We are going to talk about the end of Section II and all of Section III. The theme throughout is autonomy and freedom of the will.
Specifically, we are going to cover the third, and final, formulation of the categorical imperative: the formula of autonomy (4:431-445). And then we will talk about Kant’s views on free will (Section III).
Kant observes that moral rules are categorical and that they are imperatives. They are imperatives because they tell you what to do and they are categorical because they apply to you regardless of what you want.
It seems to me that he is right about that. So far, even Hume could at least partially agree. The conventional rules of property tell you to respect property rights and they apply to you regardless of whether you want to or not. They are grammatically categorical imperatives, if you will. The natural virtues are trickier. If, say, you do not love your children, you will be morally vicious; disinterested observers think you are supposed to love your children even if you do not want to (or you want to but cannot). But it is not clear to me that this would amount to an imperative. No one is telling the unfeeling parents to do anything. They are just judging them for not having the correct feelings; the judgment remains the same even if there is nothing that can be done about it.
Kant differs from Hume in at least four ways. First, he thinks that there is one, ultimate categorical imperative. Second, he thinks that this categorical imperative is discovered by reason. Third, he thinks that reasoning correctly will lead anyone to actually comply with the categorical imperative. Finally, he thinks that the imperative applies to our maxims rather than our feelings. Parents who are dutiful towards their children are morally in the clear regardless of how they feel.
OK, so there is one categorical imperative. What is it?
You were not expecting a simple answer, were you? How long have we been at this?
The answer is not simple because Kant gives three so-called formulations of the categorical imperative and there is no generally accepted answer to two questions “why does he think these all say the same thing?” and “why did he think he needed all three (especially if they all amount to the same thing)?”
To review, here they are.
Formula of Universal Law: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law” (4:421).1
Formula of Humanity: “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” (4:429).
Formula of Autonomy: this is first expressed as “the idea of the will of every rational being as a will giving universal law” (4:432) and then later put in the form of an imperative like so: “The principle of autonomy is, therefore: to choose only in such a way that the maxims of your choice are also included as universal law in the same volition” (4:440).
Today, we are going to start with the Formula of Autonomy.
After presenting the formula of humanity and going through the four cases (suicide, false promise, development of talents, and benevolence), Kant says that he has now explained the form and the end of what he calls “the ground of all practical lawgiving” (4:431), which I take to be a reference to the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative is universal in form (see the first formulation) and it tells us to treat humanity as our end (see the second formulation). When you combine these two points “there follows now a third practical principle of the will,” namely, “the idea of the will of every rational being as a will giving universal law” (4:431). That, my friends, is the third formulation of the categorical imperative and it is called the formula of autonomy.
Hey, I have a question. That said “law,” not “autonomy.” Are you sure that is what it is called? You seem very sleepy these days. Maybe you messed this one up.
Thank you for your concern about my health. I am, indeed, quite sure. I checked. More importantly, the relationship between autonomy and law is Kant’s big idea. To be more specific, he thinks it is important to show that “the will is not merely subject to the law” but that the will must also “be viewed as giving the law to itself” (4:431).
Autonomy, for Kant, is not the ability to act without constraint but rather, acting under the constraint of laws that you impose on yourself.
So let’s imagine what would be involved in my imposing the categorical imperative as a law on myself. How would that work?
We could start with analogies with other laws. The state has laws. I might also give myself law-ish rules such as “no drinking before 4pm.” In these cases, according to Kant, I comply with the laws if it is in my interest to do so. I want to stay out of jail or control my drinking, respectively.
This will not do for the categorical imperative. That, to remind you, is something that I am supposed to comply with regardless of what I want. So if the categorical imperative is a law that I give to myself, my reasons for complying with it cannot have anything to do with my interests (4:432-433).
How is that going to work? Kant thinks it works if two things are true.
He thinks he is going to establish how the first of these things is at least possible in the remainder of this section; the second, the idea that reason expresses my true self, is the topic of Section III.
Here are a few things to think about concerning the first point.
First, Nick said something after class last time that I find very helpful. He said that Hume thinks of reason as a tool, that is, something you use to, say, reach a conclusion. Kant thinks of reason as an authority, that is, something that tells you what you should think or do.
Second, if I am going to use reason alone to do anything, that means I am not going to consult any of the features of my distinctive personality. The things that make up my personality, such as what I want, fear, believe, hope, and so on, are going to be irrelevant. Reason for me is the same as reason for you. That is why reason is supposed to arrive at universal rules that would apply to all of us, regardless of what we want.
Third, Kant thinks of the moral life on the model of a lawgiver. Our maxims are general rules for action and moral thought involves thinking about what could be a law for everyone. To the extent that we are purely rational, we are all lawgivers in what he calls a kingdom of ends. It seems to me that this is a significantly different picture of the moral life from the one found in Hume.
Kant closes the second section with a series of remarks to the effect that there is something especially valuable about rational beings who give laws to themselves. He says that they have dignity as contrasted with a price (4:435, 4:440). Dignity is distinguished from abilities such as skills or intelligence as something that all rational beings can have equally. The other qualities, by contrast, notoriously vary. In this way, he tries to capture something that is seemingly absent in Hume’s moral philosophy, namely, the idea that moral value is something that is equally accessible to everyone.
Let’s suppose that we understand how reason alone could guide me in giving myself a law. Why would that count as my giving myself a law? After all, I am more than a rational being. Of all the lives lived by rational beings, I am living this particular one. I have my own point of view on the world that will be extinguished when I die. This matters to me in a way that the points of view occupied by other rational beings in the kingdom of ends do not. And, finally, I am more than a rational creature: I do have a personality, desires, beliefs, fears, hopes, and all the rest. Why would a choice that leaves all of this behind count as my choice?
That is the kind of problem that the third section is meant to address.
I am going to start with how it ends. Here is the last sentence: “And thus we do not indeed comprehend the practical unconditional necessity of the moral imperative, but we nevertheless comprehend its incomprehensibility; and this is all that can fairly be required of a philosophy that strives in its principles to the very boundary of human reason” (4:463).
Kant gets to this dispiriting conclusion through a discussion of free will. In a nutshell, a purely rational decision is mine if I am a purely rational being. That does, indeed, seem to be what the belief in free will involves: that I make decisions for rational reasons that are my own rather than being caused to act by forces outside of my control such as my desires, character traits, and so on. So that is a promising answer. Alas, we cannot know whether we have free will or not. Indeed, we cannot even understand what it would be like to have free will. So the whole thing is, ultimately, incomprehensible.
However, there is a silver lining! Kant thinks he can show that we must necessarily believe in free will even if we cannot really understand it (see 4:448, for example). This is how he gets there. When you think about what you should do, you implicitly believe that your thinking makes a difference. What is the point of asking yourself a question like “what does it make sense to do here?” if answering it has nothing to do with what you will, in fact, do? If you regarded your behavior as caused by forces outside of your control, the answer would be something like “something is going to make me think that one course of action makes more sense than the other and that is what I will do.” Most of us do not think like that. Rather, we turn over the various considerations for and against the options before us and we settle on the one that strikes us as the best. Kant thinks that when we do something like this, we assume that we are free and that our decision is what determines our actions.
Kant draws an analogy with our knowledge of the external world to illustrate what he means (4:451). Right now, I think I am looking at a rug. But “looking at a rug” does not really capture what is happening. Strictly speaking, I am aware of visual sensations that I take to be sensations of the rug. My mind just has access to what Kant calls “appearances” rather than “things in themselves.” But I regard the appearances that I see as appearances of the things in themselves. That is why I think I am looking at a rug rather than feeling electrical signals coming from my eyeball.
In the case of free will, Kant thinks there is a distinction similar to the one between appearances and things in themselves. Specifically, he thinks we have to take two different standpoints on ourselves. On the one hand, we can see that we belong to what he calls the world of sense, where everything that we do is causally determined according to the laws of nature. On the other hand, we think of ourselves as belonging to the intelligible world, where everything that we do is determined by reason rather than natural causes (4:452).
Kant devotes the penultimate part of Section III, “On the Extreme Boundary of All Practical Philosophy” (4:455-463) to showing that we are committed to seeing ourselves as free even though freedom “can never be comprehended” (4:459).