Why should I . . .?  Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

adapted from Dr. Bryan S. Rennie

In order to know what is the good, we have to support our propositions concerning the good with narratives, logoi, which justify them.   That is the main theme and focus of my talk today.  Immanuel Kant’s description of the good and his narrative explanation of what constitutes it, his logos which justifies his description.

It is an almost universal tradition in explaining Kant to begin with a mention of the great Scottish philosopher, David Hume, (1711-1776) because it was in reaction to Hume that Kant (1724-1804) produced his finest work.  Hume had pointed out that there are certain problems with established human reasoning that seemed to him insoluble.  First, in the realm of scientific reasoning there is the problem of induction.  It was Hume who established that in reasoning from the specific to the general, or from the past to the future, we can never attain certainty, only a degree of probability.  In fact, the question that Hume raised was far more troubling than that.  In arguing that something that has happened repeatedly in the past will happen again in the future, or in arguing that from a number of particular truths we can affirm a general universal truth, we necessarily assume that the course of nature will always continue uniformly the same.  But is our assumption justifiable, what possible logos can we give for it?  We might claim that, in the past, things that have happened repeatedly have continued to happen the same, therefore, in the future they will still continue to happen the same.  But if we do, we make precisely the same assumption that we are trying to justify, and this assumption thus remains always and forever unjustifiable.
When I am convinced of any principle [says Hume], ‘tis only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me.  When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence.  Objects have no discoverable connection together; nor is it from any other principle but custom operating upon the imagination, that we can draw any inference from the appearance of one to the existence of another.  (Treatise of Human Nature, book 1, part 3, section 8)

Thus Hume challenged to possibility of any real knowledge of things in general.  He challenged the very possibility of universal truths.  Second, in the realm of moral reasoning Hume pointed out that, as he put it, “no is implies an ought.”  That is, no actual state of affairs in the world can directly and unequivocally tell us what we should do in response to that state of affairs.  What is the case is factual, matter or fact, empirical, and physically ascertainable, but what ought to be, or what ought to be done, is a matter of abstract values which can never be dictated by factual states of affairs.  All general truths, both moral and scientific, all claims to universally valid knowledge are either simply habitual (from custom, as Hume put it) or tautological (that is, in the realm of mathematics, for example, 2 + 2 = 4, because 2 + 2 is the same thing as 4.  All universal truths are likewise of the same form as “all bachelors are unmarried men,” or “all whales are mammals.”  They are true by virtue of the very definition of a bachelor or a whale.)  Finally,  according to Hume, experience can never produce knowledge that is universal.

Kant had been comfortably teaching philosophy in the succession of his German forbears until Hume’s arguments, as he put it “woke me for my dogmatic slumbers.”  He realized that he had something really to worry about here and so he set to work to produce his Critiques, The Critique of Pure Reason, and The Critique of Practical Reason, focusing respectively on the bounds and limits of scientific and moral reasoning.  He answered that universal knowledge is real, scientific truths are universally true and constitute genuine knowledge.  He agreed with Hume that mathematical knowledge is a priori, that is, it can be known to be true without requiring physical observation to confirm it. (Obviously, no universal truths can be confirmed by observation: we would have to observe all possible instance at all possible times, past and future.)  Such truths, the truths of geometry, for example, are necessarily true.  It is not possible that they could be false.  And yet, Kant wanted to insist they are not simply tautologous either, because tautologies add nothing new to our knowledge, but simply repeat what we already know.  In order to counter Hume’s problem of induction Kant had to argue that universal knowledge such as geometrical truths are not derived from experience and are thus not derived by induction.  Rather they are based on our knowledge of space, which is not itself given in experience but is prior to it.  Mathematical and scientific universal truths are real knowledge which arises from our experience of the world but is not given to us by that experience.  Rather it is an a priori necessity of the very possibility of experience.  As with space, so with time.  We cannot have any experience without space and time.  These are not simple external features of the world independent of us, but are a priori forms of sensibility, necessary conditions of all sense experience.  Kant had realized for the first time that the mind is not the passive recipient of sensation, but that all mental judgments involve the activity of synthesis.  We constantly and necessarily organize our experience, and space and time are structures of that organization.  As well as these pure a priori forms of sensation, Kant argued, there are twelve “categories” or “pure concepts” of the understanding by means of which the sentient mind organizes its experience.  Among these are substance, cause, and reality.  These are organizing principles that we bring to experience rather than deriving from experience.  These are part of our logos about the truth, not part of the truth itself.  These are shadows cast by the interaction of the active mind with the external world rather than real attributes of external reality.  Note that now “reality” is a category of the understanding.  It is something that we ascribe to our experiences, not something that is given in and by our experiences.  And note also that this conclusion was reached by someone whose aim was to defend the validity of scientific knowledge.

Now, equipped with this understanding of the processes of organizing experience, this logos for the existence of universal truths, which is itself an account of how we can construct coherent and consistent and conforming justifications, how does Kant deal with Hume’s objection to the possibility of universal moral truths.  That is, can he answer the question of what we ought to do in universally valid terms and thus claim real moral knowledge?  To do this Kant looks for genuinely universal moral truths; claims that certain acts are just good, not good for something.  There are, of course, what he calls “hypothetical imperatives,” that is, things that we must do if we want to achieve certain ends.  If you want to go to heaven you must follow the will of God.  If you want to get tenure you should not give dreadfully boring and incomprehensible lectures on philosophy to freshman students.  But Kant wanted a categorical imperative.  Something we must just do, period.  He reasoned that there is such a thing, a simple imperative that ought to be followed for its own sake by, as he put it, all rational beings, because it is right, not for the sake of attaining any end.  This is what he called his categorical imperative, and although he expressed it in as many as five different ways , it is, he claimed, a single principle.  It might, I think, be best stated like this: you ought to always act in such a way that you could sincerely wish the general rule governing your action (what Kant calls a maxim) were a universal law (so that all people must act that way).  For example, if you give to charity you certainly can will that it might be a universal law, like the law of gravity, that everyone gives what they can spare to those who really need it.  So that act is morally justified.  It is a good act.  However, if you owe money to someone and you refuse to give it back, could you honestly will that everyone must act that same way?  No, because if everyone did act that way there could be no notion of lending, no-one would ever give anything back, so no one would ever lend anything, just give it away.

This then, is the narrative, the logos, the story if you will that Kant gives with his claim to know what is the good.  He has been challenged on several grounds, most of these objections are too complex to go into here, but the most often repeated one is simply this: that Kant’s categorical imperative lacks any human warmth, charm, or charity.  One must do what one must do simply out of the logical necessity of conforming to this formulation.  One ought to help little old ladies (and old men, I might add) across the street because it conforms to the categorical imperative and one can will that everyone might act that way, not because one actually cares about the old codger.  I wonder if that is true.  Is the fact that this formula can be given in the dispassionate manner in which Kant states it enough to rob the rule of all the goodness it might accomplish.  But that is a question which, I feel, you should ask yourselves once you have made some judgment on the status of the claim and on the logos which accompanies it.