How does the categorical imperative work? The categorical imperative has three different formulations. That is to say, there are three different ways of saying what it is. Kant claims that all three do in fact say the same thing, but it is currently disputed whether this is true.
The second formulation is the easiest to understand, but the first one is most clearly a categorical imperative.
Here is the first formulation. A maxim is the rule or principle on which you act. For example, I might make it my maxim to give at least as much to charity each year as I spend on eating out, or I might make it my maxim only to do what will benefit some member of my family. You are not allowed to make exceptions for yourself. For example, if you expect other people to keep their promises, then you are obligated to keep your own promises.
For example, if I wanted to lie to get something I wanted, I would have to be willing to make it the case that everyone always lied to get what they wanted - but if this were to happen no one would ever believe you, so the lie would not work and you would not get what you wanted.
So, if you willed that such a maxim of lying should become a universal law, then you would thwart your goal - thus, it is impermissible to lie, according to the categorical imperative. It is impermissible because the only way to lie is to make an exception for yourself. Kant on Moral Worth. The Moral Worth of Persons : Kant also has something to say about what makes someone a good person. Keep in mind that Kant intends this to go along with the rest of his theory, and what one's duty is would be determined by the categorical imperative.
However, one can treat this as a separate theory to some extent, and consider that one's duty is determined by some other standard. Keep in mind that what is said below has to do with how one evaluates people, not actions. A person's actions are right or wrong, a person is morally worthy or lacks moral worth i. A person's actions determine her moral worth, but there is more to this than merely seeing if the actions are right or wrong.
By "motivation" I mean what caused you to do the action i. Kant argues that one can have moral worth i. In other words, if a person's emotions or desires cause them to do something, then that action cannot give them moral worth. This may sound odd, but there is good reason to agree with Kant. I look around for what would be the most fun to do with it: buy a yacht, travel in first class around the world, get that knee operation, etc.. I decide that what would be really fun is to give the money to charity and to enjoy that special feeling you get from making people happy, so I give all my lottery money away.
According to Kant, I am not a morally worthy person because I did this, after all I just did whatever I thought would be the most fun and there is nothing admirable about such a selfish pursuit. It was just lucky for those charities that I thought giving away money was fun. Moral worth only comes when you do something because you know that it is your duty and you would do it regardless of whether you liked it. Imagine two people out together drinking at a bar late one night, and each of them decides to drive home very drunk.
They drive in different directions through the middle of nowhere. One of them encounters no one on the road, and so gets home without incident regardless of totally reckless driving. The other drunk is not so lucky and encounters someone walking at night, and kills the pedestrian with the car.
Kant would argue that based on these actions both drunks are equally bad, and the fact that one person got lucky does not make them any better than the other drunk.
After all, they both made the same choices, and nothing within either one's control had anything to do with the difference in their actions. The same reasoning applies to people who act for the right reasons.
If both people act for the right reasons, then both are morally worthy, even if the actions of one of them happen to lead to bad consequences by bad luck.
Imagine that he gives to a charity and he intends to save hundreds of starving children in a remote village. The food arrives in the village but a group of rebels finds out that they have food, and they come to steal the food and end up killing all the children in the village and the adults too.
The intended consequence of feeding starving children was good, and the actual consequences were bad. Kant is not saying that we should look at the intended consequences in order to make a moral evaluation.
Kant is claiming that regardless of intended or actual consequences, moral worth is properly assessed by looking at the motivation of the action, which may be selfish even if the intended consequences are good. One might think Kant is claiming that if one of my intentions is to make myself happy, that my action is not worthy. This is a mistake. The consequence of making myself happy is a good consequence, even according to Kant.
Kant clearly thinks that people being happy is a good thing. There is nothing wrong with doing something with an intended consequence of making yourself happy, that is not selfishness.
You can get moral worth doing things that you enjoy, but the reason you are doing them cannot be that you enjoy them, the reason must be that they are required by duty. Also, there is a tendency to think that Kant says it is always wrong to do something that just causes your own happiness, like buying an ice cream cone.
This is not the case. Kant thinks that you ought to do things to make yourself happy as long as you make sure that they are not immoral i. Getting ice cream is not immoral, and so you can go ahead and do it. Doing it will not make you a morally worthy person, but it won't make you a bad person either.
Many actions which are permissible but not required by duty are neutral in this way. It is fine if they enjoy doing it, but it must be the case that they would do it even if they did not enjoy it. The overall theme is that to be a good person you must be good for goodness sake.
His argument for this is summarized by James Rachels as follows:. And, crucially for Kant, persons cannot lose their humanity by their misdeeds — even the most vicious persons, Kant thought, deserve basic respect as persons with humanity. Although Kant does not state this as an imperative, as he does in the other formulations, it is easy enough to put it in that form: Act so that through your maxims you could be a legislator of universal laws.
This sounds very similar to the first formulation. However, in this case we focus on our status as universal law givers rather than universal law followers. This is of course the source of the very dignity of humanity Kant speaks of in the second formulation.
A rational will that is merely bound by universal laws could act accordingly from natural and non-moral motives, such as self-interest. But in order to be a legislator of universal laws, such contingent motives, motives that rational agents such as ourselves may or may not have, must be set aside. Hence, we are required, according to this formulation, to conform our behavior to principles that express this autonomy of the rational will — its status as a source of the very universal laws that obligate it.
The Autonomy Formula presumably does this by putting on display the source of our dignity and worth, our status as free rational agents who are the source of the authority behind the very moral laws that bind us.
This formulation has gained favor among Kantians in recent years see Rawls, ; Hill, Many see it as introducing more of a social dimension to Kantian morality.
The intuitive idea behind this formulation is that our fundamental moral obligation is to act only on principles which could earn acceptance by a community of fully rational agents each of whom have an equal share in legislating these principles for their community. Kant claimed that all of these CI formulas were equivalent. Unfortunately, he does not say in what sense. Thus, his claim that the formulations are equivalent could be interpreted in a number of ways.
There are remaining doubts some commentators have, however, about whether this strategy can capture the full meaning of the Humanity Formula or explain all of the duties that Kant claims to derive from it Wood , ; Cureton Perhaps, then, if the formulas are not equivalent in meaning, they are nevertheless logically interderivable and hence equivalent in this sense. That would have the consequence that the CI is a logical truth, and Kant insists that it is not or at least that it is not analytic.
Since the CI formulas are not logical truths, then, it is possible that they could be logically interderivable. However, despite his claim that each contains the others within it, what we find in the Groundwork seems best interpreted as a derivation of each successive formula from the immediately preceding formula.
There are, nonetheless, a few places in which it seems that Kant is trying to work in the opposite direction. One is found in his discussion of the Humanity Formula. But he postulates humanity is absolutely valuable. Thus , we must act only on maxims that can be universal laws. This we think anomolous discussion may well get at some deep sense in which Kant thought the formulations were equivalent.
Nonetheless, this derivation of the universal law formulation from the Humanity Formulation seems to require a substantive, synthetic claim, namely, that humanity is indeed absolutely valuable. The most straightforward interpretation of the claim that the formulas are equivalent is as the claim that following or applying each formula would generate all and only the same duties Allison This seems to be supported by the fact that Kant used the same examples through the Law of Nature Formula and the Humanity Formula.
In other words, respect for humanity as an end in itself could never lead you to act on maxims that would generate a contradiction when universalized, and vice versa. The subjective differences between formulas are presumably differences that appeal in different ways to various conceptions of what morality demands of us. But this difference in meaning is compatible with there being no practical difference, in the sense that conformity to one formulation cannot lead one to violate another formulation.
Most readers interpret Kant as holding that autonomy is a property of rational wills or agents. It contains first and foremost the idea of laws made and laid down by oneself, and, in virtue of this, laws that have decisive authority over oneself. Consider how political freedom in liberal theories is thought to be related to legitimate political authority: A state is free when its citizens are bound only by laws in some sense of their own making — created and put into effect, say, by vote or by elected representatives.
The laws of that state then express the will of the citizens who are bound by them. An autonomous state is thus one in which the authority of its laws is in the will of the people in that state, rather than in the will of a people external to that state, as when one state imposes laws on another during occupation or colonization.
In the latter case, the laws have no legitimate authority over those citizens. In a similar fashion, we may think of a person as free when bound only by her own will and not by the will of another. Her actions then express her own will and not the will of someone or something else.
The authority of the principles binding her will is then also not external to her will. It comes from the fact that she willed them.
So autonomy, when applied to an individual, ensures that the source of the authority of the principles that bind her is in her own will. For a contrasting interpretation of autonomy that emphasizes the intrinsic value of freedom of choice and the instrumental role of reason in preserving that value, see Guyer This is, firstly, the concept of a will that does not operate through the influence of factors outside of this responsiveness to apparent reasons.
For a will to be free is thus for it to be physically and psychologically unforced in its operation. Hence, behaviors that are performed because of obsessions or thought disorders are not free in this negative sense. But also, for Kant, a will that operates by being determined through the operation of natural laws, such as those of biology or psychology, cannot be thought of as operating by responding to reasons.
Hence, determination by natural laws is conceptually incompatible with being free in a negative sense. Indeed, Kant goes out of his way in his most famous work, the Critique of Pure Reason , to argue that we have no rational basis for believing our wills to be free. Of such things, he insists, we can have no knowledge.
For much the same reason, Kant is not claiming that a rational will cannot operate without feeling free. Thus, one engages in these natural sciences by searching for purposes in nature. Yet when an evolutionary biologist, for instance, looks for the purpose of some organ in some creature, she does not after all thereby believe that the creature was designed that way, for instance, by a Deity.
Kant says that a will that cannot exercise itself except under the Idea of its freedom is free from a practical point of view im practischer Absicht. In saying such wills are free from a practical point of view, he is saying that in engaging in practical endeavors — trying to decide what to do, what to hold oneself and others responsible for, and so on — one is justified in holding oneself to all of the principles to which one would be justified in holding wills that are autonomous free wills.
Thus, once we have established the set of prescriptions, rules, laws and directives that would bind an autonomous free will, we then hold ourselves to this very same of set prescriptions, rules, laws and directives. And one is justified in this because rational agency can only operate by seeking to be the first cause of its actions, and these are the prescriptions, and so on, of being a first cause of action.
Therefore, rational agents are free in a negative sense insofar as any practical matter is at issue. Crucially, rational wills that are negatively free must be autonomous, or so Kant argues.
This is because the will is a kind of cause—willing causes action. Kant took from Hume the idea that causation implies universal regularities: if x causes y , then there is some universally valid law connecting X s to Y s.
These laws, which Kant thought were universal too, govern the movements of my body, the workings of my brain and nervous system and the operation of my environment and its effects on me as a material being. But they cannot be the laws governing the operation of my will; that, Kant already argued, is inconsistent with the freedom of my will in a negative sense.
So, the will operates according to a universal law, though not one authored by nature, but one of which I am the origin or author. Thus, Kant argues, a rational will, insofar as it is rational, is a will conforming itself to those laws valid for any rational will. Kant appeared not to recognize the gap between the law of an autonomous rational will and the CI, but he was apparently unsatisfied with the argument establishing the CI in Groundwork III for another reason, namely, the fact that it does not prove that we really are free.
Hence, while in the Groundwork Kant relies on a dubious argument for our autonomy to establish that we are bound by the moral law, in the second Critique , he argues from the bold assertion of our being bound by the moral law to our autonomy. One strategy favored recently has been to turn back to the arguments of Groundwork II for help.
Kant himself repeatedly claimed that these arguments are merely analytic but that they do not establish that there is anything that answers to the concepts he analyzes. Kant clearly takes himself to have established that rational agents such as ourselves must take the means to our ends, since this is analytic of rational agency.
But there is a chasm between this analytic claim and the supposed synthetic conclusion that rational agency also requires conforming to a further, non-desire based, principle of practical reason such as the CI. Nevertheless, some see arguments in Groundwork II that establish just this. If this assumption is true, then if one can on independent grounds prove that there is something which is an end in itself, one will have an argument for a categorical imperative.
One such strategy, favored by Korsgaard and Wood relies on the apparent argument Kant gives that humanity is an end in itself. Guyer, by contrast, sees an argument for freedom as an end in itself Guyer Both strategies have faced textual and philosophical hurdles. The core idea is that Kant believed that all moral theories prior to his own went astray because they portrayed fundamental moral principles as appealing to the existing interests of those bound by them.
This in turn apparently implies that our wills are necessarily aimed at what is rational and reasonable. To will something, on this picture, is to govern oneself in accordance with reason. Often, however, we fail to effectively so govern ourselves because we are imperfect rational beings who are caused to act by our non—rational desires and inclinations. The result, at least on one version of this interpretation Wolff , is that we either act rationally and reasonably and so autonomously or we are merely caused to behave in certain ways by non—rational forces acting on us and so heteronomously.
This is, however, an implausible view. It implies that all irrational acts, and hence all immoral acts, are not willed and therefore not free. However, several prominent commentators nonetheless think that there is some truth in it Engstrom ; Reath ; Korsgaard , , In particular, when we act immorally, we are either weak—willed or we are misusing our practical reason by willing badly.
We do not have the capacity to aim to act on an immoral maxim because the will is identified with practical reason, so when we will to perform an immoral act, we implicitly but mistakenly take our underlying policy to be required by reason.
Our choice is nonetheless free and attributable to us because our will was involved in leading us to take the act to be rational and reasonable. It remains to be seen whether, on this complicated interpretation of Kant, it sufficiently allows for the possibility that one can knowingly and willingly do wrong if the will is practical reason and practical reason is, in part, the moral law.
Thus, rather than treating admirable character traits as more basic than the notions of right and wrong conduct, Kant takes virtues to be explicable only in terms of a prior account of moral or dutiful behavior. He does not try to make out what shape a good character has and then draw conclusions about how we ought to act on that basis. He sets out the principles of moral conduct based on his philosophical account of rational agency, and then on that basis defines virtue as a kind of strength and resolve to act on those principles despite temptations to the contrary.
Moreover, the disposition is to overcome obstacles to moral behavior that Kant thought were ineradicable features of human nature. Thus, virtue appears to be much more like what Aristotle would have thought of as a lesser trait, viz. Third, in viewing virtue as a trait grounded in moral principles, and vice as principled transgression of moral law, Kant thought of himself as thoroughly rejecting what he took to be the Aristotelian view that virtue is a mean between two vices.
The Aristotelian view, he claimed, assumes that virtue typically differs from vice only in terms of degree rather than in terms of the different principles each involves MM , They differ in that the prodigal person acts on the principle of acquiring means with the sole intention of enjoyment, while the avaricious person acts on the principle of acquiring means with the sole intention of possessing them.
Fourth, in classical views the distinction between moral and non-moral virtues is not particularly significant. A virtue is some sort of excellence of the soul, but one finds classical theorists treating wit and friendliness alongside courage and justice. Since Kant holds moral virtue to be a trait grounded in moral principle, the boundary between non-moral and moral virtues could not be more sharp.
Even so, Kant shows a remarkable interest in non-moral virtues; indeed, much of Anthropology is given over to discussing the nature and sources of a variety of character traits, both moral and non-moral. Fifth, virtue cannot be a trait of divine beings, if there are such, since it is the power to overcome obstacles that would not be present in them. This is not to say that to be virtuous is to be the victor in a constant and permanent war with ineradicable evil impulses or temptations.
Should all of our desires and interests be trained ever so carefully to comport with what morality actually requires of us, this would not change in the least the fact that morality is still duty for us. For should this come to pass, it would not change the fact that each and every desire and interest could have run contrary to the moral law.
And it is the fact that they can conflict with moral law, not the fact that they actually do conflict with it, that makes duty a constraint, and hence is virtue essentially a trait concerned with constraint.
For instance, he holds that the lack of virtue is compatible with possessing a good will G 6: That one acts from duty, even repeatedly and reliably can thus be quite compatible with an absence of the moral strength to overcome contrary interests and desires. Someone with a good will, who is genuinely committed to duty for its own sake, might simply fail to encounter any significant temptation that would reveal the lack of strength to follow through with that commitment. Among the virtues Kant discusses are those of self-respect, honesty, thrift, self-improvement, beneficence, gratitude, sociability, and forgiveness.
Kant also distinguishes vice, which is a steadfast commitment to immorality, from particular vices, which involve refusing to adopt specific moral ends or committing to act against those ends. Although Kant gives several examples in the Groundwork that illustrate this principle, he goes on to describe in later writings, especially in The Metaphysics of Morals , a complicated normative ethical theory for interpreting and applying the CI to human persons in the natural world.
His framework includes various levels, distinctions and application procedures. Kant, in particular, describes two subsidiary principles that are supposed to capture different aspects of the CI. These principles, in turn, justify more specific duties of right and of ethics and virtue.
For example, Kant claims that the duty not to steal the property of another person is narrow and perfect because it precisely defines a kind of act that is forbidden. The duty of beneficence, on the other hand, is characterized as wide and imperfect because it does not specify exactly how much assistance we must provide to others.
Even with a system of moral duties in place, Kant admits that judgment is often required to determine how these duties apply to particular circumstances. It denies, in other words, the central claim of teleological moral views. For instance, act consequentialism is one sort of teleological theory. It asserts that the right action is that action of all the alternatives available to the agent that has the best overall outcome.
Here, the goodness of the outcome determines the rightness of an action. Another sort of teleological theory might focus instead on character traits. In this case, it is the goodness of the character of the person who does or would perform it that determines the rightness of an action.
In both cases, as it were, the source or ground of rightness is goodness. Rightness, on the standard reading of Kant, is not grounded in the value of outcomes or character.
There are several reasons why readers have thought that Kant denies the teleological thesis. First, he makes a plethora of statements about outcomes and character traits that appear to imply an outright rejection of both forms of teleology. This appears to say that moral rightness is not a function of the value of intended or actual outcomes. These certainly appear to be the words of someone who rejects the idea that what makes actions right is primarily their relationship to what good may come of those actions, someone who rejects outright the act consequentialist form of teleology.
Moreover, Kant begins the Groundwork by noting that character traits such as the traditional virtues of courage, resolution, moderation, self-control, or a sympathetic cast of mind possess no unconditional moral worth, G —94, — If the moral rightness of an action is grounded in the value of the character traits of the person who performs or would perform it then it seems Kant thinks that it would be grounded in something of only conditional value.
This certainly would not comport well with the virtue ethics form of teleology. Perhaps the first philosopher to suggest a teleological reading of Kant was John Stuart Mill.
In the first chapter of his Utilitarianism , Mill implies that the Universal Law formulation of the Categorical Imperative could only sensibly be interpreted as a test of the consequences of universal adoption of a maxim. And because they are universal, Hare argued, they forbid making exceptions.
Indeed, Cummiskey argues that they must be: Respect for the value of humanity entails treating the interests of each as counting for one and one only, and hence for always acting to produce the best overall outcome. That, she argues, would imply that there would be no reason to conform to them. Instead, Kant thought the principles of rationality taken together constitute rational agency, and rational agency so constituted itself functions as a value that justifies moral action , Guyer argues that autonomy itself is the value grounding moral requirements.
And Wood argues that humanity itself is the grounding value for Kant. Since Primoratz also backs up his view with the mutually assumed value that human life is sacred, it seems morally justified in the taking of a human beings life if that person has taken one himself. All in all, it can be neatly and bluntly summarized in four words: Murderers deserve to die. This is a very Kantian perspective, the murderers making exceptions for themselves in the moral order of the world is unjust.
If you apply the golden rule to murderers, you could say they want to be killed by the way they have treated other human beings. Not only that, the law even states that too. I believe that the state killing off the criminals are no better. I also believe that I am no better than that criminal in wanting them dead. There are many reasons why capital punishment is justified as a good thing. It is a conflict of what is moral…. Yes, he has good intentions, but that does not justify his horrible actions.
If one stole from a stealer just for the simple fact that they stole, does that justify their actions? It makes us no better than the said stealer, or killer in a more extreme case. A second point on why the death punishment is cruel is because we are not God. That may sound extreme to compare humans to a God, but it is what we are trying to play a part as. Essays Essays FlashCards. Browse Essays. Sign in. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Show More. Read More.
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