Categorical imperative

The categorical imperative () is the central philosophical concept in the deontological moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Introduced in Kant's 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, it is a way of evaluating motivations for action. It is best known in its original formulation: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

According to Kant, rational beings occupy a special place in creation, and morality can be summed up in an imperative, or ultimate commandment of reason, from which all duties and obligations derive. He defines an imperative as any proposition declaring a certain action (or inaction) to be necessary. Hypothetical imperatives apply to someone who wishes to attain certain ends. For example, "I must drink something to quench my thirst" or "I must study to pass this exam." The categorical imperative, on the other hand, commands immediately the maxims one conceives which match its categorical requirements, denoting an absolute, unconditional requirement that must be obeyed in all circumstances and is justified as an end in itself, possessing intrinsic value beyond simply being desirable.

Kant expressed his strong dissatisfaction with the popular moral philosophy of his day, believing that it could never surpass the merely conditional command of hypothetical imperatives: a utilitarian says that murder is wrong because it does not maximize good for those involved, but this is irrelevant to people who are concerned only with maximizing the positive outcome for themselves. Consequently, Kant argued, hypothetical moral systems cannot determine moral action or be regarded as bases for legitimate moral judgments against others, because the imperatives on which they are based rely too heavily on subjective considerations. He presented a deontological moral system, based on the demands of the categorical imperative, as an alternative.

Outline

Pure practical reason

The capacity that underlies deciding what is moral is called pure practical reason, which is contrasted with: pure reason, which is the capacity to know without having been shown; and mere practical reason, by which we determine ourselves to practical action within the phenomenal world.

Hypothetical imperatives tell us which means best achieve our ends. They do not, however, tell us which ends we should choose. The typical dichotomy in choosing ends is between ends that are right (e.g., helping someone) and those that are good (e.g., enriching oneself). Kant considered the right prior to the good; to him, the latter was morally dependent on the former. In Kant's view, a person cannot decide whether conduct is right, or moral, through empirical means. Such judgments must be reached a priori, using pure practical reason independently of the influence of felt motives, or inclinations.

What dictates which action can be genuinely considered moral are maxims willed to action from the categorical imperative, separate from observable experience. This distinction, that it is imperative that each action is not empirically determined by observable experience, has had wide social impact in the legal and political concepts of human rights and equality.

Freedom and autonomy

Kant viewed the human individual as a rationally self-conscious being with "impure" freedom of choice:

For a will to be considered free, we must understand it as capable of affecting causal power without being caused to do so. However, the idea of lawless free will, meaning a will acting without any causal structure, is incomprehensible. Therefore, a free will must be acting under laws that it gives to itself.

Although Kant conceded that there could be no conceivable example of free will, because any example would only show us a will as it appears to us—as a subject of natural laws—he nevertheless argued against determinism. He proposed that determinism is logically inconsistent: the determinist claims that because A caused B, and B caused C, that A is the true cause of C. Applied to a case of the human will, a determinist would argue that the will does not have causal power and that something outside the will causes the will to act as it does. But this argument merely assumes what it sets out to prove: viz. that the human will is part of the causal chain.

Secondly, Kant remarks that free will is inherently unknowable. Since even a free person could not possibly have knowledge of their own freedom, we cannot use our failure to find a proof for freedom as evidence for a lack of it. The observable world could never contain an example of freedom because it would never show us a will as it appears to itself, but only a will that is subject to natural laws imposed on it. But we do appear to ourselves as free. Therefore, he argued for the idea of transcendental freedom—that is, freedom as a presupposition of the question "what ought I to do?" This is what gives us sufficient basis for ascribing moral responsibility: the rational and self-actualizing power of a person, which he calls moral autonomy: "the property the will has of being a law unto itself."

First formulation: Universality and the law of nature