“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”-Immanuel Kant
The ethics of Aristotle taught young men his virtues as a moral code and as key to happiness until 529 B.C.E., when Byzantine Emperor Justinian I converted the empire to Christianity and forced the closing of non-Christian schools of philosophy. For nearly a millennium Christian and its dependency on interpretations of Biblical text ruled the western world.
The fourteenth century’s Renaissance broke from dependence on scripture and church authority of the medieval age for guidance in matters of morality to shift its focus to the classical Greek and Latin texts. The Renaissance found in the Greek philosophers a system of ethics handed down from Aristotle that provided an absolute morality without dependence on the commands of a divine being. Aristotle’s virtues combined with Christian theology to rule philosophical thinking for centuries, until Isaac Newton published the Principia Mathematica (1687) and demonstrated a universe ruled not by supernatural commands, but by mechanical forces. The Principia ushered in a new era, the Age of Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment gave birth to Immanuel Kant.
Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 at Konigsberg, in what was at the time of his birth a part of East Prussia. He grew up under the rigid dogma of Pietism — an evangelical branch of the Lutheran Church — and was later influenced by the works of Christian Wolff and John Locke at the Albertina College at the University of Konigsberg.
A flurry of works in the 1780s included The Critique of Pure Reason (1781,1787), Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), The Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and The Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790). At that time the Age of Enlightenment was coming to a close to make room for the Romantic age and the Industrial Revolution. The Enlightenment had come into existence as a result of Sir Isaac Newton’s mechanistic universe and the consequent belief that man did not need religious authorities to tell him how to live or what to believe. He now had reason to guide him. Inherent in that view was the belief that human, scientific, and industrial progress would support tradition and a belief in a god and in the compatibility of science and religion. But that tradition required freedom to choose what is right over what is wrong, and Newton’s science, created a crisis in philosophical circles with its insistence on a nature governed by mechanistic laws. If the universe operates on mechanical laws, then humans too are subject to those laws. If human behavior is mechanical, and therefore deterministic, man has no freedom to choose his actions. Newton’s science, the fountainhead of the Enlightenment, came to threaten the freedom essential to Reason. In The Critique of Pure Reason Kant sought to reconcile traditional morality and religion with Newtonian science.
With the Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant laid the foundation for his deontological (duty-based) ethics. Duty, not the consequences of an action, he said, marks the distinction between a moral act and an immoral one. His views on morality are most interesting in that they focus on absolutes with only oblique reference to a god. God gave us reason, he said, so that we may know right from wrong. Until Kant, ethics were relative, meaning the ethics of a situation relied on the situation itself, or they were rules and commands from a supernatural being. Rules of morality were situational or God inspired with little wiggle room in between.
Central to Kant’s philosophy was the concept of good will. With good will, he rejected consequentialism, the belief that the outcome of an action dictated its morality. He maintained an action to be moral if the actor’s best wishes lay behind it. As long as we maintain good will toward others, our actions are moral, regardless of the consequences of the action.
Having rid of consequentialism and established duty as the basis for his philosophy, Kant moved on to the question: What commands will guide our good will and duties?
The answer: the Categorical Imperative.
He defined two types of imperatives, the Hypothetical and the Categorical. A hypothetical command is one we obey because we seek a specific outcome — a consequence. Those types of commands follow an “if, then” formula. If I desire a certain outcome, then I must do this. If I want to earn a degree, then I must go to school. If I want a cola, then I must have the correct amount of money or credit for the purchase. The hypothetical imperative must be obeyed only if and when we wish for an outcome.
The categorical imperative, though, is a command we must always obey. . .all the time and in every situation. This imperative tells us that any action we take must be one we grant to everyone else. If you tell your girlfriend the little white lie that those slacks do not make her look fat, you grant the world the right to tell the same kind of lie. On a more serious note, if you steal a box of tools from your neighbor’s garden shed, then you give permission to the entire world to steal. . . even to steal from you.
Kant’s Categorical Imperative and his insistence on good will could alone make his ethics a viable system for all of us, but he didn’t stop there. He devised two formulations of the Categorical Imperative. The first states, as above, that we must conduct ourselves in such manner that we give to everyone the right to act as we do. The second formulation informs us that we may use nature’s resources to our own end, but people possess free will and can think for themselves and are therefore a “kingdom of ends.” Individuals have their own ends, and should not be used by others for their ends only; doing so violates their autonomy and reduces them to mere objects. The modern meme states it as, “treat people as ends, not as means.”
Kant’s philosophy in the second formulation might come across as an ivory-tower academic’s musings, but Kant kept it bound to the real world with the acknowledgement that we may, in fact, use others if we take into our considerations that they are human, that they have their own ends and their own free will. When a waiter brings our meals, we use her to achieve our end — that of getting food into our bodies. But, Kant says, we must acknowledge to ourselves that she is serving her own ends by selling her labor for financial gain. Grant her respect and humanity, and the act of using her is not immoral.
In addressing the problem of what to do about the free rider — the unethical person who will violate Kant’s ethics for as long and as often as he supposes he can get away with it — Kant offers a solution: respect the criminal by holding him responsible for his actions. The criminal could have chosen a different path, but didn’t, and thus tacitly accepts and gives permission to his punishment. He did not ask himself, “If I do this, am I not giving everyone else the right to do the same?” Instead, he committed the criminal act because he received a gain from it and blocked from his thoughts that others will lose from his action — and he thought he could get away with it.
“If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime,” say Kantian ethicists
