Handout 4/15: Kant and the Categorical Imperative I

Kant’s Goals: Kant is strongly committed to the idea that moral principles, if they exist, must be
a priori. By this, we mean that they are not things we discover about the world through
experience or empirical investigations, but rather arrived at by reasoning alone and seemingly
grounded in pure reason.
A priori A posteriori
(i) All bachelors are unmarried. (i) Bachelors are taxed more than married
men.
(ii) All three-sided plane figures will also
have three angles. (ii) The state of Wyoming is shaped like a
rectangle.
(iii) 3 + 3 = 6
(iii) A carbon atom has six protons.

Why does Kant think morality must be this way? The main reason seems to the fact that moral
principles are universal and necessary in a very strong sense:
“Unless one wants to dispute whether the concept of morality has any truth and relation to any
possible object, one could not deny that its law is of such an extensive significance that it would
have to be valid not merely for human beings but for all rational beings in general, and not
merely under contingent conditions and with exceptions, but with absolute necessity, then it is
clear that no experience could give occasion for inferring even the possibility of such apodictic
laws” (pp. 24)
Another worry he has is that we can never be sure if there ever have been any examples of a truly
moral action—of genuine duty— to learn from because it may be that all seemingly moral
actions have been secretly motivated by non-moral motivations.
Kant also thinks that ‘pure’ moral principles, grounded in reason alone, have a special kind of
worth or dignity that can command our respect and which ‘mixed’ principles cannot.

Imperatives: For Kant, an imperative is a command of reason which can be expressed as an

ought. They say it would be good to do or not do something. They come in two kinds:
1. Hypothetical Imperatives: these are conditional imperatives. They tell us what to do
given our adoption or willing of some particular end. In other words, hypothetical
imperatives tell us to something IF we have willed an end. Hypothetical imperatives
concern the means to the willed end—the object of a hypothetical imperative is good for
the sake of some other end.
Examples:
 2. Categorical Imperatives: these are imperatives that apply to us no matter what end we
will. They represent an action as being categorically necessary.

The Categorical Imperative: Taking for granted the existence of a universal law, what can be
inferred from the mere fact of its existence about the content of its commands?
Kant’s answer: The commands of a universal moral law must take the form of categorical
imperatives—imperatives that apply unconditionally and necessarily to all rational beings. The
moral force of a categorical imperative does not depend on the contingent circumstances of any
particular rational being, and does not depend on any other, more fundamental law.
But what would such an imperative look like? Kant tells us that we can determine this from the
concept of a categorical imperative. The essential feature of a universal law is its necessity and
universality. It cannot be restricted by any other conditions. So, all that the categorical imperative
could be is to act in accordance with the universality of the law. Thus, we get Kant’s First
Formulation of the Categorical Imperative:
“Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it
become a universal law” (p 37). This formulation is often called ‘the formula of the universal
law’ or ‘the formula of the universal law of nature.’
Here a Maxim is a subjective principle which guides our decision-making.
This formula is often seen (by modern Kantians like John Rawls and Onora O’Neil) as providing
a kind of decision-making procedure for us to follow. We start by proposing a maxim that
captures a proposed plan of action, and then we imagine a world in which your maxim serves as
a universal law for all rational agents in a similar situation. Once you have such a world in mind,
you must ask (a) if your maxim would even be conceivable in such a world, and (b) if you could
rationally will your maxim in such a world.

Deriving Duties From the CI: Kant thinks we can get more particular duties from this very
general imperative. He gives us four examples:
1. A duty not to kill oneself: Kant begins with the case of a person who wants to kill herself to
escape from her miserable life. As such, she adopts this maxim: “from self-love, I make it my
principle to shorten my life when by longer term it threatens more ill than it promises
agreeableness” (38). Could this maxim be a universal law? No, says Kant:
“a nature whose law it was to destroy life through the same feeling whose vocation it is to impel
the furtherance of life would contradict itself, and thus could not subsist as nature; hence that
maxim could not possibly obtain as a universal law of nature, and consequently it entirely
contradicts the supreme principle of all duty” (38-9)
Q: What’s the supposed contradiction here?

2. A duty not to lie: here Kant invites us to consider a case in which a man needs money urgently
but has no means to pay back a loan. As such, his only option is lie to a potential lender and
guarantee that he will be able to pay back any money loaned to him. That would mean adopting
this maxim: “If I believe myself to be in pecuniary distress, then I will borrow money and
promise to pay it back, although I know this will never happen.” But:
“For the universality of a law that everyone who believes himself to be in distress could promise
whatever occurred to him with the intention of not keeping it would make impossible the
promise and the end one might have in making it, since no one would believe that anything has
been promised him, but rather would laugh about every such utterance as vain pretense” (39).
Q: What’s the contradiction here?

Q: What do you think about the Murderer at the Door Case?

3. A third person finds that she has a talent, but she chooses not to develop it because she would
rather spend time on idle amusements. If her maxim became a universal law, there would be no
contradiction, but there would be a kind of impossibility in willing this:
“It is impossible for [she] to will that this should become a universal law of nature, or that it
should be implanted in us as such by natural instinct. For as a rational being [she] necessarily
wills that all the faculties in [her] should be developed, because they are serviceable and given to
[her] for all kinds of possible aims” (39-40)
Q: What is the issue here?

4. A fourth person decides not to ask for help from others, nor to give it. He does not wish to
interfere with or harm anyone, he just does not wish to help them. However, this maxim faces a
similar kind of problem:
“although it is possible that a universal law of nature could well subsist in accordance with that
maxim, yet it is impossible to will that such a principle should be valid without exception as a
natural law. For a will that resolved on this would conflict with itself, since the case could
sometimes arise in which he needs the love and sympathetic participation of others, and where,
through such a natural law arising from his own will, he would rob himself of all the hope of
assistance that he wishes for himself” (40)

Perfect vs Imperfect Duties: The first two duties are perfect duties, according to Kant, which
hold absolutely because willing the maxim that goes against them involves a kind of
contradiction. The second two duties are imperfect, for they do admit of some exceptions—you
have to help people sometimes, but not always.