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An introduction to Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

In 1755, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) became a Privatdozent, or non-stipendiary lecturer, making a living by charging students for his lectures and giving private tuition. His students joked that he could cover for the entire philosophy faculty—which at the time included everything except the three “higher” faculties of theology, law, and medicine. He became a star lecturer, reputed for his wit, dry humour, and poker face.

When he lectured, Kant was, according to a contemporary account, “all things to all men.” He stood at a diminutive five foot two (1.57m), with blond hair, blue eyes, and rosy cheeks. Despite his slender build, flat and narrow chest, and “slight corkscrew twist”, he was described as attractive. According to his own account, his flat and narrow chest left “little room for the movement of the heart and lungs”, contributing to his delicate constitution, predisposition to hypochondria, and sedentary, regimented lifestyle.

Kant compensated for his physical frailties by being a sharp dresser. He took inspiration from nature for matching colours. Thus, in middle age, he often wore a yellow waistcoat with a brown tailcoat trimmed with gold braid. In public and in company, he sported a powdered wig, even after it had fallen out of fashion. As late as 1791, his friend and follower Joachim Christian Friedrich Schulz described him as having “the look of a good, honest watchmaker who has gone into retirement”.

From 1766, Kant derived a modest but regular income as sub-librarian of the university. From 1768 to 1777, he rented two rooms in the house of the publisher and bookseller Johann Jakob Kanter. In this period, his student Johann Gottfried Herder described him as “the most urbane fellow in the world”. He moved in the city’s most refined circles and often stayed out into the small hours.

Kant never considered himself quite rich enough to take a wife. He twice considered marriage, first to a “beautiful widow” and, much later, to a “pretty Westphalian girl”, but in each case prevaricated for so long that the ladies ended up marrying otherwise. Although he never married, Kant defended the institution of marriage, which he prosaically defined as “the union of two persons of different sexes for lifelong possession of each other’s sexual attributes”.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative

Kant is famous, among other things, for trying to put morality onto a rational basis, that is, for trying to make morality objective and “categorical” rather than subjective and arbitrary. His core ethical principle is the Categorical Imperative, according to which we should only obey those moral laws that we could consistently and rationally will as universal laws. This might be restated as, “Always act such that the maxim of your action can at the same time be upheld as a universal law.”

The Categorical Imperative is similar to the much older Golden Rule of the Bible and Indian Mahabharata, according to which we should treat others as we would ourselves wish to be treated. But whereas the Golden Rule is based on personal desire, which is subjective (I might, for example, be a masochist, or be willing to tolerate some mistreatment), the Categorical Imperative is based on reason, which is objective.

Hypothetical imperatives are practical rules for achieving a desired outcome, for example, “If you want to lose weight, you should watch what you eat.’ If you do not desire a particular outcome, you do not need to follow the rules. In this much, hypothetical imperatives are conditional and contingent. In contrast, Categorical Imperatives are universal moral commands that bind everyone regardless of their aims, for example, “Do not lie”, “Do not steal”, “Do not commit suicide”.

Hypothetical imperatives answer to the lower faculty of desire, which aims at pleasure. Categorical Imperatives answer to the higher faculty of will, which functions rationally and autonomously by following the laws which it legislates for itself, regardless of consequences or personal feelings. For Kant, true moral actions must be motivated by duty, not some desired outcome. Thus, Kantian ethics are sometimes described as deontological, or duty-based (Greek, deon, “duty”), and contrasted with consequentialism (for example, utilitarianism), which is outcome-based. For Kant, moral systems based on outcomes or desires operate on hypothetical imperatives, not true moral law.

Kant furnishes some examples to flesh out the bones of the Categorical Imperative. Imagine a person in financial need who borrows money and promises to pay it back, knowing full well that they never will. If this action were universalised, promises of repayment would no longer be believed and the practice of lending would end. Kant also points out that abusing the lender in this way reduces a dignified being with ends of his own to a mere means-to-an-end.

The universalizability formulation is only the first formulation the Categorical Imperative. The second formulation is the humanity formulation, or end-in-itself formulation: “Act always treating humanity, in yourself and others, as an end and never merely as a means.” 

When Is It Moral to Have Sex?

Kant’s rigid application of the Categorical Imperative led him to condemn many actions and behaviours that are no longer generally condemned, such as suicide out of world-weariness, homosexuality, and masturbation. He referred to homosexual acts and masturbation as “unnatural vices” on the basis that the natural purpose of sex and the reproductive organs is procreation. Marriage, he argued, is the only morally permissible context for sexual relations. But for those unable or unwilling to wait, sex is preferable to masturbation. Masturbation transgresses the natural order, sex, only the civil order.

What has aged a lot better is Kant’s insight that, during sex, one turns the other into an object of gratification, a means to an end rather than an end-in-himself or end-in-herself. This is only permissible if, in return, one makes oneself into an object of gratification for the benefit of the other. Marriage, on the other hand, is a unique union in which two people mutually surrender their bodies and selves to create a united whole.

For us, the take-home message is: Kant never had sex or even masturbated. 

Jokes aside, Kant grew into, and arguably remains, the supreme moral authority in the Western World. For better or worse, what he thought and how he thought remains part of our mental makeup.

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George Eleftheriades and Michael Selvanayagam, researchers at the University of Toronto, have designed and tested a new approach to invisibility cloaking. Their method involves surrounding an object with miniature antennae emitting an electromagnetic field that cancels out waves reflecting back from the cloaked object. Although their tests showed the cloaking system to work with radio waves, they see no reason why, as the necessary antenna technology matures, it could not also work with light waves.

All this opens the way for a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak that is thin, scalable, and adaptable to different types of objects. Some of the uses being touted for this quasi magical cloak include hiding military vehicles and conducting surveillance operations. But what if the cloak falls, as it surely will, into the wrong hands? Have the scientists really thought through the consequences? The infamous banker Bob Diamond spoke of ethics as ‘what you do when nobody’s looking’. If bankers, politicians, and even churchmen can no longer be trusted to do the right thing, then who can? But beyond this, the cloak of invisibility raises important questions about human nature: do intelligent people do the right thing because it is the right thing or because they fear being caught, judged, and punished? More fundamentally, is man innately good, under the direction of his conscience and sense of guilt, or is his restraint rather the product of fear and coercion instilled by a Hobbesian social contract that serves to keep him in check?

In Greek mythology, the Cap of Invisibility or Helm of Darkness is a helmet or cap variously worn by Athena, Hermes, and Perseus to make themselves invisible to gods, heroes, monsters, and men. In Book II of the Republic, Plato discusses the Ring of Gyges, which, according to legend, makes its bearer invisible. The ring was once given to the shepherd Gyges who used it to seduce the Queen of King Candaules and thereby usurp the throne of Lydia. In the Republic, the character of Socrates asserts that justice is the excellence of the soul without which a man cannot live well and be happy, and, therefore, that justice is inherently desirable. However, Glaucon doubts whether to be just is always better than to be unjust. All goods, he says, can be divided into one of three classes: harmless pleasures that are desirable in themselves; goods such as gymnastics, the care of the sick, or the various ways of making money that are desirable for what they bring; and goods such as knowledge, sight, or health that are desirable both in themselves and for what they bring. To which of these three classes does justice belong?

Socrates replies that justice belongs to the third class, but Glaucon points out that most people would disagree and place it firmly in the second class. Indeed, most people think that to do injustice is good, but that to suffer injustice is evil; as the evil outweighs the good, they agree among themselves not to do injustice. If a just man got hold of the Ring of Gyges, he would most certainly behave unjustly, proving that he is just only because he is weak and fears retribution, and not because justice is desirable in itself. The truly just man who cares only for justice and not for the appearance of justice will be thought unjust and suffer every kind of evil until the day he finally understands that he should not be, but only seem, just. In contrast, the unjust man who is resourceful enough to seem just will be thought just and always get the better of everyone and everything. Adeimantus adds that when people praise justice, they praise it for what it brings rather than for itself. Realizing this, the superior man devotes himself not to justice itself but only to its appearance.

Adeimantus claims that he does not truly believe his argument, but is nonetheless pressing it to provoke Socrates into taking its other side and demonstrating that justice is desirable in and of itself. As part of his lengthy reply, Socrates famously conjures up an idealized Republic to help him define justice (or, as he puts it, “locate justice within the State”). After having defined justice in the state and justice in the individual, Socrates asserts that the just man orders his inner life in such a way as to be his own master and his own law. The soul of such a man can be said to be healthy, for justice and injustice are to the soul as health and disease are to the body: virtue is the health and the beauty of the soul, vice its disease and debility. If justice is the health of the soul, and if health is desirable in and for itself, then, by analogy, justice too is desirable in and for itself.

This is as far as Plato gets in the Republic. Notice that his conclusion that justice is intrinsically desirable does not in itself answer the original question, which was whether an intelligent person would still behave justly if he no longer feared being caught and punished. From Plato’s other writings, the answer is surely yes, even if Plato defines ‘intelligent’ in such a way that only he and some of his friends at the Academy actually meet the criteria. These select men are, of course, the famous philosopher-kings.