Introduction

In the last lecture we looked at what Locke had to say about various matters. For example, we saw that he had some important things to say about the sources of legitimacy for political authority, and we noticed that his view was quite different from what was proposed by former philosophers. In particular we noticed that he was another social contract theorist like Hobbes, but his view of Man and God was such that the social contract would allow revolutions, whereas Hobbes would not allow them. This concern with political legitimacy is one of the themes that we’ve been tracing in this course – though, I have to admit, not with any great detail. That really isn’t really what I’ve been trying to focus on.  

Instead, what I’ve been trying to do is trace the development of two ideas through the course of Western ethical theory. One of these is the increasing concentration upon the Will of the moral actor as the thing that is really of paramount concern in making judgements of that actor. We saw that the ancients had very little concern for the role of the Will (in fact it’s not absolutely sure that they even had the concept of the will – but I won’t try to argue that.) At least until the time of the Christian philosophers such as Augustine, it was all very much to do with the actions of a moral actor and nothing to do with his motivations. Now Hobbes and Locke had some odd things to say about Free Will that we didn’t get into, but at least they would have acknowledged its significance. We’ll see in this lecture that Kant elevates the Will to the central place in his moral universe.

 We’ll also see that Kant takes the idea that Law is the proper model for moral concepts about as far as it can go. Which makes Kant a sort of end point for both of the two tendencies which I’m tracing, because the second of those was the tendency for the sorts of moral concepts that were important for the ancients, such as function, end, happiness, virtue, and so on, to be replaced by concepts such as duty, obligation, right, and so on, which draw upon the idea of morality as being action in accordance with some sort of law. We saw that Locke played a part in this development, because he made it very clear that natural rights were derived from natural law in the same way that legal rights were derived from laws created by man’s laws.

  Now, for Locke this Natural Law was dependent upon God who created it. But the idea of rights being independent of God had already been implicitly proposed by Hobbes, who thought that rights were a consequence of a contract between people in which God seemed to play no role. When I was describing the concept of rights in last week’s lectures I mentioned that the concept of Human Rights, as we call them these days, could best be seen as a sort of secularised version of Natural Rights. The idea of rights as things that exist independent of God is another idea that reaches a pure form in Kant’s work.

Background

The tendency to remove God from the equation, and the tendency to rely upon pure reason as the only way to reach Truth, were characteristics of what was called the Age of Reason (17^th – 18^th C.) This was a period in which, amongst other things, modern philosophy arose. You might recall that I mentioned Descartes previously: he was a Frenchman (1596-1650) who is generally taken to be the first truly modern philosopher. What mark his philosophy as a new beginning are his radical scepticism and his determination to accept only that which can be shown through the most rigorous reasoning. Descartes’s style of doing philosophy and even much of what he was interested in was a break from the scholastic style of philosophy that had been completely dominant in Europe for about 500 years. You’ve seen an example of this type of philosophizing in the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. If you’re interested in seeing what Descartes thinking was like you can look up his Meditations on the web (or you can take Introductory Philosophy next semester.) Hobbes and Locke are both good examples of the sort of thing that was being done in the Age of Reason.

  The last period of this so-called Age of Reason is also known as the Enlightenment (18^th C.) It is the culmination of the tendencies that I mentioned. During the Enlightenment period it was widely accepted that all problems were amenable to rational solution, that God played little or no active role in the universe – and that explanations that appealed to God for any purpose were probably not useful explanations, the Science was the appropriate method for discovering Truth about the world, and several other things of that sort. In the political arena, the tendencies amongst the intellectual elites toward forms of republicanism, democracy, liberalism, and capitalism, which we noticed in the history of the times in which Hobbes and Locke lived in England , continued to increase. The creation of the United States was one result of these forces, and, a few years later, the French Revolution was another. We’ve already seen some of the influences that Locke had on the Constitution of the US , but in most of Europe the ideals and achievements of the French Revolution were more immediately inspiring – the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was the model for many European revolutionaries or would-be liberators.

It’s unfortunate that the French Revolution was also responsible for encouraging a reaction against the Enlightenment. The Terror, the murder of the King, and the aggressiveness of the French Republic in foreign affairs led to a great deal of mistrust – and the European conquests of Napoleon who set up a tin pot empire on the corpse  of the shattered country didn’t help. Luckily Europe was rescued from Napoleon’s ambitions by a coalition of Great Britain , Russia , and the Germans. Kant lived during this period.

Kant

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is often considered the last philosopher of the Enlightenment and widely regarded as the greatest philosopher of the modern period. He was a university lecturer (the first of any importance in this course) in Konigsberg – formerly part of Prussia , but now part of Russia and called Kaliningrad . He wrote important works in metaphysics and epistemology, religion, aesthetics, politics and moral philosophy. Today we will be examining his moral philosophy. Kant’s main works on moral philosophy – which he called ‘practical philosophy’ – are the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason.

 I hesitate to recommend that you should try to read these books. They are acknowledged by everyone to be very tough – and not tough in the sense that they are just gibberish masquerading as profundity, which is the modern way of things, but tough in the sense that they are densely written and contain some extremely complex ideas and arguments. If you’ve been finding Hobbes or Locke or Plato difficult – and some of you have – then I wouldn’t bother with these. On the other hand, for the adventurous and aspirational amongst you, I can say that it would do you a great deal of good to have some acquaintance with one of the greatest minds that Mankind has ever produced. With those warnings having been given, I do recommend that you should try to read at least the first part of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals[1]. This was Kant’s first great book on morality. It was published in 1785. (You can find it on the course website.)

Kant’s Valuation of Moral Theory

Kant rated the importance of morality about as highly as any philosopher has. Here is a famous statement from the concluding section of the Critique of Practical Reason:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and the more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. … the first view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital force (one knows not how) must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came. The second, on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality…[2]

Two things are particularly worth noting here. First, the moral law is “within” us; it is not a law given by divine commandment or by social convention. It is a law which, in a sense that we need to understand, we legislate for ourselves. Second, morality gives us a dignity and importance beyond our animal existence. Morality is what enables human beings to transcend their animal natures.

Sources of Normativity

But if we’re going to accept the idea of morality – and almost all of us do (despite what we may pretend to believe) then we have to have some believable story to tell about the origins of obligations and duties and rights and so on. In fact we need to have something intelligent and convincing to say about the origins of normativity. This is something that I’ve spoken about before, and I’m going to mention it again now, because it really is a vital problem for ethics.

Recall that normativity is what produces the obligatoriness of obligations. And it seems to be odd to us because no matter how we describe the world we don’t seem to be able to get at what makes obligations to be obligations. What is it that makes a Natural Law like ‘A free mass falls towards the centre of mass of a system’ different from a law like ‘Don’t kill people’? It’s not enough just to say that one is descriptive and one is normative, that one tells you how things are thought to be in the world and the other tells you how things ought to be in the world. That, I think, you can come to understand pretty quickly. No, the tricky thing is trying to understand what words like ‘ought’ are actually saying without getting into nasty circular series of definitions. ‘I ought to do X’ means ‘I’m obliged to do X’, means that ‘it’s a law that X is to be done’ and ‘to be a law is to say what ought to be’, and so on. There seems to be no way to break out of this little circle of related terms to get obligations from the simple scientific facts of the universe. This is a point that Hume made and that has been a central problem for ethicists for the last 300 years – especially for those who have a purely materialistic view of the universe. How can any description of the universe in terms of physical particles and forces and energies ever yield statements about what ought to be the case?

If there’s any single thing that I want you to remember about ethics in general it is this: that the reason it is a hard subject, and why discussion in it continues to apparently go around in circles while ‘scientific’ interests moves on – in short, why ethics is a philosophical topic – is because the problem normativity has not been solved. (Or should I say that none of the solutions that have been offered have been accepted by everyone. There are always problems that mean the answer is unacceptable to many.)

One of the most important things that Kant did was to come up with an idea about the source of normativity that seems to be pretty convincing for more than the usual minority. But first let’s consider what sorts of answers had been previously offered.

a.                   Culture

The first and most popular idea amongst people who have just started to think about this sort of thing is that normativity is somehow dependent upon the norms of particular societies – so that ‘it is wrong to do X’ just means that in our society it is not accepted that we should do X. And X might be anything; like smoking, murdering, eating pork, etc. Of course, there are lots of things that are like this: the smoking and eating pork in the previous list, for example, are unacceptable in some societies but not in others. And, recognising that, we usually don’t go so far as to call these moral duties. But there are other things that we think aren’t like that at all; and we think that if there was a society that, for example, thought it was their duty to burn widows, that society would be practising a great evil that it would be our duty to stop if we could. So because we often do think that there are these moral universals we would have to accept that their right and wrongness are independent of any particular society, and therefore the duty to obey them could not receive its obligatoriness from society.

b.                   Human Nature

Another popular opinion sees normativity as somehow being derived from Human Nature itself. There are lots of different ways that this can be understood, but let’s just consider one version that claims that humans have a sort of moral sense that allows them to detect goodness or badness in objects. It’s usually thought that this moral sense operates in the matter of an instinct. When presented with an action or a situation my moral sense immediately determines, without any need for thought or rational judgement on my part whether it is good or bad of its kind. As an instinct it is presumably some part of human nature that is the common birthright of all people, and this would at least explain how it is that moral judgements can be universal amongst people (which, you’ll recall, is something that we tend to believe in.)

The problem with this idea, however, is that Human Nature is quite unreliable. An instinct, for example, may give different judgements in substantially similar situations because there are morally irrelevant conditions that affect such a faculty of judgement. It might be, for example, that if I was feeling a bit hung over in the morning my moral instinct, like my sense of balance, could be affected – but something isn’t right when I’m sober and wrong when I’m drunk. What’s more, if my only guide to whether something is right or wrong is a feeling about its right or wrongness, then there is no possibility of having a disagreement with someone over what they do. They just say, well, I felt it was right at the time to steal that car, so it was right at the time. Yet we really do want to be able to disapprove of the things that some people do. And, of course, just because I have a feeling that something is good or bad, doesn’t mean that I have to be bound by this feeling, any more than I have to be bound by other judgements that I make – such as the judgement that I’m thirsty and want water so I should leave and get a drink.  

c.                    God

Another form of explanation seems to be inspired by the obvious similarity between commands issued by accepted authority and moral laws. Your parents may say ‘Do not strike your little sister’ and the king might say ‘Pay your tribute’ and you would feel under an obligation of sorts to obey. So there seems to be a very obvious the similarity in the effect and so people have supposed that there is a similarity in the cause. Working according to the usual principles of reasoning by analogy, it’s then supposed that the cause of the ‘moral’ obligation has to be some authority that is always present, in power over everyone, with the capacity to punish, and whose commands are equally worthy of respect by all. Obviously, God is such a person; and so moral obligations can simply be understood as God’s commands.

This is a very old trick. It’s so old in fact that something like it – the idea that what is right is right because God says it is right – was explicitly debunked by Plato in his dialogue called Euthyphro. (You may recall I mentioned this in the lecture on Socrates and again in the lecture on Augustine.) On the divine command theory you would be bound to agree that if God willed that random murder was right then that would be what you were morally obliged to do. But as Plato pointed out, no one really thinks that. So they say that because God is good God cannot will what is not right. But that means that things that are right are right whether or not God wills them. And anyway, the sort of obligation that you get from this analogy isn’t really what we’re interested in, because the basic reason for obedience to accepted authority is the rational expectation of punishment if you disobey, but the sort of obligation we’re talking about is not so clearly self-interested. Without the threat of punishment where does any sort of obligation come from? Simply saying that there’s a God and we’re obliged to do what God tells us he wants us to do doesn’t help at all. We still wouldn’t know how obligation arises or how it relates to the world + God as it actually exists.

d.                   Reason

The final source that we’ll consider is just the rational capacity that is supposed to be a characteristic of humans. Now this is a bit different from the moral sense that I mentioned above, because here there are real standards of right and wrong by which we can determine whether our rational faculty is operating properly or not. You may recollect that appeals to reason or the use of reason have been parts of several of the previously considered theories. For example, Aristotle made a big deal of the fact that we humans were rational animals and that what was right for us was to use our reason well; and the Stoics made similar claims with respect to the sort of Nature that it is right for us to follow; and Augustine and Aquinas also used the nature of reason to show that God had to have a final End for us that it was right for us to seek; and Hobbes had prudential reason as one of the universal laws by which we are bound, and so on. All that is very true, but the fact is that in those cases Reason is used as a tool in order to achieve some other End, and the force of obligation is due entirely to the desirability of that End. But that, of course, just makes the obligation a type of prudence rather than a moral thing; it’s still too much like the reason that we obey someone who can punish us. We need something that doesn’t just depend upon the bad consequences of failing to do the obligatory action to provide us with the sort of obligation that we’re after. This is what Kant thinks he’s able to supply: in this lecture we’re going to hear about how Kant tried to derive obligations directly from the fact of Reason itself and from the very notion of ourselves as creatures who can be bound by laws that we legislate for ourselves. It’s rather a difficult argument to keep a grip on, but, as I say, it has been very influential.

Categories of Ethical Theory (Again)

Now, it’s also worth repeating here something which I’ve mentioned several time before (but mostly in passing) and that is that there is a standard division of the types of moral theories into three large categories. Now, the categories don’t really strictly separate the theories, and it’s sometimes difficult to say whether a moral theory falls into one or the other of them, nevertheless the division does draw attention to something important about our moral theories, so it has continued to be used. Thus:  

1.                    Aretaic

Aretaic or Virtue theories are about the character of the morally good person; their dispositions and habits. The focus of the virtue ethicist is on determining what it is about a person that would make that person a morally ideal person. Typically the question a virtue ethicist asks about any situation in ‘what would a virtuous man do?’ or ‘what action would be most consistent with the preservation or the display of my virtue?’ We’ve seen plenty of these sorts of theories; the most clear cut being that of Aristotle, but we’ve also seen the sort of reasoning that goes into a virtue theory being used by everyone from the Stoics to Machiavelli. Recall that Aristotle determined the virtue of a man as being those characteristics that would tend to the achievement of the proper end of a Man, i.e. eudaimonia, while Machiavelli wanted to discover the characters that were the virtu of a Prince by supposing they would tend to achieve the proper End of a Prince, i.e. maintenance of his state.

2.                    Teleological

You’ll notice that those virtue theories are justified in terms of the end which the virtues are supposed to aim at, and this suggests another way of looking at theories. Consequentialist or teleological theories take the consequence of the moral act to be the important thing. The goodness of the act is to be determined by reference to some (nonmoral) value produced by the act. Is it wrong to kill someone? Well, let’s see what the consequences of that act would be, and then let’s make that call. We haven’t had any theories that are absolutely of this nature, but you might think that Machiavelli or Hobbes are not too distant from this. Next week we’ll be talking about Mill’s theory of Utilitarianism which is the classical form of consequentialist theory.

3.                    Deontological

Finally, duty-based or deontological theories take what is right to do to be determined by some moral value in the potential acts themselves. Is it wrong to kill someone? Well, let’s see what the nature of that act would be, and then let’s decide. People who operate according to this sort of theory typically ask themselves whether an act is or is not their duty and care nothing for the consequences of the act. They would agree with the Latin motto that appears, for example, over the High Court of New Zealand: ‘Fiat Iustitia (ut) ruat coelum’ – let Justice be done though the heavens fall’.

The Good Will

You recall that I said above that Kant is the final step in the elevation of the Will to principal position amongst things that can be judged morally. In fact he elevates it to a position of uniqueness. Kant begins his Groundwork with a claim about value: the only thing that is unconditionally good, he claims, is a good will.

Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good, without qualification, except a good will. Intelligence, wit, judgement, and the other talents of the mind, however they may be named, or courage, resolution, perseverance, as qualities of temperament, are undoubtedly good and desirable in many respects; but these gifts of nature may also become extremely bad and mischievous if the will which is to make use of them, and which, therefore constitutes what is called character, is not good. … Thus a good will appears to constitute the indispensable condition even of being worthy of happiness.[1]

Having a good will is the mark of our character, i.e. of our being good people. Having a good will means having the right kind of intentions or motives. For Kant, therefore, it is inner psychological facts that are morally valuable; the consequences of our actions are not, by themselves, morally valuable. Kant’s theory of morality, therefore, is not consequentialist. Kant believed that a good will is a will that is motivated by moral principle, or duty. Because of his emphasis on acting from duty, Kant’s theory is usually classed as deontological.

Kant thinks that to have a good will, you must do something because you know it is right. Feelings and desires, for example sympathy and self-love, do not have moral worth according to Kant. (Kant calls feelings and desires “inclinations”.) You might act with sympathy on many occasions – he does not rule this out – but an act is morally admirable for Kant only because it is an act of duty, i.e. is done from duty.

Say that you decide to visit an ill friend in hospital. You might be motivated to do this out of self-interest; for example, to get in good with your friend because you are after a favour from them. Obviously, there is nothing morally admirable about this. However, you might instead be motivated out of sympathy or friendliness. Isn’t there something admirable about this? Kant claims that, although there is nothing wrong with feelings of sympathy and friendliness, it is not what makes your visit morally admirable. We might think that someone who visits their friend for such reasons is a nice person and has some characteristics that we approve of such as compassion or generosity or gratitude, but none of those are morally relevant characteristics or provide morally relevant motives. The only motive that makes your action morally admirable is that it is done from duty: you visit your friend because it is the right thing to do. For example, you know that they will be lonely and upset, they are your friend, and friends should take care of each other in situations like this. Importantly, you would be prepared to visit them no matter what you happen to feel about the prospect of a trip to the hospital.

If you are only motivated to do something because of your feelings, your grip on doing the right thing is very fragile. Consider our example of the hospital visit once more. Say, you visit your friend in hospital because you feel like it: you like your friend, you’re worried about her, and this makes you want to cheer her up. What happens when your feelings change? Say at the last minute you realise “I don’t like hospitals, they smell horrible, they are depressing, my friend will be in a bad mood, who needs that?” If feelings or inclinations are your guide to what you should do, then when they change you should change your plan accordingly. But this makes your judgement of what you should do depend on how you are feeling at the moment. For this reason, Kant thought that feelings are completely unreliable guides to what you should do. Even when they guide you in the right direction (as they initially did in our example of the hospital visit) they don’t do so reliably. (You may recall that this is one of the criticisms I listed for human nature as a source of normativity.)

What we need is a reliable guide to doing the right thing. Feelings or inclinations don’t provide this. What does? Kant’s answer is that reason provides you with that guide.

The Categorical Imperative

Morality is grounded in human reason. But how? He offers various formulas for deriving moral rules of action from reason as a consequence of viewing the problem of ethical actions from several different points of view; and he claims that they are all equivalent. I will discuss the two most important and well known of them.

Duty

In the first and most important version of this idea, Kant developed an idea of what it meant to be obliged to do something, and from that deduced an entire moral theory. How does he do that? Well, he begins with an observation that I’ve made several times in other places: obligation is expressed by the word ‘ought’ but there are two distinct ways of using this word. In the first place, we may say things like: if you want to get a good mark you ought to do your homework; if you want to win the championship you ought to practise hard, to get to Pac Fair you ought to take the number 6 bus. All these are the sorts of obligation that refer to the logical or practical necessities that are implied by the desire to achieve certain goals. Thus: if one has a goal that is desired, and one believes that the only way that that goal can be achieved is for a certain course of action to be followed, then that is what ought to be done. This sort of statement Kant called a Hypothetical Imperative. The strength of the ‘obligation’ in such an imperative was derived entirely from the strength of the desire that occurred in the antecedent of the hypothetical statement. It has no absolute strength of its own because by removing the desire the obligation is also removed.

Quite different from this form of imperative is the form that Kant sees as being characteristic of moral judgements. They do not say if this then one ought to do that: they say simply that one ought to do such and such. Thus: you ought to tell the truth, you ought to keep your promises, you ought not to steal. These are not hypothetical statements, they are categorical; and so Kant calls them Categorical Imperatives. Being other than hypothetical, however, means that there is a problem about what gives the ‘ought’ in them their power. Kant argues that whereas the obligatoriness of the hypothetical ‘ought’ is derived from the fact that we have desires, the obligatoriness of the categorical ‘ought’ is derived from the fact that we have reason. This is because any such categorical imperative is derivable from a single such imperative which is such that any rational creature is bound by it. Naturally, this root imperative is central to Kant’s philosophy; it has the following form (Kant, p. 421):

The Universal Law:

Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

In this principle a ‘maxim’ is the general subjective rule of the particular action that you are taking, and a ‘law’ is a principle that passes the test of universalisability.

How does Kant envisage the application of this principle? Well, consider the case of the inquisitive murderer. You may well think that there are good reasons for you to lie, but Kant thinks that you may not lie. Why? Suppose that you did lie. What is the maxim of your action? (This question actually suggests a difficulty for Kant’s formulation of his principle.) Let us suppose for now that the maxim is ‘I should tell a lie.’ Kant then asks us to consider whether we could rationally will that maxim to be a universal law. As a universal law that maxim would be transformed into the general principle ‘Everyone should lie’. Could we will that ‘everyone should lie’ be a universal law? It would seem not, and not just because if that were a universal law then we would be unable to trust the communications of any of our fellows, society would become impossible. That would be merely the Utilitarian’s objection. More importantly, and crucially for Kant, the concept of a lie depends upon the concept of an assumption of truth-telling, and if it is a universal law that everyone should lie then there could be no assumption of truth-telling and therefore there could be no such concept as a lie, and therefore there could be no universal law that requires us to lie (because it is telling us to do something for which no reality corresponds to the name) and so – by this reductio ad absurdum – there can be no such thing as a universal duty to lie. Thus the act of lying, in any circumstance, violates the categorical imperative.

Something similar happens with breaking promises. If you break a promise to repay a debt, for example, then you are acting according to the maxim: ‘I should break my promise.’ This would be universalised as ‘everyone should break their promises.’ But if this were a universal law then there could be no concept of an expectation that people will honour their solemn undertakings, and thus there could be no concept of a promise, and therefore there could be no sense to a universal law to break promises (because there is nothing like a promise), and there can therefore be no such thing as a universal law to break promises. So by this reductio there is no way to rationally will that your maxim be the basis of a universal law. QED.

Value

The second formulation of Kant’s guide to morals, which is known as the Principle of Ends, he derives from considerations of the innate worth of rational persons. Just as the justification for the UL derived from an observation that obligation came in two forms, the justification for the PE derives from an observation that value comes in two forms. When we say that a thing is valuable, we often mean that the thing is valuable for a purpose, or more precisely, is valued by a person because it is a means to an end which they desire. If you want to get a good mark you will value your textbooks; if you want to win the championship you will value practise; to get to Pac Fair the number 6 bus is valuable. Thus: if one has an end that is desired, and one believes that a thing is necessary for the achievement of that end, then that thing is valued. A thing valued in this way has Conditional Value. Its value is derived entirely from the strength of the desire in the antecedent, and the value of the thing doing the desiring.

Quite different from this form of value is the form that Kant sees as being characteristic of moral agents. For them, we do not say that if such and such is desired then one values that person: we say simply that that person has value. These are not conditional statements, they are unconditional; and so the value that is attributed is Unconditional Value.  Being other than conditional, however, means that there is a problem about what gives them their value. Kant argues that whereas the conditional value of a thing is derived from the fact that that which values it has desires and is also valuable, this is a series that cannot go on forever. For what could give conditional value to the thing that is doing the valuing but another thing that has desires and is valuable. But if that is just another agent of the same kind then it looks as if we are getting into an infinite regress of value attributions. To avoid this (without invoking God), and because there is nothing that obviously relevantly distinguishes one valuable agent from another, the conclusion that suggests itself is that those moral agents all have unconditional value. We treat things according to their value for us, and any thing with unconditional value has value for us, and therefore we have the second statement of Kant’s fundamental moral principle (Kant, p. 429):

The Principle of Ends:

Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end. (Groundwork 4: 429)

Kant thinks that if you treat others as if they are not rational agents, with purposes and goals that they set for themselves, then you violate the categorical imperative. You have a duty to always treat others as an end in themselves. Consider again the case of the inquisitive murderer. In that case, if you lie to the intending murderer, Kant seems to think, you are making him a tool for your own purposes, you are using him for a means to an end rather than as end in himself.

Similarly, when you steal from another person you very clearly use them as a means to an end. You take their property to be your own because they have a bike, and you want a bike, and you reason that if you take their bike – and never mind what their desires are – then your end will be achieved by this means.

Autonomy

So Kant’s ethics is all about valuing reason, both in ourselves and in others. Why is reason so important? What is the value of our being reasonable in the way Kant demands? Kant’s answer is that in following reason, we gain a kind of freedom: autonomy. The good will – remember this is will that is motivated by knowledge of what is right, discovered by application of the categorical imperative – is a will that is free. Kant calls this an autonomous will. What does Kant mean? In the Groundwork, Kant contrasts autonomy with heteronomy.

·                     Autonomy: the will’s determination of itself.

·                     Heteronomy: the will’s determination by alien forces.

Autonomy is a kind of self-legislation. You are autonomous when you are your own ruler. Where do moral laws come from? According to Kant, from the reason within us. What happens when our decisions are forced upon us from outside? We lack autonomy; we become a conduit for outside forces, e.g. social pressures, peer pressure. What happens when our decisions are based on desires and feelings, inclinations as Kant calls them? We still lack autonomy; we become a conduit for the animal forces which bind us. Where did our desires (for pleasure, fame, sex, social standing, etc. etc.) come from? We did not choose them. On what basis could we choose them? Yet more desires? Eventually we must admit to just finding that we desire something. Nature, society, culture and chance all plant desires in us. How can we be autonomous – i.e. self-ruled, creators of our own character – if we merely respond to desires that are implanted in us? We can’t, thinks Kant. So how can we become autonomous? By following reason. By determining our will according to reason. By following the categorical imperative. In Kant’s fanciful way of putting it, by legislating the moral law for ourselves.

Kant’s vision is of people creating their own character by exercising their reason, rather than following the dictates of their inclinations. The value Kant places on autonomy is expressed vividly in this passage from his essay “What is Enlightenment?” (You can find this essay on the course website.)

Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor! If I have a book which provides meaning for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who will judged my diet for me and so on, then I do not need to exert myself. I do not have any need to think; if I can pay, others will take over this tedious job for me. The guardians who have kindly undertaken the supervision will see to it that by far the largest part of mankind, including the entire “beautiful sex,” should consider the step into maturity, not only as difficult but as very dangerous.[1]