Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant | Notes & Summary
Objective
Kant is attempting to partake in a similar type of project as he did in the Critique of Pure Reason. He wants to figure out how rationality within each rational agent imposes moral constraints on said agent by a priori laws devoid of empiricism, “to work out for once a pure moral philosophy, completely cleansed of everything that may be only empirical and that belongs to anthropology.”
However he believes that, at least in the Groundworks, he is also partaking on a revelatory project. He is clarifying and inducing from regular moral intuition rather than deducing from first principles.
There is a not necessarily lethal tension between the purity of his aims and the empirical and revelatory manner which he satisfies them.
Kant’s opponents aren’t moral skeptics who doubt the existence of morality but rather sentimentalists like Hume and Smith who believes that empirical inclinations are the authority or at least guide for morality.
The Good
Unlike the utilitarians who define the right in terms of the good, Kant defines the good as in keeping accordance to the right.
Kant begins by saying that the only good in this world is a good will (a will is a character constituted both by desires and rationality). “It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will.” Other talents may be contingently good but can always be used for evil. On the other hand a good will will always be good even if it were deprived of all other capacities.
“If with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing and only the good will were left (not, of course, as a mere wish but as the summoning of all means insofar as they are in our control) then, like a jewel, it would still shine by itself, as something that has its full worth in itself.”
What is a good will? A good will is a will that is morally right. Moral rightness is acting in accordance to duty (it does not contradict duty) and acting from duty (it acts for duty’s sake and nothing else). Kant does not prove this but thinks that he is revealing what we already take for granted. Duty can be interpreted as the right. Acting from duty is important because, only by always acting from duty can your goodness not be contingent. He cites the example of a prudent grocer who does not cheat his clients for a consideration of his own interest or even an example of a helpful stranger who operates from compassion as NOT acting from duty. Should the empirical circumstances be different, Kant thinks, both of these individuals would deviate from the right action. As a result we can never judge moral rightness or wrongness from observing the actions of others and sometimes we can even fool ourselves.
What is duty? Kant first thinks that nature does not endow us with useless faculties. Reason however is seemingly useless: instinct is much better suited for survival and welfare. Furthermore, the more one cultivates reason the more one is likely to be less happy:
“We find that the more a cultivated reason purposely occupies itself with the enjoyment of life and with happiness, so much the further does one get away from true satisfaction; and from this there arises in many, and indeed in those who have experimented most with this use of reason, if only they are candid enough to admit it, a certain degree of misology, that is, hatred of reason; for, after calculating all the advantages they draw I do not say from the invention of all the arts of common luxury, but even from the sciences (which seem to them to be, at bottom, only a luxury of the understanding) they find that they have in fact only brought more trouble upon themselves instead of gaining in happiness; and because of this they finally envy rather than despise the more common run of people, who are closer to the guidance of mere natural instinct and do not allow their reason much influence on their behavior.”
Reason therefore must be suited to make us good. “The true vocation of reason must be to produce a will that is good, not perhaps as a means to other purposes, but good in itself, for which reason was absolutely necessary.”
Since reason is given to us to make us good, whatever law that regulates our actions must be accessible by all reasoning agents and by reasoning alone without the input of any empirical considerations. But what could this law be? Kant thinks that it isn’t any specific law like “thou shall not lie” but rather a form of law which means that reason would not contradict itself.
“Since I have deprived the will of every impulse that could arise for it from obeying some law, nothing is left but the conformity of actions as such with universal law, which alone is to serve the will as its principle, that is: I ought never to act except in such a Way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.”
Duty is that the maxims by which we act are in accordance to this law. Kant believes that all of our actions are driven by maxim(s) in the form of “I will do A to B in circumstance C to arrive at motive D”. Thus, the good and the right is to only act under maxims which can be universalized.
Evidently, Kant does not believe that it is the consequences but rather the motives of an action which determines their moral worthiness.
The Categorical Imperative
Kant argues that our wills are determined by both our inclinations as well as reason. Only the latter can act in accordance with laws and principles. If our will, like that of God or Angels were only determined by reason then we would necessarily always follow the universal law. But since we are also beings of desire, that necessitation of the reasoning side is sometimes overpowered by inclinations.
Laws can command our will in two ways. A hypothetical imperative is “If you want X you must do Y” it is contingent on you wanting X and does not form a necessity. A categorical imperative commands because of the type of beings that we are: rational beings. So all categorical imperatives must conform to the law of universalizability.
There are three formulations of what all categorical imperatives must conform to. Kant claims that all the formulations are equivalent, but in what way they are equivalent is up to scholarly debate.
The First Technical Formulation
“Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.“
A maxim can fail to become universalizable through two types of contradictions. 1. Contradiction of logic: you simply cannot universalize lying because it would be logically incoherent to lie in a world where everyone anticipates a lie. 2. Contradiction of will: “I will do A to B in circumstance C to arrive at motive D”. A contradiction of will happens if universalizing this maxim destroys any basis for your own motive D. Another interpretation is that it contradicts natural desires of the human will.
Failing 1 would make something a perfect duty: you must never do X. Failing 2 would make something an imperfect duty: you must sometimes do X.
The Second Formulation of Humanity
“So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”
Only something that contained within it it’s own worth could ground the possibility of a categorical imperative. That something, Kant postulates but does not prove, is the rationality of rational beings.
“But suppose there were something the existence of which in itself has an absolute worth, something which as an end in itself could be a ground of determinate laws; then in it, and in it alone, would lie the ground of a possible categorical imperative, that is, of a practical law.”
Treating an individual as ends has a negative component (perfect duty): there are things we must not do that would rob the person the ability to set his own ends (e.g. demand money at gunpoint). But it also has a positive component (imperfect duty): there are things we must sometimes do to develop humanity as an end in ourselves and others.
The Third Formulation of the Kingdom of Ends
“The will of every rational being as a will that legislates universal law.”
This may be similar to the first formulation but this is focused on law-giving rather than law-following.
Kant argues that the reason previous laws of morality failed is because it posited an external law giving entity. This would mean that we are motivated by external incentives and whatever that law giving entity provided would be contingent on those incentives and thus hypothetical. Much like his metaphysics and epistemology, he wants to find laws from the agent itself such that it becomes self-governing and universal. Thus it is extremely important “if there is a categorical imperative (i.e., a law for every will of a rational being) it can only command that everything be done from the maxim of one’s will as a will that could at the same time have as its object itself as giving universal law; for only then is the practical principle, and the imperative that the will obeys, unconditional, since it can have no interest as its basis.”
A world in which everyone followed the categorical imperative is called a Kingdom of Ends.
“A rational being belongs as a member to the kingdom of ends when he gives universal laws in it but is also himself subject to these laws. He belongs to it as sovereign when, as lawgiving, he is not subject to the will of any other.”
He takes a Platonic move and structures his Kingdom as he does the soul. Much like how rational good has absolute supremacy over happiness in the human, dignity from rationality admits no equivalency to price on things that bring about happiness.
“In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what on the other hand is raised above all price and therefore admits of no equivalent has a dignity.”
Kant describes autonomy as the phenomena of self-governance. It is precisely this ability to participate in the kingdom of ends and ability to legislate laws that grants us dignity. If the moral law can determine all that is morally right and wrong than the supreme power of law-giving must have immense dignity/worth. This dignity and worth is connected to the idea that we are ends in and of ourselves.
“For, nothing can have a worth other than that which the law determines for it. But the lawgiving itself, which determines all worth, must for that very reason have a dignity, that is, an unconditional, incomparable worth; and the word respect alone provides a becoming expression for the estimate of it that a rational being must give. Autonomy is therefore the ground of the dignity of human nature and of every rational nature.”
Autonomy is central to Kant’s theory, it is what grants the law necessity (the fact that it is unconditioned and foley for the fact of duty), what grants our being’s dignity (the fact that we are a source of law-giving), and what makes us free (the fact that we can abide by our own laws of reason and can escape the causal realm of desire is what makes us free).
Egalitarianism
What Kant is building his ethical theory off of is a profound sense of egalitarianism, an equality between all rational beings, that asks us to “kill the self”. The categorical imperative essentially asks us to remove everything empirical: our positions, fortunes, yearnings, relationships… until we are only left with the same form of rationality. All ethical theories are asking us to kill the self in some way, Rawls, Smith, Mill….
“But if we look more closely at the intentions and aspirations in them we everywhere come upon the dear self, which is always turning up; and it is on this that their purpose is based, not on the strict command of duty, which would often require self-denial.”
What Kant is getting at is that all evil comes from making an exception of oneself (not universalizable but I’m gonna do it).
“Only we take the liberty of making an exception to it for ourselves (or just for this once) to the advantage of our inclination.”
Free Will, Immortality, and God
Kant’s argument in chapter two of the dialectic for God and Immortality goes like this: the highest good is dutifulness but the most complete good is the most amount of virtue (duty) combined with the most amount of happiness. Our pure practical reasoning clearly aims for the most complete good, thus it must be achievable. Since in our world 1. virtue is not rewarded with proportionate happiness 2. we do not obtain the highest standard of virtue, there must be 1. a God that allocates happiness in the afterlife in accordance with virtue 2. immortality so we can perfect our virtue.
Even though the first critique concluded that God, Freedom, and Immortality were unknowable. Kant shows, at least in his mind, that we are required to postulate all of these through analyzing our practical reason. Instead of apriori/theoretical proofs he provides us with “practical proofs”. Thus we still cannot cognize them by obtaining a full intellectual understanding of how they operate for that requires they be sensible in the phenomenal realm. But, we can have ample ground to believe in their existence. Kant says that it is better we can’t truly prove these things because then we would act out of a fear of punishment and hope for reward.
Is there a Categorical Imperative?
1. Introduction
I am posing this question as a moral skeptic. This makes it an especially interesting question for Kant because he was not addressing his ethical works to a moral skeptic but more so to one who is looking to clarify and ground one’s moral principles. I am not interested in the workings of this CI and thus my project will not emphasize a critique of it’s internal inconsistencies. Instead, I will focus on inquiring about the reality and actuality of such a CI that Kant proposed.
In section 2, I will explain the importance of this question with respect to Kant’s ethical system by showing how it is initially founded on revelatory and hypothetical rather than deductive claims which desperately needs some form of solid grounding to have normative strength. In section 3, I will elucidate what Kant believed to be a sufficient proof for the actuality of the CI mediated by an equivalence between freedom and the moral law. Lastly, in section 4 and 5, I will critique Kant’s argument from freedom to morality from Groundworks of the Metaphysics of Morals (GMM) and from morality to freedom from The Critique of Practical Reasoning (CPrP) discussing why they are both unsatisfactory.
2. Revelation and Hypothesis
Kant’s first two sections of the GMM, or so I argue, should be read as revelatory and hypothetical postulates rather than a deductive proof. By revelation, I mean that the form of his arguments are designed to clarify our moral thinking by extrapolating from examples, as seen by the title of his first section “Transition from Common Rational to Philosophic Moral Cognition”. His argumentative style is revelatory because he is not arguing against a moral skeptic, at least not now, instead he believes he is just elucidating moral principles that everyone already knows which “needs not so much to be taught as only to be clarified” (Kant, GMM). By hypothetical, I mean that Kant often speculates in the form “If there were such a thing X, this is what X has to be like”. Of course, there is nothing innately wrong with either form of argument, but revelation and hypotheticals are clearly not enough to ground the necessity from the CI that Kant so desires. I merely point out his unusual form of argument to elucidate my motivations in asking the original question: “Is there a CI” or is it just a plausible system which Kant described the mechanics for but never proved the actuality of?
I will now defend my revelatory and hypothetical reading for the first two sections of the GMM.
Kant begins: “it is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will” (Kant, GMM). He argues for this point through a process of revelation: providing examples, counterexamples, edge cases in an attempt to clarify our, at least in Kant’s perspective, common moral understanding of the good. In a similar form of argumentation, Kant describes to us that the good will is one that acts according to and from duty, citing counterexamples of a prudent grocer who only fulfilled one of these criteria and asking us to think for ourselves whether that is really “good”. Duty is “the necessity of an action from respect for law” (Kant, GMM). Rationality, compared to our inclinations and instincts, is ill-suited to pursue self-preservation and happiness, thus, Kant concludes, it must be given by nature for us to obtain the highest and unconditional good; the good will. Since reason is a tool given by nature to teleologically pursue the highest good, the law which duty must abide by must be a law that all rational beings can have access to that has no traces of any empirical impulses: “Since I have deprived the will of every impulse that could arise for it from obeying some law, nothing is left but the conformity of actions as such with universal law, which alone is to serve the will as its principle, that is: I ought never to act except in such a Way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law” (Kant, GMM).
So far, the arguments have been mostly revelatory arguing for the primacy of a good will, the necessity of duty, the teleology of reason, and the conformity to a universal law; from these we have reached the necessity to explain a universal law. Thus, the majority of the arguments in section 2 of the GMM I call hypothetical: they aim to describe what such a universal law is like, if it indeed existed. “But we have not yet advanced so far as to prove a priori that there really is such an imperative, that there is a practical law, which commands absolutely of itself and without any incentives, and that the observance of this law is duty” (Kant, GMM)
Kant is soberly aware of the hypothetical nature of his discussion of the CI. In the first formulation he states “if duty is a concept that is to contain significance and real lawgiving for our actions it can be expressed only in categorical imperatives … which must contain the principle of all duty (if there is such a thing at all)” repeatedly emphasizing the “if” clause. Similarly, in the second formulation, he asks the reader to “suppose there were something the existence of which in itself has an absolute worth” and states in the third “if there is a categorical imperative (i.e., a law for every will of a rational being) it can only command that everything be done from the maxim of one’s will as a will that could at the same time have as its object itself as giving universal law” (Kant, GMM).
The claim of revelation and hypothesis is not meant as a direct attack on Kant, especially because he is aware of it: “we have not here affirmed its truth, much less pretended to have a proof of it in our power” (Kant, GMM). However, it does burden the rest of his ethical theory to prove the reality of the CI, for merely by “explicating the generally received concept of morality,” Kant has, at best, provided us a consistent and plausible explanation of rational moral reasoning.
3. Freedom and The Moral Law
Is there a will whose worth is unconditional, whose goodness is higher than all other forms of the good? Is reason given to us primarily to cultivate this will? Is a good will one that acts from and according to duty? Is duty acting to laws that converge to a universal law?
In Kant’s effort to establish a more solid grounding for the CI in the third section of the GMM and CPrP, he does not address these questions directly. Instead he aims to prove the actuality of the CI through another route: freedom.
He proves an equivalence of a free will with a will under the jurisdiction of the CI. Since Kant believes that the only causal part of the human psyche is that of desires and inclinations, freedom, both practically and metaphysically, is thus the ability to resist coercion from our desires which are determined by natural laws. However, the will can’t be random and ungoverned by any laws, it still must be determined through a meaningful mode of causation, it “is not for that reason lawless but must instead be a causality in accordance with immutable laws but of a special kind; for otherwise a free will would be an absurdity” (Kant, GMM). This law which the free will is governed by must be exercised on itself by itself for otherwise it wouldn’t be free and thus it must not include anything empirical. By governing itself, this law must ensure that once the contents of this will is universalized, it does not contradict itself “the will is in all its actions a law to itself, indicates only the principle, to act on no other maxim than that which can also have as object itself as a universal law. This, however, is precisely the formula of the categorical imperative and is the principle of morality; hence a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same” (Kant, GMM).
The reason Kant is able to draw this equivalence is because there is a variable underlying both free will and the CI: autonomy. The aims of a free will is contained and authored in and of itself and, not governed by hypothetical imperatives, it is not contingent on anything empirical. This autonomy is important for two reasons: necessity and dignity. Firstly, autonomy of the CI is important to secure it’s necessity. Kant denounced how previous moral systems always posited an external law giving entity but as a result any imperatives it posited “had to turn out always conditional [on some external interest] and could not be frt for a moral command”; true necessity only comes from an imperative which commands “from the maxim of one’s will as a will that could at the same time have as its object itself as giving universal law; for only then is the practical principle, and the imperative that the will obeys, unconditional, since it can have no interest as its basis” (Kant, GMM). Secondly, autonomy is what grants a rational being dignity: if all worth is derived from the maxims (laws) we are governed by , then the ability to author those laws must have ultimate worth. “For, nothing can have a worth other than that which the law determines for it. But the lawgiving itself, which determines all worth, must for that very reason have a dignity, that is, an unconditional, incomparable worth; and the word respect alone provides a becoming expression for the estimate of it that a rational being must give. Autonomy is therefore the ground of the dignity of human nature and of every rational nature” (Kant, GMM).
The necessity which follows from autonomy is a closure of criteria: whether a will is contradictory or not relies on no contingent conditions outside of it. The dignity which follows from autonomy is a closure of value: the worth of a will is not dependent on anything outside of it.
4. From Freedom to CI
We have established Kant’s reasons for equating free will to a will governed by the CI and why he might want to do so in his broader project: he just needs to showcase the actuality of one to prove the actuality of the other.
What Kant wants to avoid is a circular structure which argues that “we take ourselves as free in the order of efficient causes in order to think ourselves under moral laws in the order of ends; and we afterwards think ourselves as subject to these laws because we have ascribed to ourselves freedom of will: for, freedom and the will’s own lawgiving are both autonomy and hence reciprocal concepts” (Kant, GMM).
Instead, in the third section of the GMM, Kant aims to tackle this equality through the side of freedom. He follows his line of argumentation in the third antinomy from the Critique of Pure Reason. He argues for the possibility of transcendental freedom — the ability to create new causal chains — which gives room for practical freedom — the ability to refrain ourselves from the coercion of sensibility — through a key metaphysical distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal realm. The former is the world of senses and thus subject to causal laws, but the latter is the world of things-in-themselves to which we have no knowledge where the possibility of freedom lies.
But Kant concedes that in order to prove the actuality of the CI from this side of the equality would mean that one would have to prove through reason the actuality of freedom. According to Kant himself, this is a metaphysical question that cannot be proved. Kant can only show that freedom is “practically necessary that is, necessary in idea, without any further condition for a rational being who is conscious of his causality through reason” (Kant, GMM). At best, we can conclude that Kant has showed the psychological-apparency and possibility of the CI but not it’s actuality.
5. From CI to Freedom
In CPrP, Kant announces the futility of his previous mode of argumentation that started from freedom: “It cannot start from freedom, for we can neither become conscious of freedom directly, because the first concept of it is negative, nor infer it from experience, since experience allows us to cognize only the law of appearance” (Kant, CPrP).
Instead, Kant is going to tackle the equality on the side of the CI. He invites us to partake in a thought experiment through which he hopes to convince us in a Cartesian manner. First, he posits a man who, fearing death, changed his original plans to see his mistress. This is meant to show how one can be determined by a calculus of desire: the inclinations towards the mistress is outweighed by the inclinations against being killed. Next, Kant asks us to imagine that this same man, threatened by a ruler with the same consequence of death should he not give a false testimony, now chooses death instead of commiting the undutiful action. This is meant to show that even the most powerful urges of desire can be overridden by judgements of rationality. “He judges, therefore, that he can do something because he is conscious that he ought to do it, and he cognizes freedom within himself — the freedom with which otherwise, without the moral law, he would have remained unacquainted” (Kant, CPrP).
Kant believes that the proof he outlines “is fully sufficient in place of any a priori justification [of the actuality of the CI]” since theoretical reasoning had to assume at least the possibility of freedom and therefore the CI and now we have an empirical example of “the concept of a reason directly determining the will (through the condition of a universal lawful form of the will’s maxims)” (Kant, CPrP).
His achievement, in my opinion, is much more modest than that: he merely shows through his thought experiment that reason can override desire and we can reason in the form of the CI. Ironically, his theory is built on so circular, revelatory, and hypothetical groundworks that even proving the actuality of freedom and the CI, which he is far away from, leaves many questions unanswered.