Metaphysics |
Immanuel Kant is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. This portion of the Encyclopedia entry will focus on his metaphysics and epistemology in one of his most important works, The Critique of Pure Reason. (All references will be to the A (1781) and B(1787) edition pages in Werner Pluhar's translation. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996.) A large part of Kant's work addresses the question "What can we know?" The answer, if it can be stated simply, is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the natural, empirical world. It is impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible realm of speculative metaphysics. The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is that the mind plays an active role in constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind's access to the empirical realm of space and time. |
Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you to that part of this article)
In order to understand Kant's position, we must understand the philosophical background that he was reacting to. First, I will present a brief overview of his predecessor's positions with a brief statement of Kant's objections, then I will return to a more detailed exposition of Kant's arguments. There are two major historical movements in the early modern period of philosophy that had a significant impact on Kant: Empiricism and Rationalism. Kant argues that both the method and the content of these philosophers' arguments contain serious flaws. A central epistemological problem for philosophers in both movements was determining how we can escape from within the confines of the human mind and the immediately knowable content of our own thoughts to acquire knowledge of the world outside of us. The Empiricists sought to accomplish this through the senses and a posteriori reasoning. The Rationalists attempted to use a priori reasoning to build the necessary bridge. A posteriori reasoning depends upon experience or contingent events in the world to provide us with information. That "Bill Clinton is president of the United States in 1999," for example, is something that I can know only through experience; I cannot determine this to be true through an analysis of the concepts of "president" or "Bill Clinton." A priori reasoning, in contrast, does not depend upon experience to inform it. The concept "bachelor" logically entails the ideas of an unmarried, adult, human male without my needing to conduct a survey of bachelors and men who are unmarried. Kant believed that this twofold distinction in kinds of knowledge was inadequate to the task of understanding metaphysics for reasons we will discuss in a moment.
Empiricism
Empiricists, such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, argued that human
knowledge originates in our sensations. Locke, for instance, was a
representative realist about the external world and placed great
confidence in the ability of the senses to inform us of the
properties that empirical objects really have in themselves. Locke
had also argued that the mind is a blank slate, or a tabula
rasa, that becomes populated with ideas by its interactions with
the world. Experience teaches us everything, including concepts of
relationship, identity, causation, and so on. Kant argues that the
blank slate model of the mind is insufficient to explain the beliefs
about objects that we have; some components of our beliefs must be
brought by the mind to experience. Berkeley's strict phenomenalism, in contrast to Locke, raised
questions about the inference from the character of our sensations to
conclusions about the real properties of mind-independent objects.
Since the human mind is strictly limited to the senses for its input,
Berkeley argued, it has no independent means by which to verify the
accuracy of the match between sensations and the properties that
objects possess in themselves. In fact, Berkeley rejected the very
idea of mind-independent objects on the grounds that a mind is, by
its nature, incapable of possessing an idea of such a thing. Hence,
in Kant's terms, Berkeley was a material idealist. To the material
idealist, knowledge of material objects is ideal or unachievable, not
real. For Berkeley, mind-independent material objects are impossible
and unknowable. In our sense experience we only have access to our
mental representations, not to objects themselves. Berkeley argues
that our judgments about objects are really judgments about these
mental representations alone, not the substance that gives rise to
them. In the Refutation of Material Idealism, Kant argues that
material idealism is actually incompatible with a position that
Berkeley held, namely that we are capable of making judgments about
our experience. David Hume pursued Berkeley's empirical line of inquiry even
further, calling into question even more of our common sense beliefs
about the source and support of our sense perceptions. Hume maintains
that we cannot provide a priori or a posteriori justifications for a
number of our beliefs like, "Objects and subjects persist identically
over time," or "Every event must have a cause." In Hume's hands, it
becomes clear that empiricism cannot give us an epistemological
justification for the claims about objects, subjects, and causes that
we took to be most obvious and certain about the world. Kant expresses deep dissatisfaction with the idealistic and
seemingly skeptical results of the empirical lines of inquiry. In
each case, Kant gives a number of arguments to show that Locke's,
Berkeley's, and Hume's empiricist positions are untenable because
they necessarily presupposes the very claims they set out to
disprove. In fact, any coherent account of how we perform even the
most rudimentary mental acts of self-awareness and making judgments
about objects must presuppose these claims, Kant argues. Hence, while
Kant is sympathetic with many parts of empiricism, ultimately it
cannot be a satisfactory account of our experience of the world.
Rationalism
The Rationalists, principally Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz,
approached the problems of human knowledge from another angle. They
hoped to escape the epistemological confines of the mind by
constructing knowledge of the external world, the self, the soul,
God, ethics, and science out of the simplest, indubitable ideas
possessed innately by the mind. Leibniz in particular, thought that
the world was knowable a priori, through an analysis of ideas and
derivations done through logic. Supersensible knowledge, the
Rationalists argued, can be achieved by means of reason. Descartes
believed that certain truths, that "if I am thinking, I exist," for
example, are invulnerable to the most pernicious skepticism. Armed
with the knowledge of his own existence, Descartes hoped to build a
foundation for all knowledge. Kant's Refutation of Material Idealism works against
Descartes' project as well as Berkeley's. Descartes believed that he
could infer the existence of objects in space outside of him based on
his awareness of his own existence coupled with an argument that God
exists and is not deceiving him about the evidence of his senses.
Kant argues in the Refutation chapter that knowledge of external
objects cannot be inferential. Rather, the capacity to be aware of
one's own existence in Descartes' famous cogito argument
already presupposes that existence of objects in space and time
outside of me. Kant had also come to doubt the claims of the Rationalists because
of what he called Antinomies, or contradictory, but validly
proven pairs of claims that reason is compelled toward. From the
basic principles that the Rationalists held, it is possible, Kant
argues, to prove conflicting claims like, "The world has a beginning
in time and is limited as regards space," and "The world has no
beginning, and no limits in space." (A 426/B 454) Kant claims that
antinomies like this one reveal fundamental methodological and
metaphysical mistakes in the rationalist project. The contradictory
claims could both be proven because they both shared the mistaken
metaphysical assumption that we can have knowledge of things as they
are in themselves, independent of the conditions of our experience of
them. The Antinomies can be resolved, Kant argues, if we understand the
proper function and domain of the various faculties that contribute
to produce knowledge. We must recognize that we cannot know things as
they are in themselves and that our knowledge is subject to the
conditions of our experience. The Rationalist project was doomed to
failure because it did not take note of the contribution that our
faculty of reason makes to our experience of objects. Their a priori
analysis of our ideas could inform us about the content of our ideas,
but it could not give a coherent demonstration of metaphysical truths
about the external world, the self, the soul, God, and so on.
Kant's Answers to his Predecessors
Kant's answer to the problems generated by the two traditions
mentioned above changed the face of philosophy. First, Kant argued
that that old division between a priori truths and a
posteriori truths employed by both camps was insufficient to
describe the sort of metaphysical claims that were under dispute. An
analysis of knowledge also requires a distinction between
synthetic and analytic truths. In an analytic claim,
the predicate is contained within the subject. In the claim,
"Every body occupies space," the property of occupying space is
revealed in an analysis of what it means to be a body. The subject of
a synthetic claim, however, does not contain the predicate. In, "This
tree is 120 feet tall," the concepts are synthesized or brought
together to form a new claim that is not contained in any of the
individual concepts. The Empiricists had not been able to prove
synthetic a priori claims like "Every event must have a
cause," because they had conflated "synthetic" and "a posteriori" as
well as "analytic" and "a priori." Then they had assumed that the two
resulting categories were exhaustive. A synthetic a priori claim,
Kant argues, is one that must be true without appealing to
experience, yet the predicate is not logically contained within the
subject, so it is no surprise that the Empiricists failed to produce
the sought after justification. The Rationalists had similarly
conflated the four terms and mistakenly proceeded as if claims like,
"The self is a simple substance," could be proven analytically and a
priori. Synthetic a priori claims, Kant argues, demand an entirely
different kind of proof than those required for analytic, a priori
claims or synthetic, a posteriori claims. Indications for how to
proceed, Kant says, can be found in the examples of synthetic a
priori claims in natural science and mathematics, specifically
geometry. Claims like Newton's, "the quantity of matter is always
preserved," and the geometer's claim, "the angles of a triangle
always add up to 180 degrees" are known a priori, but they cannot be
known merely from an analysis of the concepts of matter or triangle.
We must "go outside and beyond the concept. . . joining to it a
priori in thought something which I have not thought in it." (B 18) A
synthetic a priori claim constructs upon and adds to what is
contained analytically in a concept without appealing to experience.
So if we are to solve the problems generated by Empiricism and
Rationalism, the central question of metaphysics in the Critique
of Pure Reason reduces to "How are synthetic a priori judgments
possible?" (19) If we can answer that question, then we can determine
the possibility, legitimacy, and range of all metaphysical
claims.
Of Quantity |
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Unity |
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Plurality |
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Totality |
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Of Quality |
Of Relation |
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Reality |
Inherence and Subsistence |
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Negation |
Causality and Dependence |
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Limitation |
Community |
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Of Modality |
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Possibility-Impossibility |
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Existence-Nonexistence |
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Necessity-Contingency |
While Kant does not give a formal derivation of it, he believes that this is the complete and necessary list of the a priori contributions that the understanding brings to its judgments of the world. Every judgment that the understanding can make must fall under the table of categories. And subsuming spatiotemporal sensations under the formal structure of the categories makes judgments, and ultimately knowledge, of empirical objects possible.
Since objects can only be experienced spatiotemporally, the only application of concepts that yields knowledge is to the empirical, spatiotemporal world. Beyond that realm, there can be no sensations of objects for the understanding to judge, rightly or wrongly. Since intuitions of the physical world are lacking when we speculate about what lies beyond, metaphysical knowledge, or knowledge of the world outside the physical, is impossible. Claiming to have knowledge from the application of concepts beyond the bounds of sensation results in the empty and illusory transcendent metaphysics of Rationalism that Kant reacts against.
It should be pointed out, however, that Kant is not endorsing an idealism about objects like Berkeley's. That is, Kant does not believe that material objects are unknowable or impossible. While Kant is a transcendental idealist--he believes the nature of objects as they are in themselves is unknowable to us--knowledge of appearances is nevertheless possible. As noted above, in The Refutation of Material Idealism, Kant argues that the ordinary self-consciousness that Berkeley and Descartes would grant implies "the existence of objects in space outside me." (B 275) Consciousness of myself would not be possible if I were not able to make determinant judgments about objects that exist outside of me and have states that are independent of the of my inner experience. Another way to put the point is to say that the fact that the mind of the knower makes the a priori contribution does not mean that space and time or the categories are mere figments of the imagination. Kant is an empirical realist about the world we experience; we can know objects as they appear to us. He gives a robust defense of science and the study of the natural world from his argument about the mind's role in making nature. All discursive, rational beings must conceive of the physical world as spatially and temporally unified, he argues. And the table of categories is derived from the most basic, universal forms of logical inference, Kant believes. Therefore, it must be shared by all rational beings. So those beings also share judgments of an intersubjective, unified, public realm of empirical objects. Hence, objective knowledge of the scientific or natural world is possible. Indeed, Kant believes that the examples of Newton and Galileo show it is actual. So Berkeley's claims that we do not know objects outside of us and that such knowledge is impossible are both mistaken.
In conjunction with his analysis of the possibility of knowing empirical objects, Kant gives an analysis of the knowing subject that has sometimes been called his transcendental psychology. Much of Kant's argument can be seen as subjective, not because of variations from mind to mind, but because the source of necessity and universality is in the mind of the knowing subject, not in objects themselves. Kant draws several conclusions about what is necessarily true of any consciousness that employs the faculties of sensibility and understanding to produce empirical judgments. As we have seen, a mind that employs concepts must have a receptive faculty that provides the content of judgments. Space and time are the necessary forms of apprehension for the receptive faculty. The mind that has experience must also have a faculty of combination or synthesis, the imagination for Kant, that apprehends the data of sense, reproduces it for the understanding, and recognizes their features according to the conceptual framework provided by the categories. The mind must also have a faculty of understanding that provides empirical concepts and the categories for judgment. The various faculties that make judgment possible must be unified into one mind. And it must be identical over time if it is going to apply its concepts to objects over time. Kant here addresses Hume's famous assertion that introspection reveals nothing more than a bundle of sensations that we group together and call the self. Judgments would not be possible, Kant maintains, if the mind that senses is not the same as the mind that possesses the forms of sensibility. And that mind must be the same as the mind that employs the table of categories, that contributes empirical concepts to judgment, and that synthesizes the whole into knowledge of a unified, empirical world. So the fact that we can empirically judge proves, contra Hume, that the mind cannot be a mere bundle of disparate introspected sensations. In his works on ethics Kant will also argue that this mind is the source of spontaneous, free, and moral action. Kant believes that all the threads of his transcendental philosophy come together in this "highest point" which he calls the transcendental unity of apperception.
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Axioms of Intuition |
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All intuitions are extensive magnitudes. |
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Anticipations of Perception |
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Analogies of Experience |
In all appearances the real that is an object of sensation has intensive magnitude, i.e., a degree. |
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In all variations by appearances substance is permanent, and its quantum in nature is neither increased nor decreased. |
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All changes occur according to the law of the connection of cause and effect. |
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All substances, insofar as they can be perceived in space as simultaneous, are in thoroughgoing interaction. |
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Postulates of Empirical Thought |
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What agrees (in terms of intuition and concepts) with the formal conditions of experience is possible. |
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What coheres with the material conditions of experience (with sensation) is actual. |
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That whose coherence with the actual is determined according to universal conditions of experience is necessary (exists necessarily) |
Kant's Dialectic
The discussion of Kant's metaphysics and epistemology so far
(including the Analytic of Principles)has been confined primarily to
the section of the Critique of Pure Reason that Kant calls the
Transcendental Analytic. The purpose of the Analytic, we are
told, is "the rarely attempted dissection of the power of the
understanding itself." (A 65/B 90). Kant's project has been to
develop the full argument for his theory about the mind's
contribution to knowledge of the world. Once that theory is in place,
we are in a position to see the errors that are caused by
transgressions of the boundaries to knowledge established by Kant's
transcendental idealism and empirical realism. Kant calls judgments
that pretend to have knowledge beyond these boundaries and that even
require us to tear down the limits that he has placed on knowledge,
transcendent judgments. The Transcendental Dialectic
section of the book is devoted to uncovering the illusion of
knowledge created by transcendent judgments and explaining why the
temptation to believe them persists. Kant argues that the proper
functioning of the faculties of sensibility and the understanding
combine to draw reason, or the cognitive power of inference,
inexorably into mistakes. The faculty of reason naturally seeks the
highest ground of unconditional unity. It seeks to unify and subsume
all particular experiences under higher and higher principles of
knowledge. But sensibility cannot by its nature provide the
intuitions that would make knowledge of the highest principles and of
things as they are in themselves possible. Nevertheless, reason, in
its function as the faculty of inference, inevitably draws
conclusions about what lies beyond the boundaries of sensibility. The
unfolding of this conflict between the faculties reveals more about
the mind's relationship to the world it seeks to know and the
possibility of a science of metaphysics. Kant believes that Aristotle's logic of the syllogism
captures the logic employed by reason. The resulting mistakes from
the inevitable conflict between sensibility and reason reflect the
logic of Aristotle's syllogism. Corresponding to the three
basic kinds of syllogism are three dialectic mistakes or illusions of
transcendent knowledge that cannot be real. Kant's discussion of
these three classes of mistakes are contained in the Paralogisms,
the Antinomies, and the Ideals of Reason. The
Dialectic explains the illusions of reason in these sections. But
since the illusions arise from the structure of our faculties, they
will not cease to have their influence on our minds any more than we
can prevent the moon from seeming larger when it is on the horizon
than when it is overhead. (A 297/B 354). In the Paralogisms, Kant argues that a failure to recognize
the difference between appearances and things in themselves,
particularly in the case of the introspected self, lead us into
transcendent error. Kant argues against several conclusions
encouraged by Descartes and the rational psychologists, who believed
they could build human knowledge from the "I think" of the
cogito argument. From the "I think" of self-awareness we can
infer, they maintain, that the self or soul is 1) simple, 2)
immaterial, 3) an identical substance and 4) that we perceive it
directly, in contrast to external objects whose existence is merely
possible. That is, the rational psychologists claimed to have
knowledge of the self as transcendentally real. Kant believes that it
is impossible to demonstrate any of these four claims, and that the
mistaken claims to knowledge stem from a failure to see the real
nature of our apprehension of the "I." Reason cannot fail to apply
the categories to its judgments of the self, and that application
gives rise to these four conclusions about the self that correspond
roughly to the four headings in the table of categories. But to take
the self as an object of knowledge here is to pretend to have
knowledge of the self as it is in itself, not as it appears to us.
Our representation of the "I" itself is empty. It is subject to the
condition of inner sense, time, but not the condition of outer sense,
space, so it cannot be a proper object of knowledge. It can be
thought through concepts, but without the commensurate
spatial and temporal intuitions, it cannot be known. Each of
the four paralogisms explains the categorical structure of reason
that led the rational psychologists to mistake the self as it appears
to us for the self as it is in itself. We have already mentioned the Antinomies, in which Kant
analyzes the methodological problems of the Rationalist project. Kant
sees the Antinomies as the unresolved dialogue between skepticism and
dogmatism about knowledge of the world. There are four antinomies,
again corresponding to the four headings of the table of categories,
that are generated by reason's attempts to achieve complete knowledge
of the realm beyond the empirical. Each antinomy has a thesis and an
antithesis, both of which can be validly proven, and since each makes
a claim that is beyond the grasp of spatiotemporal sensation, neither
can be confirmed or denied by experience. The First Antinomy argues
both that the world has a beginning in time and space, and no
beginning in time and space. The Second Antinomy's arguments are that
every composite substance is made of simple parts and that nothing is
composed of simple parts. The Third Antinomy's thesis is that agents
like ourselves have freedom and its antithesis is that they do not.
The Fourth Antinomy contains arguments both for and against the
existence of a necessary being in the world. The seemingly
irreconcilable claims of the Antinomies can only be resolved by
seeing them as the product of the conflict of the faculties and by
recognizing the proper sphere of our knowledge in each case. In each
of them, the idea of "absolute totality, which holds only as a
condition of things in themselves, has been applied to appearances"
(A 506/B534). The result of Kant' analysis of the Antinomies is that we can
reject both claims of the first two and accept both claims of the
last two, if we understand their proper domains. In the first
Antinomy, the world as it appears to us is neither finite since we
can always inquire about its beginning or end, nor is it infinite
because finite beings like ourselves cannot cognize an infinite
whole. As an empirical object, Kant argues, it is indefinitely
constructible for our minds. As it is in itself, independent of the
conditions of our thought, should not be identified as finite or
infinite since both are categorial conditions of our thought. Kant's
resolution of the third Antinomy (A 445/B 473) clarifies his position
on freedom. He considers the two competing hypotheses of speculative
metaphysics that there are different types of causality in the world:
1) there are natural causes which are themselves governed by the laws
of nature as well as uncaused causes like ourselves that can act
freely, or 2) the causal laws of nature entirely govern the world
including our actions. The conflict between these contrary claims can
be resolved, Kant argues, by taking his critical turn and recognizing
that it is impossible for any cause to be thought of as uncaused
itself in the realm of space and time. But reason, in trying to
understand the ground of all things, strives to unify its knowledge
beyond the empirical realm. The empirical world, considered by
itself, cannot provide us with ultimate reasons. So if we do not
assume a first or free cause we cannot completely explain causal
series in the world. So for the Third Antinomy, as for all of the
Antinomies, the domain of the Thesis is the intellectual, rational,
noumenal world. The domain of the Antithesis is the spatiotemporal
world.
The Ideas of Reason
The faculty of reason has two employments. For the most part, we
have engaged in an analysis of theoretical reason which has
determined the limits and requirements of the employment of the
faculty of reason to obtain knowledge. Theoretical reason, Kant says,
makes it possible to cognize what is. But reason has its practical
employment in determining what ought to be as well. (A 633/B 661)
This distinction roughly corresponds to the two philosophical
enterprises of metaphysics and ethics. Reason's practical use is
manifest in the regulative function of certain concepts that we must
think with regard to the world, even though we can have no knowledge
of them. Kant believes that, "Human reason is by its nature architectonic."
(A 474/B 502). That is, reason thinks of all cognitions as belonging
to a unified and organized system. Reason is our faculty of making
inferences and of identifying the grounds behind every truth. It
allows us to move from the particular and contingent to the global
and universal. I infer that "Caius is mortal" from the fact that
"Caius is a man" and the universal claim, "All men are mortal." In
this fashion, reason seeks higher and higher levels of generality in
order to explain the way things are. In a different kind of example,
the biologist's classification of every living thing into a kingdom,
phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species, illustrates
reason's ambition to subsume the world into an ordered, unified
system. The entire empirical world, Kant argues, must be conceived of
by reason as causally necessitated (as we saw in the Analogies). We
must connect, "one state with a previous state upon which the state
follows according to a rule." Each cause, and each cause's cause, and
each additional ascending cause must itself have a cause. Reason
generates this hierarchy that combines to provide the mind with a
conception of a whole system of nature. Kant believes that it is part
of the function of reason to strive for a complete, determinate
understanding of the natural world. But our analysis of theoretical
reason has made it clear that we can never have knowledge of the
totality of things because we cannot have the requisite sensations of
the totality, hence one of the necessary conditions of knowledge is
not met. Nevertheless, reason seeks a state of rest from the
regression of conditioned, empirical judgments in some unconditioned
ground that can complete the series (A 584/B 612). Reason's structure
pushes us to accept certain ideas of reason that allow
completion of its striving for unity. We must assume the ideas of
God, freedom, and immortality, Kant says, not as
objects of knowledge, but as practical necessities for the employment
of reason in the realm where we can have knowledge. By denying the
possibility of knowledge of these ideas, yet arguing for their role
in the system of reason, Kant had to, "annul knowledge in order to
make room for faith." (B xxx).
Kant's Ethics
It is rare for a philosopher in any era to make a significant
impact on any single topic in philosophy. For a philosopher to impact
as many different areas as Kant did is extraordinary. His ethical
theory has been as, if not more, influential than his work in
epistemology and metaphysics. Most of Kant's work on ethics is
presented in two works. The Foundations of the Metaphysics of
Morals (1785) is Kant's "search for and establishment of the
supreme principle of morality." In The Critique of Practical
Reason (1787) Kant attempts to unify his account of practical
reason with his work in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant is
the primary proponent in history of what is called deontological
ethics. Deontology is the study of duty. On Kant's view, the sole
feature that gives an action moral worth is not the outcome that is
achieved by the action, but the motive that is behind the action. The
categorical imperative is Kant's famous statement of this duty: "Act
only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will
that it should become a universal law."
Reason and Freedom
For Kant, as we have seen, the drive for total, systematic
knowledge in reason can only be fulfilled with assumptions that
empirical observation cannot support. The metaphysical facts about
the ultimate nature of things in themselves must remain a mystery to
us because of the spatiotemporal constraints on sensibility. When we
think about the nature of things in themselves or the ultimate ground
of the empirical world, Kant has argued that we are still constrained
to think through the categories, we cannot think otherwise, but we
can have no knowledge because sensation provides our concepts with no
content. So, reason is put at odds with itself because it is
constrained by the limits of its transcendental structure, but it
seeks to have complete knowledge that would take it beyond those
limits. Freedom plays a central role in Kant's ethics because the
possibility of moral judgments presupposes it. Freedom is an idea of
reason that serves an indispensable practical function. Without the
assumption of freedom, reason cannot act. If we think of ourselves as
completely causally determined, and not as uncaused causes ourselves,
then any attempt to conceive of a rule that prescribes the means by
which some end can be achieved is pointless. I cannot both think of
myself as entirely subject to causal law and as being able to act
according to the conception of a principle that gives guidance to my
will. We cannot help but think of our actions as the result of an
uncaused cause if we are to act at all and employ reason to
accomplish ends and understand the world. So reason has an unavoidable interest in thinking of itself as
free. That is, theoretical reason cannot demonstrate freedom, but
practical reason must assume for the purpose of action. Having the
ability to make judgments and apply reason puts us outside that
system of causally necessitated events. "Reason creates for itself
the idea of a spontaneity that can, on its own, start to
act--without, i.e., needing to be preceded by another cause by means
of which it is determined to action in turn, according to the law of
causal connection," Kant says. (A 533/B 561) In its intellectual
domain, reason must think of itself as free. It is dissatisfying that he cannot demonstrate freedom,
nevertheless, it comes as no surprise that we must think of ourselves
as free. In a sense, Kant is agreeing with the common sense view that
how I choose to act makes a difference in how I actually act. Even if
it were possible to give a predictive empirical account of why I act
as I do, say on the grounds of a functionalist psychological theory,
those considerations would mean nothing to me in my deliberations.
When I make a decision about what to do, about which car to buy, for
instance, the mechanism at work in my nervous system makes no
difference to me. I still have to peruse Consumer
Reports, consider my options, reflect on my needs, and decide on
the basis of the application of general principles. My first person
perspective is unavoidable, hence the deliberative, intellectual
process of choice is unavoidable.
The Duality of the Human Situation
The question of moral action is not an issue for two classes of
beings, according to Kant. The animal consciousness, the purely
sensuous being, is entirely subject to causal determination. It is
part of the causal chains of the empirical world, but not an
originator of causes the way humans are. Hence, rightness or
wrongness, as concepts that apply to situations one has control over,
do not apply. We do not morally fault the lion for killing the
gazelle, or even for killing its own young. The actions of a purely
rational being, by contrast, are in perfect accord with moral
principles, Kant says. There is nothing in such a being's nature to
make it falter. Its will always conforms with the dictates of reason.
Humans are between the two worlds. We are both sensible and
intellectual, as was pointed out in the discussion of the first
Critique. We are neither wholly determined to act by natural
impulse, nor are we free of non-rational impulse. Hence we need rules
of conduct. We need, and reason is compelled to provide, a principle
that declares how we ought to act when it is in our power to
choose Since we find ourselves in the situation of possessing reason,
being able to act according to our own conception of rules, there is
a special burden on us. Other creatures are acted upon by the
world. But having the ability to choose the principle to guide our
actions makes us actors. We must exercise our will and our
reason to act. Will is the capacity to act according to the
principles provided by reason. Reason assumes freedom and conceives
of principles of action in order to function. Two problems face us however. First, we are not wholly rational
beings, so we are liable to succumb to our non-rational impulses.
Second, even when we exercise our reason fully, we often cannot know
which action is the best. The fact that we can choose between
alternate courses of actions (we are not determined to act by
instinct or reason) introduces the possibility that there can be
better or worse ways of achieving our ends and better or worse ends,
depending upon the criteria we adopt. The presence of two different
kinds of object in the world adds another dimension, a moral
dimension, to our deliberations. Roughly speaking, we can divide the
world into beings with reason and will like ourselves and things that
lack those faculties. We can think of these classes of things as
ends-in-themselves and mere means-to-ends, respectively.
Ends-in-themselves are autonomous beings with their own agendas;
failing to recognize their capacity to determine their own actions
would be to thwart their freedom and undermine reason itself. When we
reflect on alternative courses of action, means-to-ends, things like
buildings, rocks, and trees, deserve no special status in our
deliberations about what goals we should have and what means we use
to achieve them. The class of ends-in-themselves, reasoning agents
like ourselves, however, do have a special status in our
considerations about what goals we should have and the means we
employ to accomplish them. Moral actions, for Kant, are actions where
reason leads, rather than follows, and actions where we must take
other beings that act according to their own conception of the law,
into account.
The Good Will
The will, Kant says, is the faculty of acting according to a
conception of law. When we act, whether or not we achieve what we
intend with our actions is often beyond our control, so the morality
of our actions does not depend upon their outcome. What we can
control, however, is the will behind the action. That is, we can will
to act according to one law rather than another. The morality of an
action, therefore, must be assessed in terms of the motivation behind
it. If two people, Smith and Jones, perform the same act, from the
same conception of the law, but events beyond Smith's control prevent
her from achieving her goal, Smith is not less praiseworthy for not
succeeding. We must consider them on equal moral ground in terms of
the will behind their actions. The only thing that is good without qualification is the good
will, Kant says. All other candidates for an intrinsic good have
problems, Kant argues. Courage, health, and wealth can all be used
for ill purposes, Kant argues, and therefore cannot be intrinsically
good. Happiness is not intrinsically good because even being worthy
of happiness, Kant says, requires that one possess a good will. The
good will is the only unconditional good despite all encroachments.
Misfortune may render someone incapable of achieving her goals, for
instance, but the goodness of her will remains. Goodness cannot arise from acting on impulse or natural
inclination, even if impulse coincides with duty. It can only arise
from conceiving of one's actions in a certain way. A shopkeeper, Kant
says, might do what is in accord with duty and not overcharge a
child. Kant argues, "it is not sufficient to do that which should be
morally good that it conform to the law; it must be done for the sake
of the law." (Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,
Akademie pagination 390) There is a clear moral difference
between the shopkeeper that does it for his own advantage to keep
from offending other customers and the shopkeeper who does it from
duty and the principle of honesty.(Ibid., 398) Likewise, in
another of Kant's carefully studied examples, the kind act of the
person who overcomes a natural lack of sympathy for other people out
of respect for duty has moral worth, whereas the same kind act of the
person who naturally takes pleasure in spreading joy does not. A
person's moral worth cannot be dependent upon what nature endowed
them with accidentally. The selfishly motivated shopkeeper and the
naturally kind person both act on equally subjective and accidental
grounds. What matters to morality is that the actor think about their
actions in the right manner. We might be tempted to think that the motivation that makes an
action good is having a positive goal--to make people happy, or to
provide some benefit. But that is not the right sort of motive, Kant
says. No outcome, should we achieve it, can be unconditionally good.
Fortune can be misused, what we thought would induce benefit might
actually bring harm, and happiness might be undeserved. Hoping to
achieve some particular end, no matter how beneficial it may seem, is
not purely and unconditionally good. It is not the effect or even the
intended effect that bestows moral character on an action. All
intended effects "could be brought about through other causes and
would not require the will of a rational being, while the highest and
unconditional good can be found only in such a will." (Ibid.,
401) It is the possession of a rationally guided will that adds a
moral dimension to one's acts. So it is the recognition and
appreciation of duty itself that must drive our actions.
Duty
What is the duty that is to motivate our actions and to give them
moral value? Kant distinguishes two kinds of law produced by reason.
Given some end we wish to achieve, reason can provide a
hypothetical imperative, or rule of action for achieving that
end. A hypothetical imperative says that if you wish to buy a
new car, then you must determine what sort of cars are
available for purchase. Conceiving of a means to achieve some desired
end is by far the most common employment of reason. But Kant has
shown that the acceptable conception of the moral law cannot be
merely hypothetical. Our actions cannot be moral on the ground of
some conditional purpose or goal. Morality requires an unconditional
statement of one's duty. And in fact, reason produces an absolute statement of moral
action. The moral imperative is unconditional; that is, its
imperative force is not tempered by the conditional "if I want
to achieve some end, then do X." It simply states, do X. Kant
believes that reason dictates a categorical imperative for
moral action. He gives at least three formulations of the Categorical
Imperative. What are Kant's arguments for the Categorical Imperative? First,
consider an example. Consider the person who needs to borrow money
and is considering making a false promise to pay it back. The maxim
that could be invoked is, "when I need of money, borrow it, promising
to repay it, even though I do not intend to." But when we apply the
universality test to this maxim it becomes clear that if everyone
were to act in this fashion, the institution of promising itself
would be undermined. The borrower makes a promise, willing that there
be no such thing as promises. Thus such an action fails the
universality test. The argument for the first formulation of the categorical
imperative can be thought of this way. We have seen that in order to
be good, we must remove inclination and the consideration of any
particular goal from our motivation to act. The act cannot be good if
it arises from subjective impulse. Nor can it be good because it
seeks after some particular goal which might not attain the good we
seek or could come about through happenstance. We must abstract away
from all hoped for effects. If we remove all subjectivity and
particularity from motivation we are only left with will to
universality. The question "what rule determines what I ought to do
in this situation?" becomes "what rule ought to universally guide
action?" What we must do in any situation of moral choice is act
according to a maxim that we would will everyone to act according
to. The second version of the Categorical Imperative invokes Kant's
conception of nature and draws on the first Critique. In the
earlier discussion of nature, we saw that the mind necessarily
structures nature. And reason, in its seeking of ever higher grounds
of explanation, strives to achieve unified knowledge of nature. A
guide for us in moral matters is to think of what would not be
possible to will universally. Maxims that fail the test of the
categorical imperative generate a contradiction. Laws of nature
cannot be contradictory. So if a maxim cannot be willed to be a law
of nature, it is not moral. The third version of the categorical imperative ties Kant's whole
moral theory together. Insofar as they possess a rational will,
people are set off in the natural order of things. They are not
merely subject to the forces that act upon them; they are not merely
means to ends. They are ends in themselves. All means to an end have
a merely conditional worth because they are valuable only for
achieving something else. The possessor of a rational will, however,
is the only thing with unconditional worth. The possession of
rationality puts all beings on the same footing, "every other
rational being thinks of his existence by means of the same rational
ground which holds also for myself; thus it is at the same time an
objective principle from which, as a supreme practical ground, it
must be possible to derive all laws of the will." (Ibid.,
429)
Kant's Criticisms of Utilitarianism
Kant's criticisms of utilitarianism have become famous enough to
warrant some separate discussion. Utilitarian moral theories evaluate
the moral worth of action on the basis of happiness that is produced
by an action. Whatever produces the most happiness in the most people
is the moral course of action. Kant has an insightful objection to
moral evaluations of this sort. The essence of the objection is that
utilitarian theories actually devalue the individuals it is supposed
to benefit. If we allow utilitarian calculations to motivate our
actions, we are allowing the valuation of one person's welfare and
interests in terms of what good they can be used for. It would be
possible, for instance, to justify sacrificing one individual for the
benefits of others if the utilitarian calculations promise more
benefit. Doing so would be the worst example of treating someone
utterly as a means and not as an end in themselves. Another way to consider his objection is to note that utilitarian
theories are driven by the merely contingent inclination in humans
for pleasure and happiness, not by the universal moral law dictated
by reason. To act in pursuit of happiness is arbitrary and
subjective, and is no more moral than acting on the basis of greed,
or selfishness. All three emanate from subjective, non-rational
grounds. The danger of utilitarianism lies in its embracing of baser
instincts, while rejecting the indispensable role of reason and
freedom in our actions.
Dr. Matt McCormick
Sources
Author Information:
Email: mccormick@csus.edu
California State University, Sacramento