A Fact of Reason

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

~Immanuel Kant

Morality, à la Kant

This is the sequel to The Thing-In-Itself, which covered Kant's metaphysics. In it, we learned about how Kant made room for free will by distinguishing between "two worlds." There's the world as we see it, and the world as it really is. There's, in other words, the thing we see and the thing-in-itself. Kant claimed that the laws of nature only apply to the world as we see it. In other words, the laws of nature are imposed on our experiences of the world by our faculty of understanding, our cognition. But this is just how we structure our experience of the world. Moreover, we (as rational human beings) exist as things independent of our experiences of the world. That is, we are a thing-in-itself. This means that the laws of nature don't apply. In short, the threat against free will from determinism is no threat at all, according to Kant; this is because we exist fundamentally in the world as it really is, while determinism exists only in the world as we see it.

In his defense of (libertarian) free will, Kant makes the case that there is an objective morality. In fact, it is our realization that there is an objective morality that gets us to the realization that we are free. So, in one fell swoop, Kant argued for the freedom of the will and objective morality—not to mention the immorality of the soul and existence of God(!). In this lesson, we will take a closer look at Kant's ethics.

Before we do, though, let's recall that Kant is arguing for an objective morality—a view that is sometimes referred to as moral realism. On this, moral values are mind-independent; that is, they exist independent of humans minds, rather than just being human constructs. This is important because we've already looked at a few competing approaches to morality, such as cultural moral relativism and Hobbes' social contract theory. These two ethical theories in particular embrace a non-objectivist view of moral values. Hobbes, you'll recall, argued that morality is completely subjective; there's only right for you and right for me, but no right in general. This invariably creates conflict. So, Hobbes thought that we should give all authority on moral and legal mattes to a central power that will arbitrate for us, for the sake of peace and stability. Cultural moral relativism switched the frame of reference from the individual to the culture as a whole. According to this kind of relativist, an act is right or wrong only within the context of a cultural framework. Moreover, it is common for this type of relativist to argue that it is impossible to compare and/or juxtapose different cultural framework. Attempting to judge which cultural "sphere" is better is pointless, since there is no objective metric—that is, no objective value system—by which you can engage in this comparison. As you can see, these theories aren't holding out hope for an objective morality.

And so, Kant will have to convince us that the relativistic views we covered, along with any other non-objectivist competitors are wrong. This is a tall order, since many find relativism alluring. Keep this in mind as we wade through Kant's ethics.

Important Concepts

Human Reason

In the last lesson, we stuck to how the faculty of human understanding structures our perception of reality. Kant argued that the information that we get from our sensory organs (eyes, ears, etc.) is given a structure by our understanding. Put in more modern parlance, our brain interprets the electrical signals it's getting from the outside world and creates a model of reality for us (Swanson 2016). Our brains, in other words, create a virtual reality that more-or-less matches the reality that exists outside of our skulls, and that's how we navigate through the world (Seth 2021).

This lesson is devoted to human reason. For Kant, these are two different cognitive faculties. The basic distinction is as follows. Human understanding (through which we give order to the world, as seen in the previous lesson) contains forms of intuition, i.e., those built-in categories that shape the world when we cognize it.¹ Human reason, on the other hand does not. Reason does not depend on the peculiarities of human cognition; what is reasonable is reasonable to all intelligent beings whether they be humans, angels, gods, or whatever. So, with human reason, we will discover those things that are rational across the board. And this, according to Kant, includes morality.

Perhaps it will help if I put a slightly different gloss on this distinction. Human understanding is the means by which we understand the world as it appears to us. Human reason, on the other hand, is the means by which we consider how the world ought to be. So both faculties help us construct the world, although in different senses of the word. And just as we give ourselves the laws of nature through human understanding, we give ourselves the moral law through human reason.

We should be more specific on the kinds of laws that human reason gives us. There are two ways that reason commands us. A hypothetical imperative is the sort of imperative (or command) where: a. you have a particular desired outcome or consequence, so b. you do a particular action as a means to that end. For example, “Billy wants to get an A in the course, so he does all the homework and engages in class.” Also, “Wendy is thirsty, so she got up to get some water.” Billy and Wendy had a desire, and reason came up with a rational means by which to fulfill said desire. That's one way that reason commands us.

A categorical imperative is a command from reason that applies across any situation no matter what you desire, i.e. it’s a set of rules you must follow, since they always apply. Put another way, there are some rules that if you don't obey, you'd be contradicting yourself.² Kant believes that morality is a categorical imperative. It is a moral law that is commanded upon us by our own reason.

It is the realization that there is a moral law, and that we can fail to abide by it, that makes us realize that we are free.³ That means we are Rational Beings; we are beings that can live according to principles. Non-human animals can't do this. This is why it is funny to see vegetarian sharks in Finding Nemo: it's not in a shark's nature to be able to choose to be vegetarian. But we can choose the principles by which we live. Kant argues that this is what gives us moral personhood (i.e., the status of having moral rights).

“The starting point of Kant’s ethics is the concept of freedom. According to his famous maxim that ‘ought implies can’, the right action must always be possible: which is to say, I must always be free to perform it. The moral agent ‘judges that he can do certain things because he is conscious that he ought, and he recognises that he is free, a fact which, but for the moral law, he would have never known’”(Scruton 2001: 74).

Decoding Kantianism

Some clarifications...

As previously stated, human understanding is for understanding the empirical realm (the world of phenomena that we perceive through our "forms of intuition"); human reason, then, helps us to come to know aspects of the transcendental realm (the realm of things-in-themselves), namely the general laws of logic that apply everywhere. Because Kant’s moral system is founded in this transcendental realm, he must rely solely on reason for making moral judgments. Indeed, Kant argued that we can arrive at fundamental moral truths through reason alone (or Pure Reason); in other words, we do not need to look at the consequences of the action (in the empirical realm) to see whether they are right or wrong. For example, you don't need to know what happened after someone betrayed a friend to know that betraying someone is wrong. This is why Kant develops a purely duty- or rule-oriented view.

What is freedom for Kant? Kant stresses that freedom is not just doing whatever you desire. This is because some desires are not genuinely coming from us. Desires have either biological or social origins. For example, our desire for food and sex have biological origins. Other desires, like our desire to have a bigger following on Instagram, clearly has a social origin. In any case, Kant argues that true freedom comes when you rid yourself of these non-rational desires. It is only when you allow yourself to be truly governed by reason that you are free. Getting rid of all your non-rational desires leads to pure practical reason. As previously mentioned, human reason is that through which we give ourselves the moral law. So once you've gotten rid of these non-rational desires you can follow the moral law.

For the reasons outlined in the preceding paragraph, Kant argues that an action only has real moral worth (i.e. moral value) if it is done out of duty. Doing something out of duty is to do something because one is motivated out of respect for moral law, even if one doesn’t really want to do it. The moral worth of the act is derived not from the consequences of the act, but from the principle, or maxim, that motivated that act. For this reason, good will is the highest moral virtue. Good will is what allows you to follow the moral law. In fact, other virtues wouldn’t be as good without the possession of good will first. For example, being loyal is clearly a virtue. But if you are loyal to a tyrant, like Vlad the Impaler, you are doing many immoral things, like impaling people. If you have good will (towards others), you wouldn't be loyal to a tyrant like that. It is good will that allows loyalty to truly be a virtue.

Executive Summary

The Enlightenment, which is typically considered to be—all things considered—a good thing, also sent some intellectuals into a moral panic, since many age-old institutions were being questioned.
Immanuel Kant proposed an ambitious theory that aimed to restore the moral law, the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the justification for belief in God.
Central to these theories are the transcendental deduction, which sought to establish the existence synthetic a priori claims, and the categorical imperative, Kant's duty-oriented, rule-based approach to ethics. I will typically refer to the categorical imperative as Kantianism.
Due to how ambitious it is, however, Kant's theory has many criticisms. Since we are focusing here on his ethics, we can give two brief objections. First, Kantianism appears to be too strict. For example, it never allows for lying, even small, inconsequential lies. Second, Kant's categorical imperative is vague in some cases. For example, when duties conflict, it is unclear which course of action is the right one.

FYI

Footnotes

1. Although it is not directly relevant to this lesson, the "forms of intuition" that Kant argued are a part of how we see the world but not a part of the world in-and-of-itself are actually space and time. In other words, Kant believed space and time are not actually features of the world but added to our sensory impressions of the world when we cognize it. Believe it or not, some physicists believe Kant is actually right: spacetime isn't objectively real, we construct it through our perceptual systems (see Rovelli 2018).

2. For example, here are some commands from reason: a. You may not conceive of a married bachelor; b. You may not conceive of a round square.

3. Roger Scruton puts it this way: “The law of cause and effect operates only in the realm of nature (the empirical realm). Freedom, however, belongs, not to nature, but precisely to that ‘intelligible’ or transcendental realm to which categories like causality do not apply” (Scruton 2001: 75).