The Gist of Kant's Ethics
for PHIL 120 (Fall 2009)
Dr. Jan Garrett Not for direct citation in scholarly work This page revised 6 November 2009
The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Moral) by Immanuel Kant (published in 1785) is one of the most often studied texts in the history of moral philosophy. It is best known for its endorsement of what Kant calls the Categorical Imperative, which he gives in several formulations, of which the Universal Law and Humanity as End formulations are the best known.
One fact that makes it hard initially to understand Kant is that he presents a form of dualism that strikes most people, philosophy students included, as extreme.
Kant subscribed to what Mark Johnson calls the Moral Law Folk Theory.
Dual human nature. Humans have a mental dimension and a physical dimension. Our passions or inclinations are connected to the body; we are driven by them to pursue pleasure, that is, satisfaction of our bodily needs. Our wish to avoid pain and harm is based in the body.Our passions and desires are not in themselves rational. Therefore, there is an ongoing tension between our bodily and rational parts.
There are non-moral values, such as the things that contribute to happiness and their opposites.
Problem of Morality. The problem of Morality depends upon these things:
(1) People can harm or help other people.
(2) Humans have free will
(3) Human reason enables humans to formulate principles about how to act.
Can Reason give will guidelines that instruct it how to act?Moral Laws. The Kantian answer is that Reason generates Moral Laws and tells us how to apply them to particular cases. We are to analyze situations to see how they fall under concepts contained in moral laws.
Moral motivation. The actions of animals are determined by passion, but human beings have reason. We are better than animals because reason can guide our actions. We are essentially rational animals. It's better to be guided by reason than by passion. When will allies with passion, it is being immoral. When will cannot resist passion, it is weak. To be worthy of being admired, the will must be strong and be guided by reason.
Some comments on Kant's relatively short book on ethics, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals:
"G" in what follows refers to page numbers in volume IV of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences edition of Kant's works.
1. The purpose of the book is to discover the principle of practical reason, which for Kant is the one rule that serves to determine how we should morally act.
Kant will argue that there is just one rule. Although it can be expressed in various ways (scholars have counted up to five), these are, he claims, equivalent to one another. This one rule is purely formal, but it can be used to defend more specific moral maxims (such as one should not lie and one should keep promises) as specific moral laws.
The first section of the book is entitled "Transition from the Common Rational Knowledge of Morality to the Philosophical." Kant is merely trying to clarify what he thinks every mature human being already knows. He seems to understand the ordinary adult human as the ordinary German of his acquaintance, who was a Protestant Christian.
2. The claim with which he starts is that there is but one unqualifiedly good thing, and that is the good will.
Unqualified goods are contrasted with qualified goods. Sometimes the words "absolute" and "relative" are used. Sometimes the words "unconditional" and "conditioned" are used. Sometimes "objective" and "subjective." A thing that is unqualifiedly X is X in the basic sense. Kant does not define "good" in the basic sense. We have to figure it out what he means from the things he says about the good will.
Kant defines the will (G 427) this way: "a faculty of determining itself to action in accord with the representation (=thought) of [action-guiding] laws". If Lakoff and Johnson (Philosophy in the Flesh, 1999, chapter 20) are right, Kant is metaphorically conceiving the will as a person who can freely decide.
3. Things that we deem good as a result of inclination are at best qualified goods, whose goodness for us depends on our having the corresponding inclination.
An inclination is a propensity based in a person's body, which is a part of physical nature. It is roughly equivalent to desire or aversion; it is found in humans and in nonhuman animals.
We are aware of inclinations through reflection on our own experience, so they are knowable empirically (that is, a posteriori).
They are linked to pleasure because inclinations produce need, which if unsatisfied is painful; satisfying need and following inclination is pleasant.
Greedy acts, cowardly acts, and other obviously immoral acts can occur from inclination. But so can acts that outwardly conform to ordinary morality, such as the shopkeeper's not overcharging his customers so he will continue to receive their business. So can acts of altruism if a person is so constituted that she receives pleasure from generous acts and is generous to receive such pleasure.
4. If we had a stable idea of happiness and tried to pursue it, that pursuit would be an activity from inclination.
Kant understands happiness as "complete well-being and contentment with one's condition" (G 393), but denies that we have a stable enough conception of happiness to guide our action.
5. A good will is a will that acts not from inclination but from duty; not merely in accord with duty but from duty. He distinguishes three possible types of action:
(a) acts from inclination contrary to duty (do not express a good will)6. Duty is the necessity of an action done out of respect for the (moral) law. (G 400)
(b) acts from inclination in accord with duty (do not express a good will)
(c) acts from duty (do express a good will)The moral law is metaphorically conceived as the strict father in Kant's metaphorical Family of the Mind. The good will is metaphorically conceived as a child that is obedient to the command of the moral law. The attitude exhibited by the good will is respect.
We will see that for Kant the moral law is not identical to God, because it is in some sense in the human mind.
7. The moral law emerges through the use of pure practical reason.
That is, it has no empirical content in itself. It is purely formal. It expresses the universal conformity of a person's actions to law in general. (TKA para 13; G 401n14)
8. The moral law can be stated as "Always act so that you could also will that your maxim could become universal law." This is the "universal law" formulation of the categorical imperative. Maxims are the rules of action which a person actually considers or would consider if he reflected, at least briefly, upon what he was about to do.
The Categorical Imperative in this formulation provides a formal test of such maxims. If a maxim cannot really be conceived as a universal law, then one should not act upon it. If it can be conceived as a universal law but not one that you could wish to become a universal law, then you should not act upon it.
Kant claims that this is a purely rational principle, that has nothing to do with the imagination, but in fact it depends upon a conceptual metaphor, actually two conceptual metaphors. Universal law here is metaphorically conceived as a universal law of nature, in the modern scientific sense familiar since Isaac Newton. The scientific notion of a law of nature is a metaphorically conceived as a law in the legal sense, a rule enacted by a political sovereign. In other words, law in the political sense is the source of the notion of natural law in the scientific sense; the notion of law in the scientific sense is the source of Kant's notion of the moral law.
A law or command of morality, according to Kant, involves a concept of necessity—unconditional, objective, and universally valid (for all rational beings); reference to "necessity" means that it (morally) must be obeyed even when it instructs us contrary to inclination. (G 416)
The second section of Kant's book is called "Transition from Popular Morality to a Metaphysics of Morals." In Kant's mind, this section is fully philosophical while the first was merely an elaboration of pre-philosophical thinking.
9. Kant is trying to clarify pure practical reason. This notion relies upon the following distinctions
a. theoretical v. practical reason
b. pure v. impure practical reasonPractical reason is "the power of reason to determine the will on (some sort of) grounds, either objective or subjective." Grounds refers to reasons actively entertained.10. Pure practical reason must rely upon motives and act for objective ends. Kant is using two deliberate contrasts here:
By contrast, theoretical reason is a capacity of knowing not necessarily motivated by a wish to produce any results.
Impure practical reason would involve premises given a posteriori, i.e., arising in experience. Another label for such premises is "empirical." Impure practical reason takes orders, so to speak, from inclination, of which we can often become aware by asking ourselves what we are feeling at the moment.
By contrast pure practical reason "determines the will (to choice or action) by means of a priori grounds." (G 408) That is, by something other than inclination. (Premises are either a posteriori or a priori; if they are [given] a posteriori, they are based in experience; if they are a priori, they are not based in experience. Therefore, reasons Kant, they are based in [practical] reason itself, not inclination.)a. incentives v. motives
b. subjective v. objective endsKant says this about incentives. They are subjective conditions of the will. They are created by inclinations, which produce subjective ends. (G 413, 428, 431)
Kant claims, although he has not proven, that the will can be moved by respect for the moral law grasped by practical reason. Thus he can speak of motive in contrast to incentive.
Subjective ends are ends given in experience. (G 431) We feel hunger and desire to eat. We feel a desire to be kind to a particular person, and so we offer to help her carry her heavy packages. Objective ends are not given in experience, but are grasped by pure practical reason. Upon such ends rest motives valid for every rational being. (G 427)
11. In the history of philosophy from Aristotle on, ends correspond to principles. Practical principles are mental notions understood as being able to shape our actions. Kant distinguishes between material and formal principles. He says that material ends are merely relative. That is, the goods they represent are qualified at best, not absolute. They vary with our psychological and biological states. By contrast, proper formal principles correspond to absolute ends. A principle is a (practical or moral) law only if it holds for the will of every rational being, not merely some rational beings, not merely sometimes, and not just humans. (However, because humans are not by nature good, they are the only rational beings that experience the moral law as a command.)
12. Philosophers, especially among the ancients, regarded happiness as an absolute end. Kant denies that happiness can function as a stable end, which is needed for a practical principle. Kant sees happiness as a fluctuating, unstable end. In an individual's life it varies from moment to moment, depending on the priority he gives to responding to his various felt needs. And one person's notion of happiness differs from another's.
13. The only kind of end that can serve as an objective principle, according to Kant, is an independently existing end.
This would be an end that is not produced by action, that is not an effect of our embodied interaction with our physical and social environment. (G 437)This would be an end not altered by relations we have with things outside us.
This would be an end that is not merely "for us" at the moment, contingently:
a) not affected by our bodily states14. Inclinations produce ends only of conditional or relative value. Kant's reasoning seems to be as follows:
b) not even a result of our generic human nature (such as, e.g., a universal human need for people to talk to or a universal need for love)Inclinations produce need.15. An unconditional end must be supplied by something other than inclinations.
Need is experienced as unpleasant. (not stated)
Every rational being wishes to be free from inclination. (G 428)
What every rational being wishes to escape cannot be an unconditional good.
Therefore, inclinations can only provide conditional goods.Rational beings, according to Kant, are called persons because their [rational] nature marks them out as ends in themselves. An end in itself is one that has objective value, not merely subjective value for us; it is an unconditional end, not a merely contingent one.16. From this it follows that our humanity (rational nature) sets a supreme limiting condition on our freedom of action: Always act so as to treat humanity as an end, never as a means only. This is the Humanity as End formulation of Kant's famous Categorical Imperative. He claims that it is "equivalent" to the Universal Law formulation discussed above in point 8.17. When Kant says that it is our rational nature that makes us ends in themselves, he seems to have in mind primarily our capacity for practical reason and the freedom of our will, rather than theoretical reason. So, if we ask what is the relationship between the human being as an end in itself to the good will, the only unqualified good, it is the relationship of a potentiality to its corresponding actuality. That is to say, when a person's practical reason, which Kant sometimes equates with the human will, operates at the level of its greatest possible perfection, it is a good will.