about moral goodness. Thus there is no question that all of us take into account, to a significant degree, the inner motivations of people when we judge their actions on a moral scale: a person who is acting out of pure self-interest earns from us no moral respect, no matter what she might accomplish, whereas a person who selflessly sacrifices her own wealth, time or life for the benefit of others earns our profoundest moral respect, even if the intended good is not realized, even without, that is, a positive consequence.
This is precisely Kant’s point when he champions the good will as “a shining jewel,” and we see this view of morality directly reflected in the criminal law (and occasionally in civil law as well, when the intentions of contracting parties are considered to determine whether there was a contract, for example, or in the decision as to whether the intentions of a civil defendant are so morally blameworthy as to justify punitive damages against it, or where “good faith” is required in the execution of some contractual provision, or in a civil fraud claim or where “malice” is a component of a tort). Thus, in a prosecution for homicide it is invariably the case, by definition, that the defendant is accused of causing the death of another human being—that is, the consequence of all homicides is effectively the same. First degree murder—which in many states today entails the possibility of capital punishement—is distinguished from other forms of homicide by the fact that the jury must determine that the defendant acted with the “specific intent” to bring about the death of the victim and that she did so deliberately or with premeditation or, in more traditional language, “in cold blood” or “with malice aforethought.” A defendant may be convicted of voluntary manslaughter, rather than murder, if the jury decides that the defendant acted under the influence of “the heat of passion” to such a degree that his intention was not so morally blameworthy as to be “as bad as” murder, or if the jury determines that a defendant acted unreasonably in self defense (homicide laws, like most crimes, are primarily state matters, so the specific provisions vary from state to state). And there would be no crime at all if a person’s action were judged to constitute justifiable self-defense or an accident that was not reasonably foreseeable, that is, if there were no intention to kill.
In other words, both explicitly in the law, and intuitively in our own actions and in our judgments of the actions of others, we substantially rely for our decision as to “moral worth” not on what results from a person’s action but on what our judgment of the inner intention of the actor was; that is, we make judgments of morality not on the basis of the consequences of the action, but on the basis of whether the actor is motivated in his action to accomplish some selfish result rather than by moral duty. Clearly we can’t literally see the intention of the person because we can’t “read the mind” of the person we are judging, and so must rely directly on what is visible to us; but we intuitively interpret the visible actions of other people to make judgments on what “must have been” their inner intention, on what they “must have been thinking.” If we pause to reflect on it, we can see that we all make such judgments all the time, typically without even thinking about it, and juries in criminal cases are required explicitly to think about it in their assessment of the degree of criminal fault.
The Categorical Imperative: to Be Moral is to be Rational
So the essence of Kantian ethics, as distinct from utilitarian, is that it considers the “inner self” of the acting person as opposed to her public appearance. More precisely, Kant asserts that the determination of moral action depends not at all on what goes on in the world but can and must be determined solely by the inner, rational reflection, or thought, of the person faced with an ethical or moral choice or decision. Specifically, Kant asserts that our faculty of reason, acting independently, gives us the rule for determining what is morally right, a rule Kant refers to as “the categorical imperative” and which defines our moral duty. In other words, the Categorical Imperative is basically a rational “formula” for determining what is right. In general terms, the categorical imperative states that an action is moral or ethical if a person, in considering it, could rationally will that the action be a universal law.
In other words, would I rationally expect or logically require another person facing the same decision as I to act in the particular way that seems right to me now? If so—if my reason tells me that anyone faced with my situation would and must decide that a particular course of conduct is the self-evidently right thing to do—then and only then does my proposed course of action qualify as my moral duty and thus satisfy the categorical imperative, and it is this that makes it morally right. In simple terms, Kant’s categorical imperative is a philosophical version of the Golden Rule— do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
More specifically, Kant’s categorical imperative requires that an action, to be moral, must be logically consistent, i.e. it must “make sense” and not practically undermine itself. Thus Kant’s primary formulation of the categorical imperative is, “I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will my maxim should become a universal law.” A “maxim” is a proposed course of action in a given situation, and the categorical imperative demands that we submit such maxim, which we propose subjectively for ourselves in our particular circumstances, to the test of whether we would, or could logically, will that everyone should will as we do and so adopt our maxim as an objectively valid, universal law. If it makes no sense so to will, then that maxim is not moral; for Kant, for an action to be moral it must be rational. In other words, to fail to follow what we ourselves determine to be our moral duty is to lack integrity, since we would be violating our own rational determination of what is right; for example, if someone asks us to add 2 and 3, we would use our reason to determine the answer is 5, and it would be irrational to tell them “6” so clearly the only right thing to do would be to answer “5.”
Thus for Kant it is always immoral to make a false promise, or to lie, since a promise inherently assures that it is a “true commitment,” meaning that a false promise or lie is by nature “a false true commitment,” which is absurd, it cannot be, it makes no sense— i.e. it is self-contradictory, since it is logically impossible for something to be both false and true at the same time. If my maxim were to lie when it suits me, then, on considering whether I could possibly want or will that everyone, universally, lie when it suits them, I would see, says Kant, that “my maxim would necessarily destroy itself as soon as it was made a universal law,” since “by such a law there would really be no promises at all.” This is of course is consistent with Mill’s utilitarian reason for embracing veracity as a general moral principle, due to its overwhelming “expediency,” since if false promises were permitted in society no one could ever trust anyone else, contracts would become impossible and society would be reduced to chaos. But we must keep firmly in mind that practical expediency, while welcome and praiseworthy to Kant, is of no account whatever in determining, on Kant’s terms, the moral worth of an action such as truth-telling, because Kant insists that we have no need to consider the negative consequences of making false promises since we can see that a false promise is, in itself, self-contradictory and irrational and cannot ever make sense, no matter how beneficial the result of a lie might seem to be.
Why Kant (unlike Mill) Asserts that Lying is Always Immoral
Indeed, though we have seen Mill adopt veracity as a vital general rule of morality, we also saw that Mill would allow for the occasional exception, in a case, for example, when one is forced to lie to save a life. Kant specifically addresses this hypothetical scenario and categorically disagrees with Mill, since, as we have seen, for Kant to lie is in itself irrational and thus immoral. Specifically, Kant addresses the issue of, in his words, whether there is a “right to lie because of philanthropic concerns;” in other words, where my intention is to help another, does that give me the right to lie in order to accomplish such a philanthropic result?
The argument in favor of such a “right,” apart from the utilitarian desire to achieve the result of protecting the innocent party, is that a person only has a right to the truth if she is herself fulfilling her own moral duty. More specifically, in the case of the one who threatens violence against an innocent, it is argued by the utilitarian that one has effectively given up her right to the truth since she constitutes a threat to society at large; that is, to tell her the truth would ordinarily be my duty, as a matter of social expediency, but she only earns that right to truth if she fulfills her duty of affording others the right to personal safety. But Kant argues, in essence, that a lie is a lie, and the harm of a lie is not limited to the particular fact of deceiving the one from whom truth is withheld, rather the wrong done is to society as a whole and to the very ethic of truth-telling. “For a lie always harms another,” says Kant; “if not some other human being, then it nevertheless does harm to humanity in general, inasmuch as it vitiates the very source of right.” In other words, consistent with the purely rational operation of the categorical imperative, as we observed it above, to justify a lie is to justify injustice, that is, to make injustice just, which is logically nonsensical. For Kant, “truth is not a possession the right to which can be granted to one person but refused to another”; rather, “the duty of truthfulness… makes no distinction between persons to whom one has this duty and to whom one can be excused from this duty,” for it is “an unconditional duty which holds in all circumstances.”
Kant adds a rather subtle, legal argument, to the effect that as long as one tells the truth in a given situation, then one cannot be held legally accountable for what results, whereas one can be held accountable for the results of a lie; this analysis may be legally questionable, in fact, depending as it does on the state of the law, which varies widely over time, place and circumstance. But he also points out that one can never perfectly foresee what the results of either the truth or a lie will be, and therefore it is folly to assume that lying will necessarily protect a threatened person or that the truth will necessarily injure him. It is an argument against utilitarianism generally, after all, that we can never perfectly predict any of the consequences of our actions, even those most immediate, and much less those more remote or all the results; however, we can easily see, according to Kant’s categorical imperative, that to lie is a violation, categorically and in principle, of moral duty that threatens the entire structure of morality as such.
In other words, we cannot foresee, much less control, the future consequences of our actions, but we can control our own wills; therefore, whereas it is not reasonable to hold us morally responsible for future consequences, since we cannot control them, it is reasonable to hold us morally responsible for our own wills. Thus we can see Kant’s point, that since even in the rare and extreme case of possibly lying to save a life we can be sure only that a lie is a lie, we cannot be sure of anything about what might result from it, good or bad. And consider, if you tell the truth to the killer you might be able to earn her trust and prevent the killing before it happens; but if you lie to the killer and save a life today, how do you know that the killer won’t kill someone else, or kill tomorrow? You cannot know anything for sure about future consequences, but you do know, on Kant’s terms, that if you lie you are doing wrong.
And let me add a few additional remarks of my own. First, while we all face moral decisions every day, the case where one might lie to save a life is clearly an exceedingly rare event, one almost no one will ever face; thus, even if we have doubts about Kant’s categorical stance in favor of truth-telling, such a rare exception constitutes a narrow and somewhat technical objection. It is also sometimes objected that Kant’s categorical imperative to tell the truth would require us to make mean remarks to someone whose haircut we don’t like, for example, but this is not the case at all since we nearly always enjoy the option of saying nothing; moreover, such remarks like “your hair looks horrible,” even if true, are arguably a matter of no significant moral importance and thus not even relevant to the present discussion, and if it is your friend whose hair needs help, perhaps the duty of truth-telling, however hurtful, may yet be the right policy. More importantly, we should not underestimate the significance of such a value as truth-telling for which, indeed, Mill himself expresses profound respect. Specifically, it seems safe to say that in our world today there is much more danger to be had from politicians, judicial witnesses, corporations etc., who lie, than the danger presented by their telling us the truth. People hardly need help in rationalizing their lies, but what we do often need help with is the firm reason and resolve to tell the truth. Do the problems in the world today result from too much truth-telling?; clearly, we would all benefit from a world in which there is much less lying. Thus, even if Kant takes no account of consequences I suggest that we would actually get better results from following Kant than from following Mill!
Why Suicide is Immoral
Whereas this categorical, moral duty never to lie is a duty we owe to other people, Kant also furnishes an example of a similarly absolute duty that we owe to ourselves—to preserve our own lives; thus for Kant suicide is categorically, thus always, morally wrong.
I suggest that we can understand how suicide is self–contradictory and thus immoral by considering how it is that we might try to justify it rationally, as follows. Those who do support a right to suicide invariably do so on the basis of personal liberty, and, when considering possible laws that would permit assisted suicide, such permission is typically limited to cases where people are so terminally ill that their lives might reasonably be considered to be no longer “worth living.” In any event, it seems safe to assume that anyone who would give an argument to support a right to suicide, thus one who would argue for the rightness of suicide, would base it on the notion that life can become, in the event of terminal illness and intolerable pain, no longer worth prolonging. Thus essentially any rational justification of suicide would have to come down to a subject’s claim, “I’d be better off dead,” since surely if I’d be better off alive I wouldn’t want to kill myself. Now, consider that claim: is it rationally possible to be anything—better off or whatever—when one is dead? When I’m dead, I am not, my being is over; thus it is self-contradictory to claim “I would be better off dead,” since I would not be: it makes no sense.
Thus, as in the case of a false promise, suicide fails the test of the categorical imperative by being intrinsically irrational thus rendering it, for Kant, immoral. That is, by simply analyzing the very meanings of “false promise” and “suicide,” with no reference whatever to the consequences that might flow from them, we can see that they contradict themselves, that is, they are self-contradictory, and thus cannot logically be true or right.
In sum, a “false promise” is wrong because it contradicts itself since a false promise is essentially a “false true commitment”—a commitment that is both false and true at the same time, which is absurd and impossible and so, in Kant’s terms, wrong. Similarly, to argue in favor of suicide you would have to claim “I’d be better off dead,” which is to say that it is better to be and not to be at the same time, which also is clearly contradictory and so, for Kant, categorically wrong.
Note that Actions of Moral Worth Do Tend to Produce Good Results
Though Kant’s theory requires us to ignore the consequences of our actions, it is worth noting, as a practical matter, that if we follow Kant’s theory we can presumably expect the consequences to be positive overall. Bad things would still happen, naturally and by accident, of course, but the ethical problems we see in the world today presumably do not typically result from people intending to do good; rather, when people harm one another it is obviously almost invariably the case that they were intending only to achieve good consequences for themselves. By contrast, it is hardly arguable, it seems to me, that if people tried consistently to apply Kantian principles in their lives—if people intended to do the right thing, based on the rational determination of their moral duty—then the world would be a much happier place, as in the example of truth-telling I discussed above. So as abstract, counterintuitive or impractical as Kant’s theory may sometimes appear, it would surely happen to produce very positive results indeed; thus, ironically, it would seem that to get the positive results, we must ignore them. On reflection, in fact, we might notice that this is indeed frequently true in life!
Along these lines, it is also important to remember that actions of “moral worth” (and thus those of a “good will”) will often, if not always, happen also to serve the selfish inclinations of the actor or agent, whether an individual or a corporation. In other words, it is by no means a characteristic of Kant’s ethics that in order to be “moral” one need necessarily act against one’s own interest. On the contrary, to repeat, more often than not the morally worthy action will probably also happen to benefit one’s own selfish inclination. So even though Kant insists that you ignore consequences and your own personal, selfish inclinations when deciding what’s right, it will most likely happen that you and others will in fact be better off in the end anyway.
Duty v. Inclination: The Grocer and the “Inexperienced Customer”
This is precisely the case with Kant’s example of the grocer who must decide whether to give correct change to the child, which benefits the grocer (by protecting the integrity of his business) and happens to be what duty requires and so morally right as well. Clearly it is the moral duty of the grocer to give correct change since to cheat the child would be an act of deception—essentially a false promise since it is implicit in the giving of change that the change is correct. The grocer could shortchange the child and so enrich himself, so he might be inclined to do so; on the other hand, to do that might also end up hurting his reputation in the future. So if the grocer gives the right change we can’t be sure whether he did it because it was his moral duty (“from duty”) or whether he did it to serve his own selfish inclination to preserve his reputation. In short, we can’t be sure whether or not the action is “morally worthy” since here both duty and inclination dictate the same thing. As Kant points out, in such cases it is impossible to judge whether the action of the grocer deserves merely praise, for its producing a good result, or also the respect that is due actions that are genuinely morally worthy.
When we consider, by contrast, the example (not from Kant himself) of the soldier who hurls herself on a live grenade and so sacrifices her own life while saving the lives of her comrades, we have little trouble or hesitation in judging the action as morally worthy: this is because, in sacrificing her own life, she clearly could not be motivated by selfish inclination, since presumably such inclination would have been to save her own life; therefore, her only reasonable motivation must be that she considered it her moral duty to sacrifice herself to save her comrades, in other words that she judged it to be the right thing to do, even though it was directly opposed to her own inclination. It is thus that our own intuition leads us to analyze such a situation in Kantian terms, and thus to honor the sacrificing soldier precisely for being, in Kant’s terms, “morally worthy,” since we judge her action to be motivated strictly by moral duty and not at all by selfish inclination.
So the problem in the case of the grocer is that his action, unlike the case of the soldier, serves both his selfish inclination (to preserve his business reputation) and his moral duty (to be truthful in his business dealings). And, again, it is fair to say that cases like the grocer’s are much more common, to most of us, most of the time, than cases like the soldier’s. But what all of this goes to show is that Kant’s moral theory, according to which we judge the moral worth of actions by reference to whether one’s inner intention is motivated by one’s sense of moral duty or rather by one’s own selfish concerns, in fact reflects our own, common moral intuition. So, when judging the moral worth of an action, on Kant’s terms, we ignore all consequences (to ourselves and to anyone else) to consider exclusively the motivations of the actor. As we saw above, in a homicide case the consequence is always that one person has killed another, so a jury must ignore the consequence, and focus only on the inner intention of the accused, when it makes the moral judgment to distinguish between different degrees of homicide; and to consider whether a person is motivated by duty or inclination is also to focus strictly on inner motivation and not on the consequence (in the grocer example, the child gets the right change whatever the grocer’s inner motivation). If the sole motivation of an action is moral duty and thus reckoned according to “the categorical imperative,” then the action has moral worth; by contrast, if an action is motivated by selfish inclination, yet happens also to be in accordance with duty (and thus perhaps also resulting in a beneficial consequence to myself and others), then Kant asserts that the action deserves praise (because we want to encourage people to do good deeds even if they do them for the wrong reasons) but it does not deserve our moral respect or esteem. In other words, such an action is not strictly moral since it doesn’t earn our moral esteem, but that does not make it immoral either, since it does earn our praise.
I must add, finally, that Kant’s moral theory is, at least on its face, highly theoretical or abstract, and precisely because so many of life’s day-to-day moral judgments concern matters like the grocer’s, where both selfishness and morality are in accord, it may seem practical, or just plain easier, to limit our judgments to the utilitarian terms of observable and measurable results. And, indeed, no one can reasonably dispute the practical usefulness and, perhaps, efficiency, of Mill’s utilitarianism. But it should also be clear that, as a matter of actual experience, we do intuitively align ourselves, very frequently at least, with Kant’s views on inner intention and good will; moreover, it is arguably on the most vital of moral issues, concerning human life, freedom and dignity, that Kant’s views are most likely to be invoked. In other words, where only money and material are at stake, perhaps the supposed efficiency of utilitarianism will serve us best; but when it comes to matters of life and death, mechanical efficiency loses whatever moral force it might otherwise have and we must, I suggest, turn to Kant.
The Ultimate Value is Human Being: the Second Version of the Categorical Imperative
This leads us to what most decidedly distinguishes Kantian from utilitarian ethics, namely that, for Kant, the entire determination of “goodness” requires for its ultimate justification that there be some final end, a goal or purpose, that is good in itself—the goodness of which, in other words, is self-evident and beyond dispute by any rational person. And, to put it simply, the one and only thing that no rational person, as such, can possibly dispute the goodness and ultimate value of is precisely the rational person herself, and rational people in general, who alone are even capable of a “good will”; moreover, the very possibility for goodness depends on the proposition that each individual, rational person be free to use her will in order to act in accordance with her autonomous determination, by use of the categorical imperative, of what her own reason imposes upon her as her moral duty. In other words, rationality itself, which for Kant is a uniquely human faculty, leads us inescapably to determine, if we are thinking clearly about the matter, that the ultimate good in the world, upon which all judgment of moral goodness depends, is the free, individual, rational person. This, of course, precisely reflects the foundational value on which ethics is based—that of human life, freedom and dignity.
Kant thus asserts that the categorical imperative requires, as he puts it, that, in our actions, each person treat every other person never as a means to some end, selfish or material, but always as an end in herself. So Kant sets forth another form of the categorical imperative, which, according to Kant, will in fact produce exactly the same moral determinations as the first version, however different it may seem. This formulation is, “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 imperative is necessary to the promotion of the good since the ultimate source of goodness itself is the free, rational humanity of each and every human being on earth. Thus, no person may use another person or treat him or her as a thing, rather than as a person, which is precisely what we do when, for example, we lie to someone to get his money, thus exploiting him, that is, using him as a means to our own enrichment. In the case of such a lie, we effectively disable the deceived person from exercising his own moral judgment and exercising his own freedom of action, thus disabling the person from the possibility of doing good; indeed, if we respected the person as a free, moral agent by telling him the truth, he might very well decide to give us the money out of charity, and by lying to him we deny him that moral opportunity.
So, in a dramatic break from utilitarianism’s promotion of happiness for the greatest number, Kantian ethics demands that no action can be good if it fails to respect the ultimate goodness, dignity and freedom of each and every individual person on earth. Thus we come around again to see that “the good will” is the only thing that is “good in itself,” which is another way of saying that goodness as such is defined as what values and promotes human life, human freedom and human dignity, that is, the human person in itself, since it is the human person who is the source of goodness. Kant’s theory promotes humanity individually because each and every human being is credited and charged with the capacity of moral duty and the ability to be an autonomous and responsible moral agent; and his theory promotes humanity collectively as well by acknowledging that none of us can act morally, as a practical matter, unless we live in a society of free individuals living according to our shared faculty of reason and the respect that I deserve as a rational being, which I must thus respect in others as a matter of simple logical consistency.
Individual Autonomy as the Guiding Principle of Kantian Ethics
Indeed, the ultimate principle of Kant’s ethics is individual autonomy, a synonym for “personal liberty,” which literally means “self-ruling.” This is so because the ultimate source of ethics is the individual judgment of each (and every) person, because each person is rational and thus capable of determining for herself, using the categorical imperative, what is right. So for Kant, to be free is exactly the same as to do one’s moral duty since one determines one’s moral duty oneself by one’s own rational judgment, though each person’s judgment should be exactly the same, in principle, since the rules of reason are the same for all, just as, for example, each of us, because we have reason, can determine for ourselves that two plus three equals five. Freedom is a positive power to think rationally, and that power is not diminished by the fact that we do not have the “power” to make two and five be six; on the contrary, the power is meaningful, as a power, precisely by virtue of the fact that it is a power to see the truth, and, in principle, we will always see the rational truth if we use the power of reason correctly. Thus as we autonomously use the power that nature has given us to see for ourselves what is universally true (in math, for example), so for Kant reason also leads us universally to determine what is right (in ethics).
It should be noted that we might often be tempted to think of “freedom” as the ability to do anything we want, without restraint, whether it makes sense or not. These days, many people who complain about government power are implicitly defining freedom this way, since for them to be “free” means no more than to be left alone, as summed up by the “libertarian” slogan, “don’t tread on me.” But according to Kant, this freedom of non-restraint is, we might say, merely a “negative” and shallow version of freedom; genuine freedom, by contrast, is indeed a positive power, as described above, requiring and permitting the use of the power of reason that nature has evidently blessed us with. It might seem that doing our moral duty is a limitation on freedom, but Kant explains how in fact the ability to determine our moral duty for ourselves, which is precisely the meaning of “autonomy,” is real freedom. This is the freedom of adults, whose actions can be reasoned and deliberate, as opposed to the freedom often sought by children, which is not a positive, rational, responsible freedom but is rather merely the ability to be free from the restraints of reason and responsibility.
In other words, when we consider freedom as “autonomy,” we must recall that such a positive freedom is not merely about the self―auto―but also implies the requirement of a rule―nomos. The “negative freedom” of Hobbes and Hume is a matter merely of being unconstrained by any external force, although in fact, we should note, it is in fact determined, intrinsically, by the necessity of the same physical laws that determine, or “rule,” the rest of nature. By contrast, the autonomy of Kant is a matter of determining the rule, and thus one’s duty, by oneself, from within, according to the moral law as articulated by Kant’s categorical imperatives in their various forms.
As we have seen in Kant’s transcendental justification of the existence of human freedom (see my prior chapter on Kant’s response to Hume), the faculty of human freedom is, like natural necessity, a form of causation, but in the case of freedom the law of causation has its origin not in the “world of sense,” but in a second and separate “intelligible world.” Thus the freedom of the will, or autonomy, does not permit the arbitrary, capricious and chaotic law of the jungle as implied by the negative “liberty” of Hobbes; rather, freedom is a matter of the personal discipline and responsibility that derives from one’s own, rational determination of moral duty.
To sum up the two versions of the Categorical Imperative we have so far been considering, the first version, as we have seen, is, “I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will my maxim should become a universal law.” This imperative focuses on the individual and the responsibility of the individual to derive, through personal, rational deliberation, the rule that constitutes moral duty. But the fact that the rule I derive for myself is forged according to its universal applicability implies that, for the sake of logical consistency, I must apply it to everyone else as well and so respect the autonomy of all other persons as I respect my own. Moreover, what qualifies me so to derive moral law and thus be a moral agent is that I am a person and not a thing, that is, I possess the faculty of reason, by which I determine my duty, and the will, which carries it out, and which qualifies as a “good will” and so “morally worthy” when it does so. A “thing,” that is, a mere object (which in Kant’s terms effectively means anything that is not a person, including a non-human animal), is something I might use as a means to achieving my moral purpose; by contrast, a person is precisely that which is capable of bringing unqualified goodness into the world, when, that is, a person acts in accordance with moral worth and so possesses a good will, nature’s only unqualified good, that which alone is good in-itself. Thus a person, unlike a thing, may never properly be used as a means to a moral end, because a person is not a means to morality but the end of morality since it is only by the agency of a person that morality can be. Thus Kant’s second version of the categorical imperative makes explicit the reference to all of humanity that is merely implicit in the first: “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.”
Thus we see, in fact, that though these two versions of the Categorical Imperative look rather different, they in fact amount to precisely the same thing. In the simplest of terms they determine moral duty according to what makes rational sense and what serves to respect individual human life, freedom and dignity. Thus, a lie is always wrong because a false promise contradicts itself and because a lie exploits and manipulates another person and thus violates the other person’s autonomy, treating the other as a thing rather than a person.
A Third Version of the Categorical Imperative, “The Kingdom of Ends,” and How All Three are One
Having established the essential identity of these first two versions of the categorical imperative, we may now introduce Kant’s third version: “every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends.” As the second version was found to be essentially identical to the first, so this third version of the categorical imperative is identical to, and already essentially included in, the other two: the first imperative focuses on the self, the second on the other, and the third on the community which self and other comprise. So in its first instance, morality is a matter of individual autonomy, but it is also unavoidably linked, in its nature, to other individual persons, in reference to whom I exercise my own autonomy and whose autonomy I am logically and morally bound to respect. And the respect I must have for the freedom of others, and theirs for me, implicitly binds us together in the community of all persons, which is what Kant means by the “kingdom of ends.”
In short, I cannot be free unless all those around me are free. As we noted in our discussion of Rousseau (and we shall revisit the theme in the coming chapter on Sartre), the condition of master and slave in effect binds both, since even the master is bound by his dependency on the slave and cannot function, as master, independently, that is, freely. Moreover, since the morality of Kant is founded ultimately on rational truth and logical consistency, the existence of slaves by nature defies such consistency in treating differently persons who are essentially alike. Moreover, since we undertake the course of moral judgment not merely as individuals but also in community, not only is my faculty of moral judgment challenged and sharpened and enriched by its exercise in community, but also, where slavery and any exploitation or other inequality exist, the community of the oppressed is excluded and I am thus deprived of the contributions, moral and material, which they would inevitably, by their nature, bring to the table.
So Kant’s three categorical imperatives constitute a “holy trinity,” we might say―three principles, one truth. The first sets forth the freedom of the self, the second the respect due my neighbor and the third the community of moral agents our mutual respect enables.
Conclusion
We have seen that the ethical theories of Kant and Mill are, in principle and appearance, diametrically opposed: Kant looks at inner intention and ignores consequences, while Mill does exactly the opposite. However, it is fair to say that both theories, in practice, will almost always agree on which actions are moral and which are not, but they will come to their respective conclusions for totally different reasons. The important point to take from all this is that both theories are valuable precisely for what, respectively, they value. Mill seems to be the concrete pragmatist, and though his parsing of what constitutes “happiness” seems to muddle that aspect of his theory considerably, nonetheless no one can fail to appreciate the practical value of the basic “cost-benefit analysis” that his moral theory prescribes.
Kant’s theory, by contrast, may on the surface seem to suffer from a fatal degree of abstraction and counterintuitiveness: isn’t his notion of “the good will” hopelessly ideal, and don’t consequences matter? My point in this essay has been to respond to these concerns. It should thus now be clear that, though of course “the good will” is merely an ideal, it nonetheless has concrete aspirational value: just because there is no perfect justice or goodness in the world does not mean that we should give up on aspiring to and pursuing them, nor does it mean that the terms “justice” and “goodness” are meaningless, for they manifestly are not. Moreover, as I have suggested, Kant’s assessment of what counts as “moral” is really much more in tune with everyday intuition than it might seem: we all do judge people by their intentions every day, if often unconsciously, indeed I would suggest that intentions are our primary criteria for such judgment, as in the case of homicide, and rightly so.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Kant insists, with unstinting rigor, that we place the ultimate value of individual human life, freedom and dignity at the forefront of our decision-making at all times, that we not succumb to the utilitarian thinking that would and might and does permit slavery and exploitation and indiscriminate warfare, where such things can be rationalized as benefiting “the greatest number.” One might reasonably complain that Kant overlooks things other than human beings that are valuable and that thus deserve moral status—animals, all living things, the environment—and that complaint is clearly legitimate; however, in a world in which human freedom, fulfillment and dignity are routinely ignored and frequently indiscriminately trampled, there is no substitute for Kant’s insistence on the enduring value, power and potential of “the good will.”
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