Kant and Knowledge of the Categorical Imperative
Mortimer Adler has claimed (see Adler on Kant: Not Very Reliable) that Kant thought the categorical imperative, his term for the supreme principle of morality, was self-evident. That was supposed to be how we know it’s true – or, more precisely, how we know it’s binding on us. That’s wrong, of course, about what Kant thought, but getting a perspicuous account of what he did think isn’t easy. One problem is that he clearly thought the moral law was closely connected to what he variously called freedom, causality through freedom or autonomy, but he seems to have changed his mind about just how the connection works between writing the Groundwork and the 2nd Critique. Here, I’ll say a little about some features of the Groundwork’s approach.
We need a formulation of the categorical imperative (CI) to work with. Here’s one: One must not act upon a maxim unless one could will that it be universally acted upon. The idea is that the maxim is the principle actually guiding or underlying your choice, operative in your own psychology. Typically, it will have the form, ‘I will do this, in these circumstances, in order to achieve such-and-such.’ You test it by thinking whether you could will that the maxim on which you are proposing to act could be adopted universally by people in the kind of circumstances you envision. That’s the theory. What warrants it?
Kant says it’s analytic that the CI is the law of a free will. It can be derived just by applying the law of non-contradiction to the meanings of the terms. If it is analytic in that sense, it certainly needs some unpacking.
First, what’s a free will? The concept, Kant tells us, is of a causality that acts through freedom. A being with free will, a free agent, is somehow the cause of his actions; they are brought about by him. Now, causation is not just regularity or conjunction. If it were just regularity or conjunction, then if I buy lottery tickets but never win, we would have to say that my playing the lottery causes my not winning. But I don’t believe that – if I did, I wouldn’t buy the tickets. Instead, if an event, A, causes another, B, there has to be some kind of law-like relation between A and B, something that can be expressed by ‘must’ and ‘must not,’ not just by ‘does’ and ‘does not.’
Here, there are the beginnings of a puzzle. A free will is a kind of causality and as such is law-governed. How, then, can it be free? If the will is law-governed, is that not equivalent to saying that its actions are necessary, that the will could not act differently and therefore that it is not really free, that it is under the control or direction of forces outside itself?
One loophole apart, Kant thinks that is correct. If there is some good, such as happiness, to which the will must be directed or some principle of right, such as the will of God, by which the will must be directed, then the will would not truly be free; it would be subservient to that good or principle. The loophole comes in a needed qualification: In constructing the argument the good or the principle of right supposed must come from some source outside of or apart from the will.
What if, instead, it came from the will itself? That is, what if what we were looking for were part of, constitutive of, what it is to have a will at all? Now, whatever it would be, it would not be some object of the will, something to be aimed at, for of course a will, if it is genuinely free, can be directed at many different objects. It would have to instead be some principle of willing, something that is bound up with and inseparable from rationally willing anything.
What could that be? We can imagine many different principles, rules of procedure, so to speak, that may seem appropriate in one context or another, but these, it seems, depend upon the will having set itself to achieve a particular good or engage in a particular practice. They might be principles of chess-playing or family-raising or citizenship – but not principles of rational willing itself.
What could be a principle of the will itself, not of some particular object or engagement of the will? The answer, the only possible answer, Kant thinks, is the requirement to guide itself by a principle, a law. The will must not have content given to or imposed upon it from outside; else it would not be free. It must only be governed by the requirement that whatever it aims at or selects must be a principle, must have the form of law – and that requirement is just that the maxim upon which it acts should be universalizable. For that is the common characteristic of laws, that they state something universal: Always, if P then Q; if P is the case, then Q must be. The notes of universality and necessity distinguish the law of a free will from a mere regularity, and they have normative rather than merely descriptive import because it is the law of a free will of which we speak, one that is not bound, except by its own act, to follow tomorrow the principle that it adopts today.
That, approximately, is what Kant meant in saying the CI was analytic for a free will. That doesn’t answer the question how we know it binds us, though. It may be analytic that the CI is the law governing a free will, but it is hardly analytic that we are free-willed beings. In other words, what Kant thinks is analytic is something like this: If a being is free, then it is bound by the categorical imperative.‡ If we are not free, then it might not govern us.
What is needed is some warrant for thinking that we are free, and that, Kant thinks, is not easy to come by. Part of the reason is that he thinks of freedom as contra-causal – though he wouldn’t put it that way – as something that cannot be understood as a matter of natural necessity.§ On the other hand, he thinks causality is a basic category for our interpretation of the world and that we will never find any sequence of experienced facts that cannot be represented as being in accord with some deterministic law of nature. How he tried to reconcile these is not pertinent here; the point is only that they generate a problem for our knowing that we are free and, by way of knowing that, knowing that the categorical imperative applies to us.
I think there is the beginning of something promising on this front at the end of Part Two of the Groundwork – something which is unfortunately not developed much further elsewhere. There, Kant offers what might be called a pragmatic argument. Whatever may be the ultimate truth about freedom of the will, think about how it is with you when you act, when you deliberate, when you decide. You have to think of the decision as depending on you and your deliberation; you cannot think of what moves you to action as something that simply overmasters you from without. (That might happen, in the case of an irresistable impulse, but to the extent you were certain that the impulse was irresistable, you would be reluctant to identify what was impulsively done as your action. It would be more something that happened to you than a choice you made.) In acting, you act under the idea of freedom. You think of the action as up to you, as responsive to your reasoning and deliberation, and not the product of anything that is simply imposed rather than being accepted as a reason for action. You think of yourself, conceive yourself, as free. And that, Kant suggests, may be all that is needed: in acting, you must think of yourself as free and so, must think of yourself as acting from the law of a free will, the categorical imperative.
Rob
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Rob Bass
rhbass@gmail.com
http://oocities.com/amosapient
‡ Also needed is the qualification that, for Kant, the moral law is an imperative only for a being who does not of necessity act according to reason, who can be tempted to set aside rational requirements.
§ Arguably, Kant doesn’t need this for free agency to be what he claims it must be. What is needed is for free agency to be realizable in a deterministic system