Categorical imperative
The categorical imperative is the central philosophical concept in the deontological moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Introduced in Kant's 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, it is a way of evaluating motivations for action. It is best known in its original formulation: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
According to Kant, rational beings occupy a special place in creation, and morality can be summed up in an imperative, or ultimate commandment of reason, from which all duties and obligations derive. He defines an imperative as any proposition declaring a certain action to be necessary. Hypothetical imperatives apply to someone who wishes to attain certain ends. For example, "I must drink something to quench my thirst" or "I must study to pass this exam." The categorical imperative, on the other hand, commands immediately the maxims one conceives which match its categorical requirements, denoting an absolute, unconditional requirement that must be obeyed in all circumstances and is justified as an end in itself, possessing intrinsic value beyond simply being desirable.
Kant expressed his strong dissatisfaction with the popular moral philosophy of his day, believing that it could never surpass the merely conditional command of hypothetical imperatives: a utilitarian says that murder is wrong because it does not maximize good for those involved, but this is irrelevant to people who are concerned only with maximizing the positive outcome for themselves. Consequently, Kant argued, hypothetical moral systems cannot determine moral action or be regarded as bases for legitimate moral judgments against others, because the imperatives on which they are based rely too heavily on subjective considerations. He presented a deontological moral system, based on the demands of the categorical imperative, as an alternative.
Outline
Pure practical reason
The capacity that underlies deciding what is moral is called pure practical reason, which is contrasted with: pure reason, which is the capacity to know without having been shown; and mere practical reason, by which we determine ourselves to practical action within the phenomenal world.Hypothetical imperatives tell us which means best achieve our ends. They do not, however, tell us which ends we should choose. The typical dichotomy in choosing ends is between ends that are right and those that are good. Kant considered the right prior to the good; to him, the latter was morally dependent on the former. In Kant's view, a person cannot decide whether conduct is right, or moral, through empirical means. Such judgments must be reached a priori, using pure practical reason independently of the influence of felt motives, or inclinations.
What dictates which action can be genuinely considered moral are maxims willed to action from the categorical imperative, separate from observable experience. This distinction, that it is imperative that each action is not empirically determined by observable experience, has had wide social impact in the legal and political concepts of human rights and equality.
Possibility
Rational persons regard themselves as belonging to both the world of understanding and the world of sense. As a member of the world of understanding, a person's actions would always conform to the autonomy of the will. As a part of the world of sense, he would necessarily fall under the natural law of desires and inclinations. However, since the world of understanding contains the ground of the world of sense, and thus of its laws, his actions ought to conform to the autonomy of the will, and this categorical "ought" represents a synthetic proposition a priori.Freedom and autonomy
Kant viewed the human individual as a rationally self-conscious being with "impure" freedom of choice:For a will to be considered free, we must understand it as capable of affecting causal power without being caused to do so. However, the idea of lawless free will, meaning a will acting without any causal structure, is incomprehensible. Therefore, a free will must be acting under laws that it gives to itself.
Although Kant conceded that there could be no conceivable example of free will, because any example would only show us a will as it appears to us—as a subject of natural laws—he nevertheless argued against determinism. He proposed that determinism is logically inconsistent: the determinist claims that because A caused B, and B caused C, that A is the true cause of C. Applied to a case of the human will, a determinist would argue that the will does not have causal power and that something outside the will causes the will to act as it does. But this argument merely assumes what it sets out to prove: viz. that the human will is part of the causal chain.
Secondly, Kant remarks that free will is inherently unknowable. Since even a free person could not possibly have knowledge of their own freedom, we cannot use our failure to find a proof for freedom as evidence for a lack of it. The observable world could never contain an example of freedom because it would never show us a will as it appears to itself, but only a will that is subject to natural laws imposed on it. But we do appear to ourselves as free. Therefore, he argued for the idea of transcendental freedom—that is, freedom as a presupposition of the question "what ought I to do?" This is what gives us sufficient basis for ascribing moral responsibility: the rational and self-actualizing power of a person, which he calls moral autonomy: "the property the will has of being a law unto itself."
First formulation: Universality and the law of nature
Kant concludes that a moral proposition that is true must be one that is not tied to any particular conditions, including the identity and desires of the person making the moral deliberation.
A moral maxim must imply absolute necessity, which is to say that it must be disconnected from the particular physical details surrounding the proposition, and could be applied to any rational being. This leads to the first formulation of the categorical imperative, sometimes called the principle of universalizability: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
Closely connected with this formulation is the law of nature formulation. Because laws of nature are by definition universal, Kant claims we may also express the categorical imperative as:
Act as if the maxims of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.Kant divides the duties imposed by this formulation into two sets of two subsets. The first division is between duties that we have to ourselves versus those we have to others. For example, we have an obligation not to kill ourselves as well as an obligation not to kill others. Kant also, however, introduces a distinction between perfect and imperfect duties.
Perfect duty
According to Kant's reasoning, we first have a perfect duty not to act by maxims that result in logical contradictions when we attempt to universalize them. The moral proposition A: "It is permissible to steal" would result in a contradiction upon universalisation. The notion of stealing presupposes the existence of personal property, but were A universalized, then there could be no personal property, and so the proposition has logically negated itself.In general, perfect duties are those that are blameworthy if not met, as they are a basic required duty for a human being.
Imperfect duty
Second, we have imperfect duties, which are still based on pure reason, but which allow for desires in how they are carried out in practice. Because these depend somewhat on the subjective preferences of humankind, this duty is not as strong as a perfect duty, but it is still morally binding. As such, unlike perfect duties, you do not attract blame should you not complete an imperfect duty but you shall receive praise for it should you complete it, as you have gone beyond the basic duties and taken duty upon yourself.Imperfect duties are circumstantial, meaning simply that you could not reasonably exist in a constant state of performing that duty. This is what truly differentiates between perfect and imperfect duties, because imperfect duties are those duties that are never truly completed. A particular example provided by Kant is the imperfect duty to cultivate one's own talents.
Second formulation: Humanity
Every rational action must set before itself not only a principle, but also an end. Most ends are of a subjective kind, because they need only be pursued if they are in line with some particular hypothetical imperative that a person may choose to adopt. For an end to be objective, it would be necessary that we categorically pursue it.
The free will is the source of all rational action. But to treat it as a subjective end is to deny the possibility of freedom in general. Because the autonomous will is the one and only source of moral action, it would contradict the first formulation to claim that a person is merely a means to some other end, rather than always an end in themselves.
On this basis, Kant derives the second formulation of the categorical imperative from the first.
By combining this formulation with the first, we learn that a person has perfect duty not to use the humanity of themselves or others merely as a means to some other end. As a slave owner would be effectively asserting a moral right to own a person as a slave, they would be asserting a property right in another person. This would violate the categorical imperative, because it denies the basis for there to be free rational action at all; it denies the status of a person as an end in themselves. One cannot, on Kant's account, ever suppose a right to treat another person as a mere means to an end. In the case of a slave owner, the slaves are being used to cultivate the owner's fields to ensure a sufficient harvest.
The second formulation also leads to the imperfect duty to further the ends of ourselves and others. If any person desires perfection in themselves or others, it would be their moral duty to seek that end for all people equally, so long as that end does not contradict perfect duty.