Greg Detre
Thursday, May 24, 2001
Jeremy Watkins, Hertford
Ethics V
Kant�s ethics is antithetical to consequentialism in holding that the criterion of right relates to our motives in acting, rather than the consequences of the action. If an action motivated by a good will acting out of duty inadvertently leads to hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths, then a Kantian would consider that a good action. This is the perspective that results from a system based around the actions of individual rational agents, all of whom must be considered ends in themselves.
Kant believed that morality is objective, not a �real� aspect of the universe like light or gravity, but necessary and apparent to any rational being. Morality derives its force for rational beings directly from reason. If Kant�s attempt works, a rational being, acting rationally, must and will follow the dictates of morality, and freely. Kant recognised that we cannot be moral agents unless we are autonomous agents, which seems difficult to square with our notions of causality in nature. In order to understand Kant�s solution, we would have to first consider his metaphysics. It is enough to say that we straddle his distinction between nuomena and phenemona, and that Kant considered that this opened things up enough for us to act as though we are free. This is the freedom we require in order to act out of duty. It is not enough that we should act in the way that a good person does, or that our actions have happy consequences for the world. Indeed, these are irrelevant factors in assessing the morality of an action. All that matters is our motive,
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His first formulation of the Categorical Imperative runs:
�Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.� (Groundwork 88)
As O�Neill puts it, �nothing can be a moral principle which cannot be a principle for all�. With this first formulation, Kant has placed universalisability at the heart of his moral system. If the maxim of an action is non-universalisable, it cannot be adopted by all rational agents, and so it cannot be a moral action. Kant�s wording here is important and subtle, referring to the underlying maxim of one�s action, rather than just a particular act-description we can find. This is enough to dismiss one criticism of Kant�s ethics by simply re-formulating clearly immoral acts in universalisable ways, such as �steal whenever you can�.
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Kant�s second formulation of the Categorical Imperative runs:
�Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.� (G 96)
It is important to remember that Kant considered both the above decrees as equivalent formulations of the same Categorical Imperative, or Moral Law, rendered differently. They can be seen to reduce into one another, when you consider that by considering oneself and all other agents equally as ends, any action that is right for me must be universalisably right for everyone else, and vice versa.
Kant�s famous example of false promising can be seen to contravene both formulations of the Categorical Imperative, especially the first. A false promise is simply a promise that is broken, deliberately and premeditatedly. False promising works well as an example of an immoral action for Kant, since it so clearly and easily leads to logical incoherence. If I promise falsely, and this action is universalised, then everyone�s false promises lead to a complete debasement of trust, and a situation where promises cease to have any meaning. With reference to the second formulation, false promising is an abuse of other agents, whom we are treating as merely means to our own ends, rather than ends in themselves. One way to see this easily is simply to reverse the roles � our aggrieved reaction to being falsely promised is a clear sign that we are not being treated as an end in ourself.
Refraining from false promises is a �perfect� duty, in the sense that it is a duty which can observed by each towards all others. He contrasts this with �imperfect� duties, like helping others in need or developing one�s own talents. Imperfect duties cannot be observed to all others, since these �duties of virtue� cannot be carried out to their full extent � nobody can help all others, or develop all their own talents.
In one sense, the false promising example works very well for Kant, because he is able to show how quickly his system can demonstrate its wrongness. However, it is also a bad example, because it doesn�t generalise easily in the way that an example should.
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