Kant's 'Metaphysics of Morals', 1785

What could be more intimidating than the title Kant gives to his famous essay? In English it reads, Foundations of the metaphysics of Morals and in the original German version it was Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, published in 1785 in the distant provincial city of Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, a region from which the inhabitants fled in 1945 when the Russian armies poured over the border in the closing stages of the Second World War. Today the German province that was once East Prussia is divided between Lithuania, Poland and the Russian military enclave of Kaliningrad, which is the victors' name for what was once Königsberg. (The name derives from that of a Communist politician in Stalin's inner circle).There are no Germans left in what was once Kant's homeland, the result of a policy of Realpolitik and retribution that was biblical in character and which we - the western allies - agreed should be allowed to happen.  I wonder if we should feel the same if triumphant Mexicans decided to expel the people of California or Nevada? They would have arguably more justification than Stalin's armies had for their policy of driving out an entire population. But are there any moral principles that we might stop an army of tanks or dissolve the phalanxes of missile power? 

duc de la Rochefoucauld

We often quote the adage that 'Might makes Right', meaning that power alone gives human actions their sense moral rightness and legal entitlement. We usually say this in a slightly wistful manner to acknowledge the wicked ways of the world, as though we really believed that there are or should be moral standards - moral laws - which all people - triumphant armies, great powers and their governments good and bad - should all adhere to in their dealings with each other and with their own and other peoples and individuals. At the end of the Second World War there was an attempt to revive the idealism of the League of Nations which gave us the principles enshrined in the new United Nations Organisation. It was inevitably perhaps a compromise between the imperatives of power and the rhetoric of moral principle. But we should not reject it on that ground for people and states are often shamed by being forced to live up to the standards they pretend to but in practice flout. As La Rochefoucauld said, 'L'hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu.' We judge ourselves by our pretensions and others by their actions. 

So what are these 'moral laws', these principles that we think should be binding on all people, especially on those who have the power to do harm? Do they exist or are they nothing better than legal fictions? Are they no more than forms of words that lawyers concoct to regulate the actions of individuals and states?  This is the problem that kat sought to solve. He wanted to find a secure basis for moral laws  that would make plain what principles we should follow. If there really are such things as 'moral laws' then we have reached a kind of moral bedrock. Kant believed that he was able to identify these moral laws, which he saw as a fundamental principle of that defined what we ought to do or what should govern all our actions. This was the idea of the categorical imperative, by which he means the imperative or command that we should always follow regardless of our own wishes or those of others. We shall see later how he reaches this conclusion but for now we need take notice of its basic features.

Tony Blair and Lord Levy

The categorical imperative is a principle that is a priori, that is to say, it is independent of experience. You don't reach the categorical imperative by investigating human nature, but rather by examining the logical character of our sense of what we ought to do. his major approach to this problem was to take note of the character of our ordinary actions, which he said we do for the sake of the benefits or consequences that we expect to follow from them. We go to work in order to get money to buy life's necessities and we apply for promotion to get more of life's glittering prizes including of course a sense of what fine fellows we are. Almost all of what we do is done - arguably - for the sake of what we will gain from our actions. We do things for the sake of anticipated rewards. Kant claimed all actions of this sort could be seen as examples where we are applying a maxim or rule of a  single logical type which he called the hypothetical imperative. What he means is that we do things for the sake of some anticipated benefit. If I pass my exams, then 'll be able to get a better job. If I make myself a bit more attractive I might win myself a better husband or a classier wife. If I urge my sons to get out of bed every day, I might make them less idle and more switched on to the world. if I give a lot of money to charity, I will get a lot of tax relief and maybe a good name for myself and invitations to places where I might not have previously been welcome. (I'm paraphrasing Tony Blair's advisor, Lord Levy). Kant's term for this is the hypothetical imperative. That is to say all the self-interested actions of our lives can be expressed as variants of the formula If you want X, then you ought to do Y. The if clause is the hypothetical part, the imperative is the part that says what you will have to do to achieve that end or aim.

You can guess where this analysis is going. The hypothetical imperative is a logical formula that covers just about everything that we do in life. If people are doing things in order to attain or acquire benefits of one kind or another, then according to Kant they are not behaving morally. They are merely acting in their own interests. For an action to count as moral you must do it with no thought of personal gain or any kind. You must do it simply because you see that it is your duty to that regardless of any consequences good or bad. You should do things because they are the right thing to do. Kant called this contrasting principle the categorical imperative. The problem here is how to recognize a categorical imperative. Some people - many in fact today, if not a majority - would claim that everything we do is done for our own sake or for some perhaps disguised benefit. It was in fact the duc de la Rochefoucauld who first clearly established the thesis that all human actions are done out of self-interest and for no other reason. His Reflections,  or Sentences or Moral maxims (1665-78) are all designed to show that our seemingly virtuous behaviour is in fact just an expression of self-interest. We are in other words prisoners of self-deception: 'What we term virtues are often but a mass of various actions and divers interests, which fortune or our own industry manage to arrange; and it is not always from valour or from chastity that men are brave, and women chaste'. This is undoubtedly true, but the key word here is 'often' - are we often self-deceived or are we as some would claim always self-deceived? The long history of the novel can be seen as an extended examination of this thesis. Darwin, Freud and Marx all in their different ways helped to undermine our sense of moral confidence in what we do.

Kant however is quite clear that human beings can and do act for purely moral reasons and that therefore altruism is a real and not a spurious entity. So it is fair to say that a lot depends on how successful Kant is in establishing his thesis for a categorical imperative. This is what we should be keeping clearly in mind as we read the Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals. We need to be clear what it is and what logical tests we need to apply to establish its existence. Of course, even if you admit the existence of categorical imperatives, that does not mean that people are not living their lives in varieties of self-deception, but it does mean that the prospect of escaping from self-deception and acting in a genuinely moral way is not an illusion.


We will look at these questions in more detail next time but it is worth saying a little more now about the general character of the categorical imperative. What kind of actions do we do exclusively because we think that they are the right thing to do, because we feel that we ought to do them even though we gain no advantage from them and may even suffer loss or death as a result? Well, we may think of things like helping those in need, as the Good Samaritan did in New Testament parable, or approving when someone risks his or her life to save the life of others or to save them from terrible harm.    Christians would certainly see these actions as example of a rule to 'Love thy neighbour as thyself'. More ordinarily we might think that a person ought to keep his promise even if it will involve him in costs of suffering or even perhaps betrayals of someone else's interests, because we think that a person should always follow the rule, 'Keep your promises!' Similarly, we think that people should always tell the truth and honour their parents.You should not commit murder. Or adultery, and so on. Never. What is noticeable here is that all these examples is that they are all duties, and in fact duties that are sanctioned by religion. They can all be expressed in the form, 'Do or Do not do X'. There is no if in sight here, circumstances and consequences are considered irrelevant.

The 'Good Samaritan', Chartres cathedral

You might object that there are always reasons why we might condone or excuse the neglect of our neighbour and broken promises or lies or murder or adultery, but is usually hard to praise such actions. Who praises Scrooge? Who thinks Count Levin was right to abandon Anna Karenina? Who would have blamed Lieutenant Colonel Claus von Stauffenburg, if he had succeeded in killing Adolf Hitler? Though, on the other hand, we all admire the successful deception and trickery of an Odysseus against the Cyclops or the British Military Intelligence when they outwitted the Germans with their elaborate deception in the 'Man Who Never Was' operation. How would Kant deal with these complexities? We will have to think about these things later when we meet.

Scrooge, forerunner of Goldman Sachs

One last point in this initial survey of our text. Kant's moral philosophy is an ethic of duty. Our lives are in his view a matter of doing our duty and doing it perfectly and absolutely with no leeway allowed for the compromises which circumstances so often force upon us. It has, as we have seen, a strongly biblical feel, but without the authority of a divine command. This is like a secular version of the ten commandments, if only because  these commandments are the prime examples of things that we feel we ought to do regardless of consequences. But is this a proper view of life? Is this what life is all about? if we lived our lives just doing but doing completely the things we ought to do according to Kant's prescription would we we full or complete or happy people? Kant would presumably say that these quibbles are beside the point. it does not matter if you are an interesting or fulfilled personality. It only matters that you should be a moral person. Do we agree with this? Or do we not also want a life that makes sense to us in other terms? Don't we want to be more than just moral? And if you agree with that, you might like to ask yourself in what ways you might like your from and for your life.

Lev Tolstoy, author of Anna Karenina