Chapter 4 - Kant

Introduction

Kant (1724–1804) was born in the city of Königsberg in East Prussia, now the Russian city of Kaliningrad. Having completed his studies, he spent a number of years tutoring and giving lectures in the University of Königsberg. This work was then typically so poorly paid that he lived in a state of constant poverty until he was appointed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in 1770. Aside from his single-minded devotion to academic work, what is perhaps most remarkable is that, in spite of his familiarity with scientific and philosophical ideas coming from everywhere in Europe, he never travelled, spending his whole life in or very near Königsberg.

There can be little doubt that Kant is the most important Modern philosopher in the Western tradition, and it wouldn’t be difficult to find those who regard him as no less important than the Ancient philosophers Plato and Aristotle. The breadth of his work is astounding: even before he wrote those philosophical works for which he is now best known, he lectured on many scientific topics and, advancing as he did the view that there were galaxies beyond our Milky Way, he is rightly regarded by astronomers as a pioneer in our theoretical understanding of the cosmos. His philosophical work covers metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, morality and politics, and in almost every one of these fields, his ideas continue to be hugely influential.

Following his professorial appointment, Kant set about rethinking the whole of philosophy, and, more particularly, the role of philosophy in our understanding of science. After a period of nearly ten years during which he published very little, he produced The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), undoubtedly his most important work, and followed this with a staggering number of further publications. Included here are the Critique of Judgement (1790), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787) and the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). It is this last short work which is the text for this chapter.

As suggested in the titles of Kant’s works in his prolific later period (note that he was 57 when the Critique of Pure Reason was first published), he thought of himself as engaged in what he called a ‘critical revolution’. Explaining what he meant by this in any detail is not possible here, but a brief remark is worth giving. Kant thought that giving a firm foundation to human knowledge required us to turn our critical philosophical attention onto the faculty of reason itself. Whereas most thinkers had presumed that reason confronts a reality that is wholly independent of us, and thereby produces such scientific and moral understanding as we have, Kant suggested that we should think of reality as dependent on the conceptual structures that reason brings to the task of producing this understanding. Thus, the world describable by ordinary empirical and scientific understanding, in being dependent in part on the concepts we deploy, becomes knowable in a profound way – one whose possibility had eluded philosophers before Kant. However, in cases where reason attempts to speculate about the nature of a supposed reality that lies beyond one constructed from our concepts, it is bound to fail. Hence, the ‘critique’ of pure reason that gives Kant’s main work its title.

The consequences of this critical revolution for scientific understanding are manifest. Just to take a single (schematically described) example, think of philosophical attempts to give a foundation to our judgments of cause and effect. For philosophers like Hume, the idea that the world can be known to be governed by causation is deeply problematic; indeed, Hume can make it seem simply irrational even to believe that the world contains causal regularities. By insisting that cause is a concept imposed by reason – that this concept is partly responsible for the empirical world being the way it is – we can have firm grounds for finding causal regularities. Moreover, these grounds are a priori, or purely philosophical: we discover that causality reigns by looking into the structure of our concepts.

Nor is Kant’s critical stance limited to scientific understanding. In the Preface to the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (hereafter FMM) Kant insists that we can, and indeed must, proceed by an a priori investigation of the concepts that constitute the phenomenon of morality. He writes: ‘… all moral philosophy rests solely on its pure [i.e. a priori] part. When applied to man, it does not borrow the least thing from the knowledge of man himself (anthropology), but gives laws a priori to him as a rational being.’ This strong, and to some counterintuitive, assertion is at the heart of Kantian moral theory. Kant is here claiming that even if we think of morality as governing human actions and relationships, it can only be understood properly when we understand it as having a wholly rational (i.e. a priori) basis. The First Section of FMM sets out to clarify and support this claim. (Note: In some English editions, FMM is called the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.)

In what follows, I shall highlight the most important argumentative moves that Kant makes in FMM, but there is no substitute for a careful reading of the intricate detail of his argument. As should be clear when you do this reading, Kant doesn’t waste words: even what might at first seem like an aside or rhetorical flourish, tends in the end to push his arguments forward. Note too that I shall be more liberal with comments about the First Section of FMM, and will give less space to the other two sections. Kant’s view of morality can seem so different from that of other philosophers, including Hume, that it is important to get the shape of the account right from the beginning. (It could be argued that Kant’s account shares certain important features with Plato’s, but making this out would be a long and difficult exercise.)

Reading

Primary text

In my explanatory text, I have used the translation by Lewis White Beck. This translation was originally published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1959 and is also used in:

Wolff, Robert Paul (ed.) Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals: Text and Commentary. (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969).

In other English translations, FMM is called the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and a good recent translation is:

Korsgaard, Christine M. (ed.) with translation by Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) [ISBN 0521626951].

An older translation by T.K. Abbott, which is certainly suitable for this course, is available on the internet from Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org).

Recommended essential reading

* Darwall, Stephen ‘Kantian Practical Reason Defended’, Ethics, 96(1), 1985, pp.89–99.

* Guyer, Paul ‘The Form and Matter of the Categorical Imperative’ in his Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) [ISBN 9780199273478].

* Harrison, J. ‘Kant’s Examples of the First Formulation of the Categorical Imperative’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 7(2), 1957, pp.50–62.

* Kemp, J. ‘Kant’s Examples of the Categorical Imperative’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 8(30), 1958, pp.63–71.

* Korsgaard, Christine ‘Kant’s Analysis of Obligation: The Argument of Groundwork I’ in her Creating the Kingdom of Ends. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) [ISBN 0521496446].

* O’Neill, O. ‘Reason and Autonomy in Grundlegung III’ in her Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) [ISBN 0521381215] pp.51–65.

* Wood, A.W. ‘What is Kantian Ethics’ in Wood, A. (ed.) Kant: Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002) [ISBN 0300094876] pp.157–82.

* Wood, A.W. ‘Kant’s Formulations of the Moral Law’ in Bird, Graham (ed.) A Companion to Kant. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006) [ISBN 9781405111973].

Further reading

Allison, Henry Kant’s Theory of Freedom. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990) [ISBN 0521387086].

Baron, Marcia Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) [ISBN 0801428297].

Guyer, P. Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) [ISBN 9780199273478].

Korsgaard, C. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) [ISBN 0521499623].

O’Neill, O. Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) [ISBN 0521388163].

Timmerman, J. (ed.) Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) [ISBN 9780521175081].

Wood, A.W. Kant’s Ethical Thought. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) [ISBN 052164836X].

The principles of duty

Kant opens the First Section with words that are widely quoted, though not always wholly understood: ‘Nothing in the world – indeed nothing even beyond the world – can be called good without qualification except a good will.’ He then goes on to explain why other human character traits – intelligence, wit, judgment, courage, resolution, perseverance – can certainly be useful and morally good, and why gifts of fortune – power, riches, honour, health and happiness can aid, but never constitute, goodness. For we can imagine each of them as pressed into service for ends that we would not recognise as worthy. In short, none of them has the unconditional worth of a genuinely good will.

These first paragraphs are an opening gambit. Having insisted that the only thing unconditionally good is a good will, Kant next, subtly but crucially, seeks to establish a second feature of the good will: it is, and can only be, the product of human reason or rationality. The supporting material here is interesting, but can seem weak: essentially Kant suggests that reason must surely have a purpose, but as it is itself a poor guide to the satisfaction of the range of desires and needs we all have and which can be summed up as the pursuit of happiness, we cannot think that reason’s purpose is one of helping us in that pursuit. So what is the purpose of human rationality? Kant writes: ‘As nature has elsewhere distributed capacities suitable to the functions they are to perform, reason’s proper function must be to produce a will good in itself and not only good as a means…’

I mentioned that these opening pages are argumentatively weak, but I don’t think that this matters. For Kant’s aim here is to encourage rather than convince the reader. The real arguments come just after he introduces the notion of duty, and they have a typically Kantian structure. He asks us to consider the principles (propositions) that figure in the use of the concept of duty in its employment in everyday morality. Kant is in this way giving us an a priori analysis of this important moral notion; he is thus working backwards from our ordinary moral intuitions about duty to those principles which underlie them.

The examples he uses to prompt our intuitions are: (1) that of a dealer who has a duty to charge the same price, even to the inexperienced purchaser; (2) that of an agent – perhaps one tired of life – who has a duty nonetheless to keep on living; and (3) that of an agent who has a duty to be beneficent, whether or not he cares about others. In each case, one can think of motives which would bring about the same results: the dealer might think ‘honesty is the best policy’, the would-be suicide might simply cling to life and fear death, and we might well engage in beneficence because of the sympathy we might feel for others in need or the reputation it brings. However, Kant insists that insofar as the latter sorts of motive are operative, we would not regard the agent in each case as acting out of duty, and hence would not regard such a person as acting for purely moral reasons. From this, he claims that the first proposition of morality follows: a dutiful act has genuine moral worth – is a real example of the good will – only if it is done out of a sense of duty and not for some other motive.

The second proposition is that the moral worth of a dutiful act lies not in anything one might hope to achieve by it, but rather in the principle (the Kantian expression is ‘maxim’) by which one’s will to do the act is determined. This proposition is said to follow directly from the considerations that led to the first. For if we can rule out the possibility that some hoped-for end is to be achieved by a morally worthy act, all that remains seems to be a concern to act out of duty as such.

The third proposition is: ‘duty is the necessity of an action executed from respect for law’. Kant thinks that this follows from the first two, but in order to understand why this might be so, it is important to be clear about what he means both by ‘necessity of an action’ and ‘respect for law’.

In this context, Kant understands ‘law’ to be a moral requirement which would be recognised as such by any rational being. That such a requirement is aptly describable as a law – a universally true generalisation – follows from the fact that it would be recognised by any rational being. However, though human beings have reason, and are thus capable of being rational agents, we are also pulled in many directions by our desires and needs. Using Kant’s terminology, these ‘inclinations’ may sometimes pull in the same direction as our moral requirements, but in many cases, they oppose them. In the latter sort of case, Kant thinks that we will feel the moral law as exercising a demand or constraint on us – he also calls it an ‘imperative’. Because we are rational, we recognise the moral law, but because we are human creatures with desires and needs, we feel this law as constraining. A human act, then, can be recognised as having moral worth when the force of the moral law – its necessity – constitutes our reason for undertaking it. Think here again of the dealer who charges an inexperienced customer fairly. If he does so because he recognises that the moral law demands such behaviour, the act is one displaying moral worth. If, however, he does so because he wants to keep his business reputation, or because he happens to like this particular customer, then his act is not done out of respect for the moral law and is not one of duty. Of course, Kant never says that in the latter cases what the dealer does is morally bad; it is rather that in such cases the act is not a proper example of moral action.

Because the terminology may be unfamiliar, Kant’s conception of moral worth is not easy to take in at first reading. It is crucial to remember, though, that Kant regards his conception, not as in any sense technical, but as already contained in our everyday moral intuitions. As part of showing this, he asks us to consider the question: ‘May I, in distress, make a promise with the intention not to keep it?’ He notes first that this question has a prudential reading: it might be in your interest to make such a promise, perhaps because you need some money that can only be obtained via such a deceptive promise. However, he believes – I think correctly – that when the question is taken morally, there can be no doubt about the answer: it would be contrary to the moral duty we owe to each other to make such a promise. He thinks that his terminology captures this intuition perfectly: our moral duties are those we can only appreciate when we put on one side human desires and interests, and ask ourselves what is required by the moral law. Moreover, he thinks that this conception of duty is one that we arrive at by a priori means – that is, by an analysis of everyday moral intuitions.

The categorical imperative

I have spent some time discussing the materials introduced in the First Section of FMM, because it will help with the important Second Section. Though Kant introduces new concepts and the discussion is more sophisticated in the Second Section, he explicitly leans on the main points of the First Section.

The first few pages consider what Kant calls ‘popular moral philosophy’. He has in mind here, not the everyday intuitions that figured in the First Section, but rather the attempts of philosophers to account for those intuitions by constructing morality on the basis of human desires, needs and interests. Nor does he think we should be surprised by these philosophical projects, given how difficult it is to be sure that any given morally worthy act is done purely out of a respect for the moral law. He writes: ‘There have always been philosophers who for this reason have absolutely denied the reality of this disposition in human actions [a disposition to act out of respect for the moral law], attributing everything to more or less refined self-love.’ He doesn’t mention him, but Hume could well be one of those he has in mind. Opposing these philosophers, Kant repeats his view that only an analytical, a priori, investigation can reveal the true nature of morality. Whereas in the First Section he tried to show this by an analysis of everyday moral intuitions, the task of the Second Section is that of arriving at the same place by a more theoretical investigation of reason and action. He writes: ‘In order to make this advance, we must follow and clearly present the practical faculty of reason from its universal rules of determination to the point where the concept of duty arises from it.’

Beginning with the idea that ‘everything in nature works according to laws’ – where of course these ‘laws’ include physical laws of nature – he notes straightaway that there is something special about the way in which rational beings fall under laws. Rational beings such as human agents act not merely according to laws – as would, say, a physical object – but according to their conception of laws. Rational agents in this way employ their faculty of reason in a practical (i.e. active) sense.

Kant then notes: ‘The conception of an objective principle [i.e. a law] so far as it constrains a will, is a command (of reason) and the formula of this command is called an imperative.’ And he goes on to consider different sorts of imperative. While his methods for doing so remain controversial, Kant then distinguishes between hypothetical and categorical imperatives. This distinction is based on the way in which the relevant imperatives command our wills. A hypothetical imperative attains the status of a command by virtue of our having some end that could be achieved by obeying it. Consider, for example, this command: ‘if you want to be healthy, eat broccoli’. (Note by the way that it is of the form ‘if… then’, and this is no doubt the reason Kant thinks of these kinds of imperatives as ‘hypothetical’, even though the idea itself doesn’t seem to absolutely require the ‘if… then’ form.) Who might find their will engaged by this command? Well, someone who wanted to be healthy. If you had no interest in your health, then this particular imperative might well be true, but would be of no interest to you. So all hypothetical imperatives seem to command our wills only insofar as we share the purpose or end on which they are based.

Consider next an imperative which has no suggested benefit but is just a direct requirement, e.g. do not make a lying promise. The commanding nature of this imperative cannot come from some end or purpose on which it is based, because it has no such backing. There is no ‘if’-clause hidden here, suggesting, for example, that making a lying promise will ruin your reputation or lead to even worse consequences. That is what it means for this imperative to be called ‘categorical’.

Kant’s view is that, as the above example suggests, the requirements of morality are all categorical imperatives. On the one hand, this allows Kant to fill in the philosophical picture of practical reason so that we end up saying many of the same things about duty as were evident in the First Section, and there will be more about this shortly. On the other hand, this way of thinking of moral duties raises an immediate and fundamental question: what reason do we have to think that categorical imperatives actually can command the will of rational agents? In other words, what reason do we have for thinking that what are called ‘categorical imperatives’ actually have imperative force? Kant’s own way of asking this question is: how is the categorical imperative possible? However one asks this question, it is certainly crucial, for if the answer is negative, then Kant’s idea of morality – and remember, he has argued that it is the common idea too – would be empty. There would simply be nothing in the world corresponding to what we had thought of as morality.

Kant’s attempt to describe how the categorical imperative is possible comes in the complex and rich Third Section. The remainder of the Second Section consists in the further analysis of the idea of the categorical imperative, the main lines of which I shall now describe.

Given that a categorical imperative appeals to no further end or purpose, every such imperative will command, when it does, in the same way. To take our example, if you ask why you ought not to make a lying promise, the only possible answer Kant envisages is: because it is my duty and hence I am fulfilling it out of respect for the moral law. Since this is the answer that he thinks you should give in connection with any other example of a duty, Kant concludes: ‘There is, therefore, only one categorical imperative’, and he states it in these famous words:

Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

This is generally known as the ‘first formulation’ of the categorical imperative, and Kant then goes on to give four examples of duties which are meant to illustrate this formula. (Note that the notion of a ‘maxim’, which we have come across earlier, is a somewhat technical term for Kant. You should try to get a sense of it by looking it up in various of the accounts given in the reading list.)

The examples are: Do not take your own life even when you are in despair. Do not make a lying promise even if you will benefit from it. Do cultivate your talents even when you have no specific need to do so. Do help others in need even when you have no inclination to do so. Many commentators have thought that Kant’s discussion of these examples is weak in various ways; some even describe them as ‘Kant’s notorious examples’. There are two interrelated questions that should figure in your reading of these examples: what is the exact role of the formulation of the categorical imperative in respect of them?, and where do these specific duties come from in the first place?

With the first formulation of the categorical imperative, Kant takes himself to have achieved the basic aim of the Second Section. He has shown that the only kind of imperative which could command the will of a rational agent is by its very nature one that commands all rational agents. Further, he claims that the moral duties that figure in everyday moral intuition are themselves best understood as falling under the categorical imperative. In sum, Kant takes himself to have established that practical reason – the determination of a rational agent’s will – coincides with our intuitions about duty. Or, put another way, this means that the good will described at the beginning of the First Section is none other than the will of a rational agent. (Towards the end of the Second Section Kant explicitly returns to this claim.)

These equivalences are profound and even surprising. For they imply that morality is itself simply the product of a will acting under the guidance of reason; that is, under the guidance of the categorical imperative. But rather than stopping there, Kant takes this thought further. Asking whether there could be something the existence of which had absolute worth, Kant answers: ‘… man and, in general, every rational being exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will’. With this idea of a being of absolute worth – an end in itself – Kant produces a second formulation of the categorical imperative:

Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.

He takes this to be effectively equivalent to the first formulation, and proceeds to re-discuss his four examples using it as the governing principle.

This ‘formula of humanity’, as this second version is often called, tends to be the one most cited. It seems clear enough what it means to use someone as a means only – think of a factory owner who cares only about how many units workers produce – but the notion of a human being as ‘an end in itself’ is elusive, even if it sounds somehow right. Some hint about it might be gleaned from the two further formulations of the categorical imperative.

One is the principle that every human will is a will giving universal laws, and another is put this way: Act according the maxims of a universally legislative member of a merely potential kingdom of ends. Both of these introduce the idea of a rational agent as not merely subject to universal laws, but making them. This is of fundamental importance both to our understanding of human beings as ends, and to the material in Section Three.

The second of these formulations introduces the notion of a ‘kingdom of ends’, and it is worth finishing off our discussion of the Second Section by looking more closely at this notion and its context. Additionally, this discussion will serve as an appropriate introduction to Section Three.

Kant claims that human agents are ends in themselves, and also that one form of the categorical imperative sees us as possessing wills who make, rather than just obey, universal laws. These claims invite one to consider a community of such beings, and this is what Kant has in mind by the ‘kingdom of ends’. In such a community, all members, in giving laws to themselves, are at the same time legislating for everyone. Why so? The laws to which my will is subject are by definition universal. Were the determinants of my will anything less than universal, they wouldn’t be laws and wouldn’t apply to everyone. Here is an example to make the contrast: suppose that I desire a holiday in Greece. This desire has the potential to influence my will, but insofar as it does, this is not something that I could for a moment think of as also applying to the wills of others.

There is no reason to think the desire to holiday in Greece is
universal. However, in recognising my duty to help others, my will is determined by a categorical imperative, and this determination is not based on any personal desire, but rather on the universal law constitutive of that duty. Moreover, because this universal law is not merely one I obey, it is one that I legislate for myself and, in so doing, also legislate for everyone else. Kant describes as ‘autonomous’ a will that is thereby self-legislating, and he reserves the term ‘heteronomous’ for a will subject to personal desires, needs and inclinations.

A kingdom or community of ends in themselves (i.e. rational beings) would be a community in which each member is autonomous or self-legislating. And because the laws of such legislation are universal, they would apply to all members of the community and thus the kingdom of ends would be fully harmonious. There could be no conflict in such a kingdom. (Though this cannot be developed here, there is a lot in common between Kant’s picture here and the notion of the general will that was at the centre of Rousseau’s political philosophy. Nor is this coincidence: Rousseau’s works were acknowledged by Kant as of the first importance.)

Freedom and the categorical imperative

The central notion discussed in the Third Section of FMM is freedom. In the opening paragraph, Kant brushes aside what he calls the negative idea of freedom – the idea that one is free when not influenced by outside causes – in favour of a more positive formulation: freedom is having one’s will determined by laws one gives to oneself. As our discussion of various formulations of the categorical imperative suggests, this way of defining freedom seems to link it closely with morality. In fact, for Kant the link is more than merely close. He writes: ‘A free will and a will under moral laws are identical.’

The consequences of this identity are both profound and controversial. Kant is not merely saying something ordinarily regarded as true: that we are morally responsible only for those acts we engage in freely. Instead, he is claiming that the possibility of acting morally is one and the same as the possibility of acting freely, and vice versa, so that a free act is itself a moral one. Moreover, Kant recognises that we can only be sure that anything corresponds to our idea of morality if we can show, or have good reason to believe, that we are free in the Kantian sense of our being self-legislating beings. So, a great deal hangs on the discussion and arguments in this Third Section.

The identity that Kant claims here is something arrived at by an analysis of the notions of the good will, a will subject to the categorical imperative, and his positive definition of freedom as a will that legislates for itself. By ‘analysis’ Kant of course means a process of a priori deliberation. What he claims is that if you examine the notion of the good will, you will see that it is a will guided by the categorical imperative, and also that this link is one we can make via an understanding of freedom. However, the very fact that these notions are analytically connected shows that we cannot use them to demonstrate, in Kant’s words, that the categorical imperative is possible. Put another way: an analysis of our notions of morality and freedom shows how they are connected but cannot by itself show that morality has any reality.

The discussion of freedom that figures in Section Three is thus the pivot on which Kant’s defence of morality rests. In speaking about morality – and in acting morally – we presuppose that we are free, but until and unless we can demonstrate the reality of that freedom, it is open to someone to think that morality is empty. He sums this predicament as follows:

We assume that we are free in the order of efficient causes [the causal network describable by empirical science which governs all things and creatures] so that we can conceive of ourselves as subject to moral laws in the order of ends. And then we think of ourselves as subject to these laws because we have ascribed freedom of the will to ourselves. This is circular because freedom and self-legislation of the will are both autonomy and thus are reciprocal concepts, and for that reason one of them cannot be used to explain the other and to furnish a ground for it.

All is not lost, however. Kant begins to address this circularity, writing:

One recourse, however, remains open to us, namely, to inquire whether we do not assume a different standpoint when we think of ourselves as causes a priori efficient through freedom from that which we occupy when we conceive of ourselves in the light of our actions as effects which we see before our eyes.

The story that Kant then goes on to tell has been deeply controversial, and many think unsatisfying. Moreover, it is a story that appeals at the most fundamental level to Kant’s metaphysical and epistemological views. It is also one that figures in some guise in many discussions of free will.

As suggested above, Kant’s basic idea is that we can adopt two standpoints when we think about ourselves. On the one hand, we can think of ourselves as capable of initiating actions, as being free in the way required for morality. On the other hand, we can think of ourselves as subject to the pushes and pulls of empirical causes, those that are physical and also those that are psychological, arising as they do from our desires, needs and interests. Kant goes on to anchor this possibility of a double standpoint in the context of his larger philosophical project.

In this project Kant distinguishes between the world which is knowable because partly constituted by our own concepts, and a realm that lies beyond – a realm of things as they are in themselves. As noted in the first section of this chapter, Kant thinks that we are tempted by our faculty of reason to think we can know about things in themselves – that we can know about what transcends our understanding – but the centrepiece of Kant’s critical revolution is that reason needs to be reined in when it is so tempted. Does this mean that we cannot even speculate about things in themselves? One would have thought so, for any such speculation could never be so much as evaluated for truth, so it is difficult to see what point it could have. But when he canvasses the idea of two standpoints, Kant does engage in rather a lot of speculation. In particular, he suggests that one special item in the transcendent realm is a self which grounds the possibility of the standpoint from which we view our actions as free. The other standpoint is grounded on our empirical self, which is the locus of our desires, needs and interests.

Isn’t there a tension, if not an outright incompatibility, between the two standpoints? And, if so, doesn’t one have the right to ask which of the standpoints is correct? Finally, and most importantly, given that the two-standpoints account seems intended to underpin the reality of the categorical imperative and hence morality, does this talk of standpoints really do the trick? These are questions Kant puts to himself, and it is far from clear that his answers are satisfactory. Nor is he completely assured about this himself, as witnessed in the concluding paragraph of FMM:

Therefore reason restlessly seeks the unconditionally necessary and sees itself compelled to assume it, though it has no means by which to make it comprehensible and is happy enough if it can only discover the concept which is consistent with the presupposition.

Critical explorations

Kant is not an easy philosopher, and though FMM is more accessible than many other of his works, it is demanding nonetheless. Of the first importance, then, is your working through the text and coming to understand both the shape of Kant’s account of morality and the detail which fills in this shape.

Aside from understanding what Kant said, there are a number of different aspects of his views which you could profitably pursue in more depth, making special use here of the essential secondary reading.

Some areas you should explore are:

  1. 1. The purpose of Kant’s categorical imperative. Does he intend it as a principle from which one can directly discern one’s duties? Some have thought so, and accused Kant of a kind of formalism about morality. Perhaps the categorical imperative (in all of its forms) is not so much the source of our actual duties, as it is an explanation of what a duty is.
  2. 2. Are the different formulations of the categorical imperative actually equivalent in any sense, as Kant suggests? If not, which of them is best suited for his purposes?
  3. 3. Is his discussion of the four examples – a discussion which crops up twice in the Second Section – convincing?
  4. 4. Another area worth looking into is his distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives. The labelling here seems to come from the form of these imperatives, but the significance of the distinction seems to go well beyond this form.
  5. 5. As has been suggested already, the Kantian idea of freedom and its role in relation to morality is controversial. Can it really be the case that acting freely and acting morally are one and the same?
  6. 6. In trying to reconcile freedom and causality, Kant calls on his account of two standpoints. Does the existence of these standpoints help here, and does he make them plausible?