I am going to start by returning to the question of what Kant means by “will.”
Then we will turn to the categorical imperative and Kant’s examples of the duties that, he claims, are derived from the categorical imperative.
I went back over the material from last time and realized that I had a point to make about the will that I did not actually make. What is more, I failed to do this despite the fact that Kevin brought it up. It was like the universe, or Kevin, or the universe acting through Kevin, was waving a big red flag in my face. Yet for whatever reason, the gears in my head did not engage.
I blame the cat. Totally threw me off my game. Fortunately, we get do-overs!
Let’s look at the passage that Kevin pointed out, from 4:412-413. Since it is complicated, I am going to stick some numbers in there to make it easier to say what I think is going on.
Everything in nature works in accordance with laws. (1) Only a rational being has the capacity to act in accordance with the representation of laws, that is, in accordance with principles, or has a will. Since reason is required for the derivation of actions from laws, the will is nothing other than practical reason. (2) If reason infallibly determines the will, the actions of such a being that are cognized as objectively necessary are also subjectively necessary, that is, the will is a capacity to choose only that which reason independently of inclination cognizes as practically necessary, that is, as good. (3) However, if reason solely by itself does not adequately determine the will; if the will is exposed also to subjective conditions (certain incentives) that are not always in accord with the objective ones; in a word, if the will is not in itself completely in conformity with reason (as is actually the case with human beings), then actions that are cognized as objectively necessary are subjectively contingent, and the determination of such a will in conformity with objective laws is necessitation: that is to say, the relation of objective laws to a will that is not thoroughly good is represented as the determination of the will of a rational being through grounds of reason, indeed, but grounds to which this will is not by its nature necessarily obedient. (4:412-413)
The paragraph starts with an implicit distinction between two senses of the word “law.” There are the laws of nature, as in the laws of physics, and there are moral or legal laws. The laws of physics describe what matter does. They do not order matter to obey, say, the laws of gravitation. They just say that matter will do what the laws of nature say it will do. The other kinds of laws are normative; they are addressed to creatures that are capable of either following commands or not following them. These laws tell the creatures to which they are addressed what they ought to do. So far so good.
What kinds of creatures are capable of following commands or not doing so? Kant says they are rational ones.1 This leads to what looks like definitions of “will” in (1). These hold that the will is the “capacity to act in accordance with the representation of laws” and that “the will is nothing other than practical reason.”2
However, in (2) and (3), Kant characterizes the will as a “capacity to choose.” He says that what the will chooses can either conform with what reason “cognizes” as good or not conform. (“Cognizes” means “knows,” “finds,” or “discovers”).
There is a lot going on in (3) concerning free will. When our behavior is influenced by what we want, it is necessitated or, to put it more plainly, caused. (Hume would totally agree!) By contrast, when reason governs our behavior we are free. (Hume would totally disagree.) The use of “subjective” and “objective” is a bit confusing here. Kant calls desires “subjective,” because different people want different things; reason, by contrast, is the same for all rational beings and so, Kant thinks, it is objective. The paragraph ends with a claim that when our “subjective” desires lead us to do the things that “objective” reason also tells us to do, our doing those things is “necessitation” and “not thoroughly good.”
Let’s go back to main question. What does Kant think the will is? I think he is genuinely torn between these two definitions of the will: (a) it is “nothing other than practical reason” and (b) it is the “capacity to choose.”
We are going to see this tension come out in the last section of the Groundwork. There, Kant’s theory is going to lead him to say that only choices governed by reason are free choices and so they are the only ones that are genuinely our own. Any other kind of choice, such as one that is determined by things you want, is caused by something other than you. But, as he notes here, most human behavior is actually determined by “subjective” causes, like what we want, rather than “objective” reason. So your true, rational, will might be different from the will you act on.
In case you were wondering, yes, that is paradoxical.
As we saw last time, Kant identifies three kinds of imperatives that fall into two categories. Imperatives of skill and prudence are hypothetical imperatives while moral imperatives are categorical. He poses a strange sounding question: “how are these imperatives possible?” (4:417).
I am not sure what he means. But here is a reasonable guess. The question is how any of these imperatives can move someone to action. This is how I understand 4:419. In the case of the hypothetical imperatives, the answer is fairly easy. A hypothetical imperative tells you how to accomplish something that you want. When your desire for a given outcome is combined with the knowledge of how to achieve that outcome, we can see why you would be led to act on this knowledge.3 A categorical imperative is different. It is an imperative that tells you what to do regardless of what you want. That is what “categorical” means. When Kant asks how such an imperative is possible, I understand him to mean “how is it possible that an imperative that has nothing to do with what you want could move you to action?” And that is a reasonable question!
I think Kant is right to say that only the categorical imperative has the “tenor of a practical law” (4:420). A hypothetical imperative tells you what you would have to do to achieve a goal. If you do not want to do that, you can abandon the goal. A categorical imperative, by contrast, tells you what you must do regardless of what you want. It is an “unconditional command that leaves the will no discretion” (4:420).
There is only one categorical imperative: act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law (4:421). Or, if you like, “We must be able to will that a maxim of our action become a universal law: this is the canon of moral appraisal of action in general” (4:424).
A maxim is “the principle in accordance with which the subject acts” (4:421n).4 It is more than what we might call an intention. Rather, it is supposed to be a general statement about what is allowed or sensible to do. If I get a drink of water because I am thirsty my intention would be to get a drink of water while my maxim would be something like “anyone who is thirsty and can get a drink without disrupting others is allowed to do so.”
In the second section of the Groundwork, Kant is going to ask whether “all imperatives of duty can be derived from this single imperative” (4:420). There is a kind of question about this imperative that will only be addressed in the third section. That question is “how is such an absolute command possible?” or whether “what is called duty is not as such an empty concept” (4:421). I do not understand what either of those questions means, but I gather we will find out later. For now, we have to read this with the understanding that Kant thinks there is something important that will only be addressed later.
One last point before I move on. The categorical imperative is given several different formulations throughout the Groundwork; they are all supposed to be equivalent. The one quoted above is called the Formula of Universal Law. It is followed a couple paragraphs later by the so-called Formula of Law of Nature: “act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature” (4:421).
The question is whether the imperatives of duty can be derived from the categorical imperative. Kant answers the question by giving examples of four different duties and trying to show how they can be derived from the categorical imperative.
Kant thinks that our duties fall into four categories. There are perfect and imperfect duties and there are duties that we owe to ourselves and duties that are owed to others.
| Duties to ourselves | Duties to others | |
|---|---|---|
| Perfect duties | No suicide | No false promises |
| Imperfect duties | Develop abilities | Benevolence |
Perfect duties are duties where specific actions are required or forbidden. For every promise you make, you must sincerely intend to keep it. Imperfect duties are duties to do a kind of action, but not on any particular occasion. I should help others in need, but not necessarily all the time.
Kant goes through a series of examples of people who propose to violate each of these duties. In each example, he identifies the maxim that would lead someone to violate the duty and he argues that such a maxim could not be adopted as a universal law.
His clearest case involves promising. Suppose I make a promise knowing that I am not going to keep it. My maxim, according to Kant, would go like this: “when I believe myself to be in need of money I shall borrow money and promise to repay it, even though I know that this will never happen.” Is this a maxim that I could both act on and “at the same time will that it become a universal law” (from 4:421)? No. “For, the universality of a law that everyone … could promise whatever he pleases with the intention of not keeping it would make the promise and the end one might have in it itself impossible, since no one would believe what was promised him” (4:422). In a nutshell, I would not get the loan if my maxim were a universal law because if it were, no one would believe that I would repay the loan and so no one would give me the loan. That would not be a way of getting what I want, namely, the loan.
We are going to go over the examples this time, mostly to get a sense of what Kant means. In each case, identify the maxim and Kant’s reasons for thinking that the maxim could not be willed as universal law.
Next Monday, we are going to read a chapter from a commentary on Kant’s Groundwork that will review some of the most prominent objections raised against Kant’s discussion of these examples.
In class I said that two of Kant’s cases looked, to me, as though they just involved what is called a discount rate. The cases I had in mind were the ones involving the development of one’s talents and benevolence towards others. Having thought about it, I think this was not the best way of understanding what Kant is trying to say.
Kant had said that maxims that reject either developing one’s own talents or helping others would result in a contradiction if everyone shared them, as they would if the relevant maxims were universal laws or laws of nature. The contradiction is not conceptual: you could imagine worlds in which no one develops their talents or helps others. Rather, the relevant contradiction lies in the will; it is a practical contradiction rather than a conceptual one. The idea is that if the relevant maxim were a universal law, you would not be able to use your developed talents or receive help from others. That is a contradiction because you might need those talents or that kind of help in order to do things you want to do.
I said that these arguments looked unimpressive to me because they rely on a contentious assertion that everyone has to prefer the satisfaction of their future desires over their present desires. The future desires are the ones they will need their talents, or help from others, to satisfy and the present desires are the ones that incline them against developing their talents, or helping others. I borrowed a term from economics to express this: discount rate. I said that the people who do not want to help others, even at the expense of receiving help for themselves in the future, have a high discount rate. They put greater value on satisfying their present desires than the do their future desires. I said that everyone has some discount rate and that there was nothing obviously irrational about having a very steep one.
Really, you do not even need to talk about discount rates. There is just a trade-off: do I want A or B? If I buy a new car I will not have enough to make a down payment on a house in a nice neighborhood. I want both but if I spend my money on one, I will not be able to have the other. I have to decide which one is more important to me. This is not a contradiction of any sort. It is just making a decision.
In any event, having thought about it, I have concluded that this is not the best way of putting Kant’s point. This is better. As Kant sees it, if everyone followed a maxim like “do not help others,” then I would have perished from neglect as an infant. Everyone needs to be cared for when they are babies so if no one cared for others, no one would make it out of infancy. Kant could argue, with considerably plausibility, that it is irrational to prefer a world where I would die in infancy over one in which I help others as an adult.
Admittedly, that is not what Kant says. He says that in a world where no one helps or hurts others, human life could subsist and that we might be better off than we are in this world, where people pay lip service to benevolence and then take positive steps to hurt others. By contrast, I am imagining a world where almost everyone dies as a baby. Still, I think it is a better way of making the point that I believe he himself is trying to make.
You could still challenge the argument even if it is put this way. You could ask whether people need a sense of duty to care for their children or whether they take a very strong emotional interest in doing so.5 And you could also challenge the idea that what is going wrong in this world is best described as a contradiction or irrationality. I am just saying that I think this way of putting it makes the strongest case for Kant’s side. And, in particular, I am saying that this way of putting it is immune to the sort of objection I raised.
I still do not have anything helpful to say about the suicide case. I simply do not understand why he thinks there is anything contradictory about a world where people kill themselves when they think that continued life would be worse than death.
This is what might be going on with these examples.
Kant thinks that reason is universal. Whatever is rational for one person has to be rational for everyone. Let’s grant that point. Kant takes it one way and those who are skeptical about his arguments take it another way.
For Kant, the universality of reason works out like this.
I think his critics have something closer to this in mind.
There was a handout for this class: 17.KantWill.handout.pdf