A new perspective of Kant’s universalizability

Jay Deshmukh, Tanmay Thakkar, Tathagath Karmakar

November 15, 2017

Abstract
In this project we would like to investigate one of the deontological theories by Immanuel
Kant, namely Kantianism. Kant formulated a supreme principle of morality, referred to as the
Categorical Imperative. Actions are judged as moral not on the basis of their consequences
but on whether they fulfill our duty as prescribed by the Categorical Imperative. There are
hence actions which are deemed immoral even if they have positive consequences. This invites
criticisms when contrasted with utilitarianism which we shall also explore. Kant says that for
an action to be moral, we should be able to universalize it, i.e. apply it to all people, without a
contradiction occurring. We shall attempt to understand Kant’s principle of universalizability
and defend it by taking a fresh interpretation.

Immanuel Kant was one of the most important philosophers and thinkers of the nineteenth century.
His work on moral theory is still considered one of the most valuable works in this field. Before
presenting his own view, Kant rejected consequentialism or teleological ethics, claiming that they
do not possess any basis to form a valid moral theory. His idea was that by rational arguments
we can judge if something is moral or not. He introduced the idea of the ‘Categorical Imperative’.
We shall attempt to visit this concept and understand it in great depth and then go on to explain
our interpretation of it.

The Kantian theory is an example of Deontological moral theories. These are theories which
suggest that the morality of actions is determined by their role in fulfilling duties. Thus morality
can be judged without taking care of the consequences. To formulate his view, Kant first placed
humans at a special position. He argued, animals are driven by impulse and do not have choice. So
the questions about morality do not arise for them. However, human beings have to make choices.
Only rational arguments can lead human to the right (moral) choices. Kant used the notion of
imperatives to present his thoughts. An imperative is a command or a rule. For example, "Don’t
run behind a train" is an imperative. Kant first made a distinction between hypothetical and
categorical imperatives. A hypothetical imperative is one which must be followed conditionally
based on a relevant desire. For instance, "If you wish to become a king, you should be kind to
the poor". This sentence tells us to fulfil some duty if something is to be attained. However, in
case someone isn’t interested in being a king, the senetence holds no value to him. On the other
hand, a categorical imperative must be followed irrespective of desire. To state formally, the cate-
gorical imperative is a command that must be followed with no exceptions. For example, "Don’t
lie". Such unavoidable sense of duty imposed by these sentences are what makes them valuable
regarding moral thoery.

Before delving into the discussion of categorical imperatives, we must remember that Kant made
important contribution in metaphysics and epistemology too. One of the most notable of them is
introducing the concept of analytic and synthetic truths. Analytic truths are truths by meaning
of the words associated with it; like "triangles have three sides". While, synthetic truths require
more than just the meaning of the words. For example, "Sum of three angles of a triangle is 180◦ ."
Now synthetic apriori are truths which aren’t true trivially, but their truth can be derived based on
rational arguments. Kant’s categorical imperatives can be best compared with synthetic aprioris.
They have certain property called ’universalizability’ attached to them which, according to Kant,
can be determined through apriori reasoning.

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“Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become
a universal law (of nature).” A maxim is a general rule or principle by which one acts. The im-
perative states that for a maxim to be valid, it needs to be “universalizable”. Universalizable in
this context means that the maxim should allow all other people to follow the exact same maxim
with the knowledge that everyone follows the maxim, without running into a contradiction. No
one is allowed to make an exception for oneself. For example, “Don’t take bribes” is an imperative.
An imperative can be hypothetical or categorical. Hypothetical imperatives assert what should be
done given a situation . “If you see a beggar, give him money” is a hypothetical imperative. The
content of this sentence comes into consideration only when we see a beggar. This is to be con-
trasted with categorical imperatives which are requirements to be obeyed under all circumstances
without exception. Consider the imperative: “don’t lie”. According to Kant, there shouldn’t be any
exceptions to following this. In his formulation of moral theory, Kant stressed on universalizability.
If “steal whenever you like something” is followed in every situation, everyone would take measures
to stop theft of their belongings. This would eventually make stealing impossible and thus no one
would be able to follow this maxim anymore. Since it becomes eventually impossible to follow the
maxim, the whole process goes in vain. However, “never steal” doesn’t face any such catastrophe
and can be taken as a universalizable (categorical) imperative. We can see that, Kant’s argument
tries to provide a way of assessing actions based on their content not on their consequences.

To go much deeper into the debate, let’s have a careful look at the procedure to be followed
while investigating universalizability of an imperative. After formulation of a new imperative of
the type “Everyone should do A when B happens to achieve C”, one should hypothetically conceive
a society where everyone obeys it. In order to do that, one must ensure that -
• he/she doesn’t face any contradiction rationally in following the imperative, and
• he/she is rationally willing to live in the conceived world
In this way Kant divided maxims into two classes, perfect duties and imperfect duties. If any
imperative violates the first condition, it is a perfect duty to not follow the imperative. “Don’t
lie” is a perfect duty because we can never lie rationally. These duties correspond to our own
moral perfection, duties of improving our own selves. On the other hand there can be imperatives
which do not violate the first condition but compromise the second condition. For example the
categorical imperative “never help others”, unlike “don’t steal”, does not succumb to contradictions.
However, we wouldn’t rationally choose to live in a world where people never help each other. It
is thus an imperfect duty to help others. This class mainly corresponds to our social duties and
responsibilities. One of the criticisms and a source of hesitation for many is the case of lying for
the benefit of others.. In a world where “never lie” is a categorical imperative, what would happen
if a murder comes to you and asks the whereabouts of your friend (who is hiding in your house)?
Should you save your friend and disobey the imperative or the contrary? Kant argues that one
must obey the imperative and comply with the murderer’s request.
According to Kant, the imperative ‘lie but only to save your friend’ cannot be universalized since
the knowledge of this would cause the murderers to not ask you where your friend is hiding, since
they’d be certain that you’d lie. This does not pass the first test of a categorical imperative as
it is running into a contradiction. Hence exceptions to a categorical imperative cannot be made.
However, this puts us in an uncomfortable situation as it doesn’t match our intuitive notions of
morality and ethics. Furthermore, at the outset this makes Kant appears martinet and naive.

We hope to address this seemingly naive “follow rules just because” by interpreting Kant’s ideas
in a different way. Unfortunately, Kant himself is no longer with us to tell us if our interpretations
of his ideas are correct, but we shall continue with the risk of steelmanning. We think there is
potential in viewing Kant’s ideas that will appeal to consequentialists as well. Let’s go through
some popular moral dilemmas and apply Kant’s ideas.

We take a situation as follows. You are a soldier, captured by the enemy and are now being
interrogated. The enemy wants to kill your general and they give you a choice. You can tell them
the exact location of the general and they will eliminate him via a surgical strike, avoiding any
collateral damage. However if you refuse to tell them, they will inevitably have to nuke the entire
city in order to kill him. What will you do? Say you lie, and point to some abandoned garage.
The enemy sends a single missile, obliterating the garage. They think they’ve killed the general

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but the general finds out about the threat to his life via this incident and escapes to a safe hiding
spot. Is this an ethical lie? Kant would say that if people universally lied about the location of
their general then people would be aware of such a trend. No one would bother asking and just
nuke the city entirely, refraining from any sort of negotiation. This does suggest in an overall long
term harm that is being caused due to lying in such situations. We shall say that what he means
to say is “Don’t do things that undermine the possibility to offer positive-sum bargains.”[1]

Let us take another example and analyze with this interpretation in mind. You happen to be
a terrible soldier and this time find yourself not captured by enemies but stranded in a desert,
with no help or supplies, waiting for your death. Quite fortunately a man in a car enjoying a ride
on the sand dunes, happens to pass by. A bit unfortunately, as with most recreational sand dune
riding men, he is quite greedy and selfish and offers to save your life in exchange for money. You
don’t happen to have any money with you at that moment but you can give him money once he
rescues you and takes you to a city. He takes you to the city and once rescued, you run off without
paying. You’re safely back home and didn’t need to spend a penny! Sounds great right? Let us see
why this is morally wrong according to our positive bargain concept. You would rather pay some
money than die in the desert, the greedy man would rather make some money over continuing
his dune riding. What is being offered is thus a positive sum bargain. If you choose to run away
without paying, then universalizing it makes the greedy man not offer the bargain at all. If we go
back to the previous situation where you were held captive, the enemy was offering you a positive
sum bargain. They would rather conduct a surgical strike than having to nuke the entire city
and killing a lot of civilians, which seems to be in your best interests as well. If you lied about
the general’s location, then universalizing that would lead to you not being offered such a deal in
the first place. In this light, we start seeing Kant as not some blind rule follower, but extremely
pragmatic. This seems to be inspired from decision theory which would not be associated with a
typical deontologist like him at all.

Let us see how far our new operative statement of Kant’s ideas can be pushed and whether it
can be abused. How will we analyze the scenario of a boss firing an employee who has a different
political party preference. In our new vocabulary, we can easily see that is this idea is universal-
ized, everyone refuses to work with people of different political preferences and hence everyone’s
job opportunities are reduced to half. We can see that the rational thing to do is make the positive
sum bargain and agree to hire/work with people regardless of political affiliations. The problem
we run into here is that we can have many different maxims for the same act of firing the employee
who had different political preferences. If for instance, the employee is conservative, the boss can
claim the maxim used to fire the employee is about not working with people who support gay
marriage. If we universalize that, it leads to great victory for gay people everywhere but we are
not satisfied with the application of our tool. Similarly, after your inevitable exit from the army as
a soldier, you decide to exploit Kant’s ideas of maxims and imperatives to get very rich while being
moral. You say, “My principle is to always do whatever benefits Jay(myself) the most”. Using the
steps outlined previously, if universalized, it becomes, everyone acts on the principle “always do
whatever benefits Jay the most”. We address this and the employee-boss situation together. We
need to go deeper at the meta-level of universalizability and we say something like “universalize
as if the process you use to universalize would itself become universal”. How does that help us?
Well now, Alice will universalize to “do what gets Alice the most money” and Bob will universalize
to “do what gets Bob the most money” and we all lie, cheat and steal, the economy collapses, no
one is happy and the purpose is defeated. It is a positive sum bargain for me to not make such
a maxim. Similarly, if the boss uses any maxim to fire the employee that he/she disagrees with,
meta-universalizability will say that everyone will pick out a value that means a lot to them and
fire people based on it, this again leads to half the jobs lost and the rational thing would be to not
fire the employee.

Kant’s ideas suggest that his view of ethics isn’t dependent on the subject. One cannot have
personal ethics. Ethics is common principle shared by whole system. That’s what the principl of
universalizability enforces. However, possibility of positive sum burgain gives it somewhat personal
tint. Although, as the whole idea is to treat humanity "as an end, not as a mean", at the end of
the day morality remains a collective notion in this framework. Kant’s radical views brings us to
an important question, what about our feelings for someone? Shouldn’t we put hold on our moral

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principles to save someone’s life we care for? Shouldn’t a mother lie to a murderer about her son
(hiding in her closet)? Though Kant’s original ideas were polar opposite of it, whenever we bring
in the concept of positive sum burgain, the question of what one values arise. It might seem that
"Lie to save your dear one"

One more thing to note is that Kant’s method of determining whether something is moral provides
us with a possible algorithm to make a morality machine (machine trying to determine whether an
act is moral or not). However Kant’s original approach can prove to be useless because while man-
ifesting the universalizability it needs to assume human behavior in certain situations. A machine
might not be able to consider the entire spectrum of possible outcomes. It’ll be extremely difficult
to determine whether a certain individual would want to become a part of the world where every-
one follows certain maxim or not. But positive sum burgains give us a clue towards resolving such
issues. At this stage of computer programming, it seems easier to put in a bunch of parameters
and simulate a hypothetical perturbed world following a maxim. The paramters can be used to
determine whether in the given scenario positiive sum burgains are possible. This might give us a
clue regarding the potential implementation of a value system for artificial intelligence. Although,
we’ll have to go a long way before reaching any serious conclusions.

It can’t be denied that Kant’s view has served as a guiding light for many philosophers who
tried to present a moral theory. We see these days that his ideas have fallen out of favour, with
consequentialism being a better guide for individuals than blind rule following. What we have
shown is that Kant’s idea of universalizablity was more powerful than maybe even he envisaged.
The interpretation of his categorical imperative into the positive-sum bargain terminology we used
may not have made Kant happy but it lets us apply his tool to a much broader sphere of situations.
We also want practioners of modern consequentialist methods to know that the roots of decision
theory were laid by none other than the poster boy for deontology, Immanuel Kant.

References
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/16/you-kant-dismiss-universalizability/
[2] http://www.csus.edu/indiv/g/gaskilld/ethics/kantian%20ethics.html
[3] http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantview/#H5