Some Remarks on Kant’s Groundwork



Some Remarks on Kant’s Groundwork

Let us begin with two cases of truth-telling. I will use these examples to illustrate some of the key conceptual distinctions K draws in order to analyze what makes for an ethical situation. I will stick to the backbone of this account, so not every nuance K stresses will be present in what follows; but this should serve our purposes. Then I will offer a brief account of what K is trying to achieve in the Groundwork and how, followed by a summary of some of the central tenets of Kantian ethics.

Truth-telling, then. Imagine the following situations:

a) You are called upon to give testimony against the boss of the local mob. Let’s say you witnessed a murder committed by him and your testimony will help the prosecutor to lock him up for good. You know that if you so testify, you will be facing immense risk to your life. It is very likely that the mob will try to hunt you down and kill you. Not only that, the mob-boss is like Keiser Soze of the Usual Suspects, and he will try to torture and kill everyone you ever held dear to your heart. Let’s not fail, however, to note that the community’s good and well-being will increase immeasurably as a result of your testimony: no more drugs or guns on the streets, and people will enjoy idyllic days, the likes of which are found only in Sweden.

b) This same mob boss shows up knocking at your door. You know that his intention is to kill your friend and you know that your friend is hiding in a closet on the second floor at that very moment. The boss asks you whether your friend is in the house. For our purposes, let’s stipulate that you are not allowed to simply refuse to give an answer: you must give either a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.

Let’s spell out what is involved in decision-making in these situations. First, for Kant all rational-activity is rule-governed activity. What this means is that we need to distinguish between completely arbitrary ‘performances’ from genuine actions. A genuine action is one which is done for the sake of an end, it is action in view of an end. This also means that the agent is able to formulate his action in terms of a rule. A maxim, in Kantian parlance, is precisely such a rule: it is the subjective principle, or rule, which articulates the different components of an action and serves as the basis of one’s actions. A simple maxim will have two components: the act and the end for the sake of which it is done (its purpose). So let’s formulate some of the possible responses to the situations (a) and (b) in terms of maxims.

(a) 1 I will testify truthfully, b/c I want the award offered for the prosecution (of the boss).

2 I will testisfy truthfully, b/c I want to contribute to the well-being of the community.

3 I will not testify truthfully, b/c I do not want to put my family at risk.

(b) 1 I will tell the truth, b/c I fear that he will kill me instead if I don’t.

2 I will not tell the truth, b/c I want to save my friend’s life.

You can see that in both situations we have two possible acts (by definition): you either tell the truth or you don’t tell the truth. You can also see that there are (perhaps) an indefinite number of ends for which they could be willed: in some they serve selfish purposes (financial or physical gain), in others altruistic ones (contributing to the well-being of the community, one’s friend).

The question K asks himself is what makes an action have moral worth, and it is concerning this question that he introduces the distinction b/w an action that is in conformity w/ duty and one that is done for the sake of duty. Let’s consider (a)2 and (b)1. We generally recognize being truthful as a moral duty. In both (a)2 and (b)1, we have acts that are strictly in conformity w/ duty: the agent tells the truth. Now let’s look at the ends for which the agent tells the truth: in the former, it is to increase general well-being (happiness), in the latter it is to preserve the agent’s own well-being. One of the central claims K makes is that we cannot simply appeal to our ends (purposes) to account for our actions, as if they were naturally given ‘cause-like’ factors determining our will (to act in this or that way). Recall that that way of conceiving the matter would turn us into a leaf which falls down from or remains attached to its branch depending on the relative strength of the forces acting on it in this or that way. We must be able to see ourselves as choosing our ends, making it our maxim to act for this or that reason. So for both (a)2 and (b)1, we have actions that are in conformity w/ duty—(b)1 poses further problems I will mention below—but they do not, strictly speaking, have moral worth, because the agent chooses to tell the truth only because he happens to value the well-being of the community, or the preservation of his/her life. In both cases, we have an agent who makes it his maxim to tell the truth, which is an act in conformity w/ the duty of telling the truth, only because such an act contributes to the pursuing of other ends, namely, personal or communal happiness. To make the same point in different terms, the agent chooses to be guided in the selection of his/her ends by his desires. For K, however, for an action to have moral worth, the agent must make it his maxim to tell the truth because it is his duty to do so, because it is what is required of him as a rational moral agent, because it makes a claim on him. Such an agent is said to act for the sake of duty, or from duty. Note that it can in fact be the case that by telling the truth the agent may be accomplishing other ends, such as his happiness or that of the community, but the important thing is that if the action is to have moral worth, then it must be done for the sake of duty: the agent chooses to tell the truth, because he conceives of it as a moral obligation.

What is it to conceive of an action as a moral obligation? It is to conceive of the action (or its end) as what is required of you. And when K says that if the action is to have moral worth, then it must be so conceived, he also means that the agent chooses to do what is required of him, only because he takes it to be required of him. To put it bluntly, you must choose to do what you do, only because you conceive of it as your duty; the sole motivating force behind your action is the thought that that is what duty commands you to do. I will tell the truth, because it is my duty to do so.

Let’s pursue this line of reasoning to give a basic account of what K is attempting to do in the Groundwork and why. To give a one-line description of this, we can say that K is explicating the claim that if we are to have genuine moral obligations, then we must conceive of ourselves as autonomous beings. So, we must figure out what it is to have a genuine moral obligation and what it is to be an autonomous being. Let’s follow up on the guiding question introduced above: what makes an action have moral worth? We value many things: health, wealth, good-looks, …. Recall that Aristotle also started the NE [1]with a reflection on the ends we seek to achieve in different spheres of activity. Some things we value for the sake of other things, some things we value for their own sake. For A, eudaimonia turned out to be the supreme good, self-sufficient and final; and he continued to spell out the conditions necessary for the attainment of the activity that is eudamonia. K does not deny that we could desire something like happiness for its own sake. But he regards a good will as the only thing that really deserves the name of good in itself. What is a good will and why is it the only thing deserving of the name? It is doing the right thing for the right reason, i.e., because it is the right thing to do; and it has moral worth in itself, because it is independent of all external conditions. K is usually taken as putting the emphasis (in accounting for moral activity) on the intention (motive) and the will of the moral agent at the expense of the act itself, or its consequences. What does all this mean? Recall example (a) above. You testify truthfully. But perhaps the judge was corrupt and bribed, the jury intimidated and coerced, etc. So no good comes out of your act of testifying truthfully. But we would still regard your decision to testify truthfully as having moral worth in itself (especially since we know that in so doing you risked considerable danger to yourself, to your family, etc.) Why did you do what you did? You knew the bad guy would get away anyway (b/c of corruption, etc.) and you knew what your decision would entail (personal misery, etc.), yet you said the truth. You did the right thing b/c it was the right thing to do. Your action deserves our respect and has moral worth even though no beneficial consequence came out of it. A good will, then, is where we will need to look, if we want to find out what makes an action have moral worth.

This is where motives become crucial. Motives are strange things. They are like causes, because we say that the motive is what determines us to will in this or that way. Why did you testify truthfully? B/c x (where x is a statement of the motive that ‘forced’ you to do what you did). But we also think that motives are not physical causes. The leaf mentioned above could not have acted otherwise, once the relative strength of forces acting on it is given. Pull of gravity > push (up by the branch)( I fall. But you could have not testified (or so we think when we think of ourselves as free beings, unlike the leaf.) A motive is the principle by which we choose to do what we do. Recall the truth-teller again: he could be testifying b/c he wanted the reward, etc. What is the motive by which a good will would be determined? To find out what this is, K looks at actions that are done for the sake of duty, b/c in such cases we can see conflicting motives. Our truth-teller also has the motives to preserve his life and avoid pain, not to risk his family’s life. In such a case, the agent would rather not do what she does; but she does it. This is why such cases are instructive for K’s purposes: it enables him to abstract from all those other motives and attend to the one in which the thought of duty determines the will of the agent. Once again, what makes you decide to tell the truth is the thought that it is your duty to do so.

But we need to complicate a little further this idea of what makes you decide to do x. As I showed above, since morality is a matter of rule-governed activity, the agent must formulate the rule according to which she acts: I will do x, because of y. This is the maxim of her action. You also know (from what I showed above) that the agent must make it her maxim: the truth-teller could say, “I’d rather not testify, because this entails great personal cost for me and my family, but I make it my maxim to tell the truth, because it is my duty to do so.” K’s point is that, attention to how a good will would be determined shows us that we must abstract from all personal desires and inclinations as possible motives for our actions, and focus on the thought of duty alone as the sole determining factor for our will. When you tell the truth not b/c of some desire or inclination (even ones we would think of as legitimate ones such as the desire to make others happy), but b/c you take truth-telling to be what is morally required of you, as making a demand and claim on you, this is like taking truth-telling as a law. And since you have abstracted from all personal desires in the formulation of your maxim, it has the form of a law, valid for everyone. What does this mean for the motive of our action, what is it in such a case that ‘moves’ us to tell the truth? The thought that our maxim has the form of a law is the sole incentive for our action. K calls this acting solely out of respect for the law.

Another way by which we can arrive this point is the following. A moral obligation requires you to do something, it makes a demand on you: you ought to do x. What is the force of this ought? The strange thing about it is that, if we consider it a legitimate obligation, then its validity remains in force even if we do just the opposite of what it tells us to do. So, if truth-telling is an obligation, then its force remains valid (i.e. ‘you still ought to tell the truth’) even if you end up not doing so (b/c you want to avoid danger, etc.) For K, a moral obligation is necessarily binding for us, regardless of what we end up doing in fact; moreover, such an obligation must be universal, i.e. valid for every rational being. Universality and necessity, then, are two essential features of an obligation. For K, only something that has the form of a law can have the required universality and necessity. So, if we are to have genuine obligations, then we must act according to a maxim that has the form of a law.

A law is a command, i.e. an imperative. The law of gravity commands the leaf to fall down. But we saw how this is a matter of forces external to the leaf, pulling and pushing it this or that way. For K, most of our desires are precisely such external forces pulling and pushing us in whichever way—but more on this later. Rational beings have the capacity to form representations of the commands according to which they are supposed to act. And they do this by forming maxims for their actions. We saw that a genuine obligation requires a will to be motivated by a maxim that has the form of a law. How does a command become rationally binding? This requires us to find out what kinds of commands (imperatives) are possible for human beings, and this is where K tells us that there are two, namely, hypothetical and categorical imperatives. A hypothetical imperative is a conditional that tells you that ‘if you want x, then you must do y’. Notice that the imperative that says ‘you must do y’ is conditional upon your wanting x. In such imperatives an end we set for ourselves is always for the sake of another end: if you want to be healthy, then you must exercise; or, if you want to spare your family, then you must not testify. Such imperatives are valid, rationally binding, in virtue of the principle according to which if you will the end, you must will the means necessary for its attainment. For K, this is simply an analytic principle, because he thinks that any rational being who wants to get something, must also want to do the things necessary for getting it. But it is also clear that such imperatives cannot provide the kind of law necessary for genuine moral obligations. We saw that we must do the act for its own sake, b/c it is the right thing to do, from duty. But a hypothetical imperative is one that always tells you what you must do for the sake of some other end, external to it; in other words, the necessity of one action is conditional upon us wanting something else other than it. If you want x, then you must do y; if you want to do y, then you must do z … So we need an imperative that commands uncondionally, that tells us what we must do, not for the sake of something else, but because it is our duty to do so.

Enter categorical imperative. What is it to be a categorical imperative? Precisely what I just said: to be unconditional. But if there are no conditions, as opposed to hypothetical imperatives, in virtue of what is a categorical imperative valid? Let’s recall our example (a). You decide to testify because you want to increase communal welfare. What is the maxim? I will testify, because I want to increase communal well-being. Notice that this would require us to include the condition that we must increase communal well-being as part of our imperative. If you want to increase communal well-being, then you must testify. But this is a hypothetical imperative, and we know that truth-telling, if it is a duty, must be so unconditionally, not for the sake of something else. But if we get rid of all such conditions (personal happiness, wanting to please God, the good of others, etc.), what remains? Precisely the form of law: your maxim must have the form of a law, hence universal and necessary for all rational beings. And this is precisely what the categorical imperative says: act only in accordance w/ that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law. The term ‘form’ is important. The categorical imperative, in itself, does not tell us anything substantial, does not tell us that we must do the specific acts of telling the truth, not murdering, being nice to people … . It is a formal criterion, and as regards all specific actions, it is empty. If it says anything about duties at all it says this: your duty is to do your duty, or you must do your duty. But it proposes to give us a means through which we can figure out what our duties are. This is why it is taken to be a test through which we can rule out certain maxims as immoral. Those maxims which cannot be willed as universal laws, i.e. those maxims that will be seen as generating some sort of contradiction in the attempt to conceive of them as universal laws valid for every rational being, will be discounted. (I do not quite agree w/ this view of the categorical imperative as a test and there are many more things to be said in connection w/ it; but if I get into the reasons why, then you will make it your cat. imp. to hate me for making things unnecessarily more difficult.) So let’s leave it at this. For our purposes, you might find it helpful to think about it in terms of Korsgaard’s[2] suggestion: a formalized version of the question ‘what if everybody did that?’ We will discuss several examples, for instance suicide, in order to figure out the nature of such contradictions.

Rational reflection as an expression of freedom: K is offering an independent conception of and justification for morality—independent of both religion and the pursuit of happiness. His view is based on a notion of human dignity that is a function of a human being as a rational free agent. According to this conception most of our desires (inclinations)—including the one for happiness, which in fact can be seen as a blanket term for all our empirical ends—are discounted, or rather, are irrelevant b/c a moral law cannot be binding for a rational free agent simply in virtue of the contingent desires he happens to have. Thinking of one’s self as deciding under the sway of such desires turns such a self into the leaf that gets pushed and pulled in every which way by the forces acting on it now and again. It is precisely our capacity to abstract from such desires and make it our maxim whether or not to be determined by them that opens up the space for freedom in K’s conception. K is saying: you are not simply determined to act in this or that way b/c you happen to have a desire to achieve this or that; you choose to make it your maxim to be so determined. Remember truth-telling (if you are not sick of it by this point): it is not that you tell the truth simply b/c you happen to want to contribute to communal happiness; you choose to make communal happiness the kind of end requiring your action. This is what makes us autonomous beings for K. What is autonomy? It is self-determination, self-legislation, giving the law to oneself. The categorical imperative tells you that you must act only in accordance w/ a maxim that can be universalized, i.e. that can be seen as a universally valid law binding for all rational beings. It is precisely this capacity, for K, that makes the moral law something that is legislated by the rational agent itself: the law on the basis of which we act is not found written outside on some granite block by God, it is not laid down by our corporeal nature which imposes the force of this or that desire, but, as the categorical imperative, it is written by us qua (that is, only under the aspect of) rational beings. Allowing yourself to be determined by any other end is heteronomy, for K; that is, being determined by something external, other.

A famous and long-standing objection to Kantian ethics will make this point clearer. It is the charge that K’s ethics lacks any substantial content and it goes something like this: from a formal principle of rationality, it is impossible to derive any substantial conclusions about how to act. A purely rational will, so isolated from all corporeal desires, concrete circumstances of action, etc., will have no basis for making any decisions about how to act. Why, we may wonder, K so radically deprives the will of any determining motivation other than respect for the law; why would anybody regard any action that is not done strictly for the sake of duty, but rather in some way motivated by other desires, as inherently suspicious, lacking genuine moral worth? The answer is that, for K, since all empirical desires are contingent and subjective, only by reflectively detaching myself from them, that is detaching myself from my present interests and concerns as this particular individual, can I attain an objective, universal standpoint—the only standpoint that can generate objective laws binding for all. And the categorical imperative tells us precisely to regard ourselves as one moral agent among others, untainted by the subjective coloring of our desires, interests. The objection I just mentioned maintains that from such a detached perspective, one will have no motivations left for acting in a particular way. What could K say to this? After all, it is precisely the formality, and hence the substantive emptiness of the categorical imperative that he considered to be the supreme achievement of his conception of ethics. He might claim that the point is not to generate motivations, but to offer rational justification for the ones we already have, from a perspective that is outside these motivations. To this, the above objection responds that either it is not possible to offer such justifications from the objective standpoint (b/c it is so abstract), or it will smuggle precisely those motivations (desires) into the objective standpoint that it ends up endorsing, in which case it would be self-deception to consider it objective.

Consider the following example: You would all expect me to grade fairly; in fact, you would all claim that I have an obligation to grade everybody’s paper based on its merits, and not based on whether or not I happen to like a particular student. In short, you would demand that I grade objectively. What does that mean? Among other things, it means that I abstract from your particular features, as well as from my own personal inclinations. According to the Kantian view of the matter, it would be the easiest thing in the world for me to give one paper a higher grade than it merits, b/c I like its author. In fact, it would increase overall happiness in the world by making that student happier, and not reducing any happiness elsewhere, for no one would know about it. Besides, what is, after all, a single paper in the over all scheme of things? Yet you would probably say that I still have the obligation. In light of the above, the questions to consider would be whether I could ever attain such an objective viewpoint and what it would be like to make decisions from this viewpoint. Of course, this problem is not hard to solve, since I could just cover the names written on the paper and grade without knowing who in fact wrote that paper. This is what people do all the time in what they call blind-review. But the example is still instructive: it shows us that what is at stake in what K asks us to do is to regard ourselves as anonymous in moral decision-making, just one rational agent among others. This is what universalization amounts to: figuring out what any rational being would agree to do, divorced from his/her particular perspective, ignorant of his/her particular make-up. The trouble is that it is not an abstract rational being who is asked to engage in this reasoning, but you and I. But this is precisely what makes it possible for human beings to have moral obligation, and hence freedom, for K. If we were angels, always willing solely out of respect for the law, that is, always doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do, w/o ever facing the problem of empirical and contrary desires, then there would be no talk of freedom. It is human beings, who participate both in the sensible world (because our bodies, as well as psychological states, are objects among other objects, obeying the laws of physics) and in the intelligible world, for whom freedom is both a necessity and a possibility.

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[1] I will explain this when I tell you about the three fundamental theories of ethics.

[2] See the introduction to our translation if you have the time.

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